So you wanna be a demoscener
summary
History and mechanics of demos from Commodore 64 assembly and SID trackers through Amiga mods to PC VGA and modern GPU shaders, with concrete how-tos: implementing the plasma effect as summed sine waves, a fire effect by averaging pixels, a twisting column via per-row angle transforms, and ray-marched scenes using sphere tracing. Shows winning examples (a Gathering winner and a 4K demo), compares C/assembly/JavaScript and GPU approaches, and releases a Unity framework and source on GitHub.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Demo scene world
- 1:56From C64 to demoscene
- 3:43Demo scene and constraints
- 6:43Defining a demo
- 8:29Origins of demos
- 9:53C64 hardware basics
- 14:07Amiga in demoscene
- 15:52PC VGA graphics
- 22:57Second Reality breakthrough
- 29:48Staple demo effects
- 31:14Plasma effect math
- 35:45Twisting columns explained
- 37:52Fire effect basics
- 39:56Modern demos and GPUs
- 43:064K demo rendering
- 46:28Escape demo techniques
- 48:15Pixel Dreams framework
- 51:45Demo scene future
