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From: bombadil@diku.dk (Kristian Nielsen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: AMIGA DEMOS: Europe VS. USA
Keywords: demos
Message-ID: <1991May5.155027.27068@odin.diku.dk>
Date: 5 May 91 15:50:27 GMT
References: <20691@brahms.udel.edu> <1991Apr23.071311.46295@vaxb.acs.unt.edu> <1991Apr23.164302.6289@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <1991Apr23.192050.24176@wpi.WPI.EDU>
Sender: bombadil@freja.diku.dk
Organization: Department of Computer Science, U of Copenhagen
Lines: 53


>> There is nothing "awesome" about copper tricks and vectorballs. They are
>>easy once you shut the OS down. Multitasking on the Amiga is not slow,
>>graphics.library has just too much overhead. Eurocoders don't hit the
>>hardware because its faster, they do it because it's easier. How many
>>teens can afford to become a developer, purchase the autodocs, rkms, devcon
>>notes, and the AmigaDOS manual? Do you think those teens purchase
>>Devpac or Seka? I doubt most European or American teens could write
>>a program like AmigaVision, it's too much work. Most demo coding is done is
>>a week, usually less, with the majority of time taken up programming
>>tools you need and waiting for the graphics/music to get done.

>NOTHING AWESOME about copper tricks and vectorballs ...
>well ... I am sorry ... IT IS NOT trivial to code some of the
>stuff that new demos present. I think this is TOTALLY unfair and
>not giving any credit. I admit these features may be "hacks" but it
>just is not nice to give no credit. Some features of the new demos are
>just amazing and the fact that some of them have never been implemented
>before shows some sign of creativity and the ability to program the AMIGA
>not AMIGADOS and should definetly receive some respect. NOBODY is perfect.

  Well, you might call vectorballs etc. awesome... you might also call
them tiresome to write. To do vectorballs, for example, all you need to do
is rotate some points in 3d-space, sort them after z-coord and dump them to
the blitter. The hard part is optimizing the code - squeezing every single
clock cycle out of the processor. And it's not really THAT ingenious - it's
really just cumbersome, since the code becomes very hard to expand on. I
really haven't seen that many demos where it wasn't immediately apparent how
the effects were done, and none where it wasn't apparent after 30 mins. work
with a disassembler. In my view, what IS very impressive is the innovative-
ness displayed in the demos - constantly finding new ways to use the features
of the machine. The now-famous plasma-effect (which is impossible to
describe unless you've seen it yourself) using the copper is a very
good example of this: It's easy to bang up a copperlist that changes the
color every few pixels, but it's damn good thinking of the first person who
thought of doing it in this particular way. Another example is one of the
first vectorball-demos by 'Red Sector International' (the one with the
famous 'Juggler') - it is tecnically unimpressing (using slow bubble-sort and
primitive clipping), but this is really irrelevant, since it has so many
beatyfull animations - I still find it one of the most impressive amiga-demos
ever. What impresses me is the persistence in designing the animations;
after all, it's what comes up on your screen that counts, not the assembly
listning.
  Just as an aside: Anybody who find hardware-banging demos impressive,
think about your favorite one. Then think about Kickstart 2.0.. I don't think
the people like Randel Jesup and Dave Haynie from Commodore would feel too
small among the so-called 'euro-kids' (but I guess they'll have to speak
for themselves). Its just that for some people (or me for one), except for
the fun of it, life is too short for hardware-hacking and assembler.

	Just my 5 p's worth..

	Kristian