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1993-07-05
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MEGADEMOS - ARE THEY A WASTE OF TIME?
Looking through PD libraries, you find a massive section marked DEMOS.
This is where all of the rasters, sine distorters, 3D balls, sinus
dots, scrolltexts, hardware scrolling, VU's, terra-disters, parallax
backgrounds, starfields, and vectors reside. What the hell are they
for?
Well, from my point of view (speaking personally as a STOS demo coder),
I think that coders write demos to either i) give them something to do,
ii) show off how good they are at coding, iii) show off how good the
particular language is, iv) show off how good the particular computer
is, v) show off how long they can write scrolltexts, or vi) show off
how many swear words they can fit into half a kilobyte.
Some people just think that they are a waste of time, money, and disk
space. These people, of course, are wrong. Demos aren't things you
knock up one Sunday afternoon. One demoscreen can take days to write,
and a whole megademo can take months. Lots of mathematical skills go
into a demo, such as calculating the paths for sprites, or the waves
for raster bars.
Demos, if not tutorative to a learner coder, if not providing nice
scrolltexts to read, if not playing lots of funky (?) music to listen
to, if not displaying lots of rasters and strobes to have fits over,
are at least entertaining to watch. Virtually every new demo I see, I
say something like, "Wow! I've never seen that done before" or "I
didn't know STOS could do it THAT fast!" or "That's crap."
Megademos help to provide a source of entertainment for people who like
that sort of thing, and I especially like the 'wars' between coding
groups. A typical example of this was the old 'CAREBEARS' and 'LOST
BOYS' war. "Yah! I bet you can't do this!" says one group. "You ripped
my code you git!" says the other, and so on and so forth.
Especially with STOS megademos, I bet avid STOS users would be very
keen to find out what can be achieved with STOS, and to get into
contact with the coders, to expand their own knowledge.
The unfortunate thing is, though, that some groups tend to use adult
words, trying to make out that they are really grown up (which has the
opposite effect on the reader). Try to ignore this as much as possible.
One certain PD library that I am well-aquainted with is keeping a
strict limit on the number of megademos in it's library. That is
understandable, I suppose, but what is the point of not putting a disk
in PD? It doesn't cost anything. You are supposed to expand your
library, not restrict it, and I for one take every opportunity to buy a
megademo that I have not yet got my hands on. The only real result of
not putting demos in libraries is to reduce the number of disks that
you sell to potential megademo-fans.
Article: BLACK EAGLE 31/5/93