Todays lesson in Scene Demos - exercise your gfx cards

[.one.]

I don't understand, what's the objective of this competition? What rules are the contestants bound by?

In the amiga days it was how much math you could get on the screen at once with good frame rate prob the same now.

 

[manveruppd]

But surely now it's pretty pointless, right? I downloaded one of them (for some reason the first-place entry would crash when run, so I checked out one of the others), and they looked like DX8 graphics - modern graphics cards can do much more without breaking a sweat, so am I missing something? Is everything that happens in there procedurally generated or ray-traced or something that makes it more challenging for our hardware than normal rendering techniques used for modern games?

 

[NutritioN]

I don't have enough knowledge of the details, but as for constraints, I'm not sure other than some demos have to be made at the party itself (2-3 days?) and limitations of 64k or 4k filesize in those particular categories.

So I'm certainly not of the opinion that these are amazing graphics that put modern dx10 games to shame. But the fact that they are done by kids, and often custom 3D engines, custom shaders etc I think warrants some merit. It's like anything though, you either like or you don't

 

[manveruppd]

Do you have to write the graphics engine to produce them at the event as well? Or is there not an "engine" in the sense used in most games?

 

[NutritioN]

Oh yeah, I'm sure you can reuse stuff. But I think there are sometimes speed coding categories, as well as speed 2d graphics and music production; those will be more focused on start with nothing, create it all.