As for cracktros, probably not. I should spelunk through backups. However, the most technical and competitive people generally transitioned to the demoscene in the early 2000s and that scene is far more open.
You can find a lot of groups/individuals publish a lot of esp. their older stuff now.
And instead of YT/archive (though, shoutout to textfiles.com, which is now part of archive), https://www.pouet.net/ and https://scene.org/ is still where things are generally at
Same here. I came in on the back end of having to write your own engine from scratch (not just 3D, but general graphics.) MOV AX, 13h; INT 10h will forever be burned into my memory.
The transition was definitely odd. What brought it around for me was when fr-08 was released and the broader scene realized what _could_ be done with procedural generation and whatnot.
If you'd like to know where the demoscene came from, look no further than The BBS Documentary[1]
The whole thing started w/ cracktros in the 80s and through the artscene it eventually evolved into its own scene that was entirely disconnected from its roots in piracy.
Steal everyone's samples! I recall my brother thinking they'd hate him for doing it, or he'd be a lamer.. it didn't matter, and eventually others used his samples and his techniques.
The scene these days is much more welcoming than it ever was in the past. Just get in there and do something, anything :)
Gave my baby brother FastTracker when he was 13 I believe, not only did he become one of the best chip musicians ever, it effectively shaped his entire life toward pursuing music in some form or another.
After this unexpected HN post today, I'll be queueing up some bleeps.
I remember trying to replicate a sine scroller at age 9, not having the slightest clue what a sine wave is, I just let sprites go up and down linearly on a C64 and couldn't for the life of me figure out a way to make that a smooth wave until years later :D
Check out ryg's blog about it[1]. To nobody's surprise, other than tweeting things my puny brain can't decypher, I believe he works on Unreal Engine these days.
Not just crytek! Yager also had founding demosceners I believe? There's more in Germany for sure.
3DMark the benchmark by Futuremark is as the name suggests, made by ex Future Crew. The list goes on.
If you go around looking at where most demosceners from the past decade or two work today, you'll find the vast majority of them work at places like Unity, Unreal (Epic), etc.
I suspect you're aware, but leaving this for the hackernews crowd that might not be: Shadertoy was in fact made by sceners for sceners. Inigo Quilez is iq/Rgba[1] who released it as a tool for the scene to use[2] back in 2009
I saw the headline and was hoping it'd mention psenough who has been my only lifeline in the last decade to keep up with what's going on in the scene, and I'm sure I have that in common with a lot of old sceners.
Highly recommend watching his monthly reports[1].
He also streams on twitch[2] and all larger parties have fully embraced live streaming on a mainstream platform such as twitch these days, despite ads.
Also highly recommend going to Europe to attend one of the big parties. As the article says, the scene is and has always been mostly a European thing (post-BBS, post-buccaneer, after the split from piracy mid-end of the 90s) and much of the audience here seems very US-centric in their perception :)
> the demoscene devolved into a "L'art pour l'art"
It didn't, though. It just took the scene a while to adapt to the reality that you can't learn how to push a GPU over the edge in a weekend any longer. As a result, making demos also became more accessible, and more directly related to game development (and related careers.)
The result is a scene that is so broad now, it's almost impossible to keep track of it all. It's no longer just Amiga, C64 and PC.
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You can find a lot of groups/individuals publish a lot of esp. their older stuff now.
Two off the top of my head:
- https://github.com/ConspiracyHu (and they made a W32 port of Future Crew's Second Reality, which is public domain: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality)
- Farbrausch published their original demo tool source ages ago: https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public