| ▲ | Sharlin 4 hours ago |
| If there’s no human effort behind this, what’s the point? You could just as well watch any of the zillions of video recordings of these demos. There’s no inherent value in "running natively in the browser". Never mind the vast irony in demoscene specifically being a celebration of human skill and creativity. |
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| ▲ | Karliss 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Not going to say anything about AI translations. But the video recording don't do justice for many of demos. The effects in some of the demos simply kill any video encoder, only way to properly experience them is by running or emulating locally. Not that crystal sharp upscaled square pixels on modern display or poor quality CRT filters are very representative either, but it's likely better than blurry mess you get when video encoder tries to deal with high frequency details or random noise from procedural effects. |
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| ▲ | Sharlin 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m sure there are lossless recordings around. At 320x200x8bit even a simple sequence of PNGs wouldn’t take that much space in today’s terms. | | |
| ▲ | Karliss 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just did a quick test 320x200x8bit grayscale PNG (couldn't quickly figure out how to get 8bit color pallet) compressed to ~15-40kB. Multiply that by 60frames a second (or whatever odd framerate historic hardware used) and 120seconds and you get 200MB. Not completely impractical, but I wouldn't call it trivial amount of space. And if you find any demoscene collection providing losslessly compressed videos let me know. All I have seen is original executable+youtube video (which suffers from compression artifacts). And I doubt many demoscene website maintainers are eager to increase their storage and bandwidth costs 100x. | | |
| ▲ | Sharlin 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Fair, it’s indeed a shame if there aren’t lossless or very-high-bitrate lossy recordings available. A literal sequence of PNGs is of course an upper limit, using temporal coherence (of which there’s a lot of) would shrink the size to maybe a few tens of megabytes. But of course there aren’t many lossless video formats in common use because it’s a rather niche use case outside mastering and archival. There’s lossless H.264 and H.265, and IETF’s FFV seems pretty well-supported too. Not sure if browsers support them though. |
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| ▲ | inoop 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I must have watched Second Reality almost a hundred times when I was younger. A video does not do it justice. This is the closest you can get on modern hardware. |
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| ▲ | Retr0id 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Well, there is a little advantage. Most recordings are not at the native framerate, and have compression artefacts (which impacts some effects more than others) |
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| ▲ | mrob an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Lack of CRT flicker is the biggest problem. Demo text scrolls are far more readable when you don't have sample-and-hold blur. There are gaming monitors with strobed backlights but I don't know of any that allow you to enable the strobing at 70Hz. A workaround for modern hardware is frame doubling then blanking every other frame (software black frame insertion). It halves the brightness, but modern monitors generally support higher brightness than CRTs so this just brings it back to the authentic level. It's possible with FFMPEG filters, although I don't remember how I accomplished it when I tried it years ago. The importance of CRT flicker is one reason I greatly prefer DOS demos to C64 and Amiga demos. Those were mostly designed for 50Hz PAL CRTs, so the flicker is far more annoying than 70Hz VGA. | |
| ▲ | bananaboy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean even these browser ports aren't at the native framerate. The native framerate for these demos was 70hz as they were all designed for VGA video modes. | | |
| ▲ | Retr0id 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | A browser can run at whatever framerate you set your monitor to. Mine supports 70Hz. | | |
| ▲ | Sharlin 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But most people’s monitors don’t, or people just never set them outside the standard rate. | | |
| ▲ | ahartmetz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | My monitor's standard and actual rate is 165 Hz, which is probably not terrible at approximating 70 Hz (very few fps from a small multiple of 70 would be worst). High fps is probably a little more rare than HiDPI, but also becoming more common. It's already common in phones. |
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| ▲ | bananaboy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure. I don't think I've ever had an LCD monitor that supports 70hz at a useful resolution though. My current monitors (native resolution 2560x1440) only seem to support it at 1024x768! | | |
| ▲ | Retr0id 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Well, the demo runs at a lower res than 1024x768 so you're all set ;) | | | |
| ▲ | mrob an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Pretty much every modern fast gaming LCD will support 70Hz. |
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