AssemblyTV
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2020–2024
13:45 · 26K views · Jul 24, 2011
The first-place PC demo at Assembly 1992, Unreal by Future Crew, showing real-time effects such as palette-based wormholes.
Cited as a landmark demoscene piece that astonished people with what a PC could do.
4 comments from Hacker News
Part of the difficulty is that technical feasibility of the software is no longer as much of a limitation. Half the things in XScreenSaver or Future Crew's Unreal this video were things it was really surprising to see on the screen of a computer in 1993, especially one that wasn't a $50000 SGI. But now pretty much anything you can see, you can record an HD video of, and your $100 hand computer is fast enough to play it back in real time. So there's no longer the wonder factor of "how is this even possible? Am I dreaming?". Except sometimes there is. Like with Deep Dream. Or GPT-2. Or the Looking Glass light field display. Or GauGAN. Or a lot of math things. Or topology optimization. Or Wikipedia. But I do think it's a constant danger, forgetting that this stuff is supposed to be fun.
The Future Crew demo before Second Reality was actually called Unreal [0], hence that track name Unreal II. The Unreal video game soundtrack was also from demoscene musicians. The one I remember most was "Mechanism Eight" [1] from Unreal Tournament, written by Andrew Sega, aka Necros in the demoscene. He's also got a couple of great non-demoscene solo albums as The Alpha Conspiracy, worth looking up on Spotify. [0] this video [1] [LINK]
Yes, you could for example achieve the tunnel effect described above with a 16x16 or 32x8 texture using a 256-entry palette. Unreal by Future Crew has an effect that comes to mind that is probably implemented exactly like that (on VGA mode 0x13), just more of a wormhole than a tunnel: this video
Ha! Or Rule 34a, "every sufficiently observed phenomenon, has just become somebody's new fetish". Although actually, and on a slightly more innocent (but just as edgy!) note, the thing that immediately popped into my head upon reading "4D Gaussian Splatting", was the music from the 1992 Future Crew demo Unreal, and the image of it's inter-scene title screens. ["IYKYK", but basically, that famous old PC demo consists of several short sections, each showcasing a particular coding/graphical technique - each section prefaced by a title screen which named the effect being showcased.] YT of Unreal demo, as citation for this highly-important observation : this video