Directtovideo

That's one way of putting it. In the early 2000s, commercial production games were just as much "demos done inefficiently" (for good business reasons, mostly). Maybe I sense an unintended connotation with the term "kids", though.

I remember ATI came to demonstrate their GPU at the Breakpoint demoparties (02/03 or so?) .. it was not unimpressive, and I didn't really understand what a "shader" was in the context of a GPU back then (it was also a dumb choice for a name, given what "shading" meant in gfx programming back then, the term "vertex shader" was borderline nonsensical). But they mainly showed stuff we could already do, except doing it in a higher resolution (on what had to have been the most high-end consumer hardware available, ATI brought themselves, it wasn't the official compo machine, for sure). Given I now know what a GPU shader does (parallelism, domain specific instructions but mainly parallelism), I know that "the same thing but on a higher resolution", is absolutely the most obvious thing you can do with a GPU over just a CPU. In demoscene terms, boooooring :-P

This was a few years later, THIS is what a demoscener does to a GPU: https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-particle-system/

Either way, at some point (late 200X's?) professional game industry blew past the demoscene in production level. It did happen. I always thought it was the Hollywood movie level budgets (because those exploded too, in that era, didn't they?), but…

In my opinion there have been two great non-commercial (counter-commercial) software movements: The Cracker/Demoscene and the Open Source/Free Software Movement. Both movements came out of solving the same problem, commercial software is expensive and not as available (in several different senses of the word) as each movement would like. How both movements attempted to solve that problem is where that difference lies:

The Open Source/Free Software Movement:

1) Prevent software from being closed in the first place with various licensing schemes

2) Recreate closed commercial software with open alternatives

3) Share the guts of what you've done with others

The Cracker/Demoscene (for those that don't know, the demoscene is a spinout of the software cracking scene):

1) For software you want to use, crack the copy protection on it so licensing is irrelevant

2) Do it in as creative a way as possible

3) Compete with other groups of people trying to do the above, that means trade secrets

Over time, these core philosophies dictated how the movements operated.

They're both social movements in a sense, but very different kinds of movements:

I also remember attending a few Linux User Group (LUG) meetings. A bunch of folks crowded quietly into a rented room, there were a few lectures, a bit of Q&A, discussions over various Linux distros, shared tips, lots of config discussions. A few people might show off how their desktops were configured or provide a demonstration of a…

Here are a bunch of blogs from my RSS reader that I think are worth reading. Some of them haven't updated in a while, but the archives may be worth a look anyway.

* Blogs with a math focus:

http://blog.sigfpe.com

http://bit-player.org

http://mathr.co.uk/blog/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/

* Blogs with a programming languages focus:

https://existentialtype.wordpress.com

https://bluishcoder.co.nz

http://blog.ezyang.com

http://akkartik.name

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org

http://mrale.ph

* Blogs with a UI design focus:

http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/

http://interuserface.net

* Blogs with a graphics / 3D rendering focus:

http://c0de517e.blogspot.com

http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com

https://directtovideo.wordpress.com

http://graphicrants.blogspot.com

http://www.reedbeta.com

http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/

https://blog.demofox.org

http://eelpi.gotdns.org/blog.wiki.html

* Other interesting / more general programming blogs (many of these have a "systems" focus):

http://danluu.com

http://ewontfix.com

http://chneukirchen.org/blog/

http://neverworkintheory.org

http://apenwarr.ca/log/

https://www.snellman.net/blog/

https://www.pvk.ca

http://psy-lob-saw.blogspot.com

https://randomascii.wordpress.com

http://fastcompression.blogspot.com

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com

http://blog.plover.com

http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/

This kind of comment frustrates me. Not the original DHH comment, but the above one. So because DHH didn't like it, we're also obligated to? God forbid people enjoy things! It's a sad cultural meme to go to any post and see the top comment be something that tears down the content.

Putting that aside, I think the DHH comment isn't the full story on demoscene. Demoscene people were interested in those languages because that's where you perhaps could do the most interesting things at the time. Some people still cling to that, and some don't. For example Farbrausch, one of the most famous demo teams, released the tool they were using themselves, called werkkzeug, which was basically a GUI way to generate cool demos that still were tiny and had procedurally generated textures and effects etc etc. Similarly, I've seen a neat demos that use modern tools, a lot use GPUs and shaders these days, but it depends what they're trying to do. Sometimes they want to squeeze all that into a tiny binary - can we have a fully running game engine in smaller size than a jpeg of my face? But a lot of times size isn't a consideration, and it's about how cool of a thing can you do!

One example that comes to mind is Agenda Circling Forth. I think it's very beautiful. I wouldn't hesitate to call it art at this point. Here is a video of it running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5w7Gh7WBjw

Some articles with more technical details:…

As cool as those are, I've always found Numb Res to be the most impressive:

http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

( http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56900 )

( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOC_ajkRkU )

Subtle presentation a great effect, but this bit from the demo's nfo is kind of insane:

3d smoothed particle hydrodynamics with a fully-featured solver,
supporting surface tension, viscosity and collisions with arbitrary meshes.

rendering as metaballs converted to triangle meshes with marching cubes.

simulating around 250,000 - 1 million particles per frame and generating & rendering
several million vertices per frame during triangulation.

except we wanted to do it in realtime. on a consumer gpu. on vanilla directx 9.
no cuda/compute, no geometry shaders. (they'd probably be too slow anyway.)

with everything else youd expect from a modern demo going on around it and on top.
the best possible lighting, depth of field, post-process antialiasing.

twice. (for stereoscopic 3d.)
with style.

Here's a good explanation: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1096

http://scene.org/ is very active with news. http://pouet.net/ is the canonical site for searching demos, you can find most demos here. (Demos really should be run in real-time, but you can find video links if you don't have the hardware or don't want to download the program.)

I'll just highlight one example that shows application to CS research: Numb Res by CNCD and Fairlight, video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOC_ajkRkU and explanation https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/