Directtovideo

https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/ is another excellent demoscene "in-depth explanations" blog.

None that I know of. Your best bet is to find a post explaining what effects are in a renderer you like (such as the Godot one above), then look up the research papers those effects were published in. I really like democoder Smash's old blog for getting an idea of the graphics coding mindset - https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/ . Another good source of what is possible and what it's named is the yearly Siggraph Technical Papers Trailer. But it's usually going to come down to learning the names of the techniques used and then finding the papers.

reminds me of the particles with curl noise force Smash used for some great demos a few years back- https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-par…

Worth a link to his extensive blog posts http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/category/fluid-dynamics/

A wonderful feature of Timothy Lottes' blog is a continuously updated list of blog articles from other graphics programmers down the right side. http://blog.selfshadow.com/ has several great articles and a great blogroll. Meanwhile, here are a few favorites: http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/ http://www.iquilezles.org/ http://0fps.wordpress.com/

Here are a bunch of blogs from my RSS reader that I think are worth reading. Some of them haven't updated in a while, but the archives may be worth a look anyway. * Blogs with a math focus: http://blog.sigfpe.com http://bit-player.org http://mathr.co.uk/blog/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/ * Blogs with a programming languages focus: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com https://bluishcoder.co.nz http://blog.ezyang.com http://akkartik.name http://lambda-the-ultimate.org http://mrale.ph * Blogs with a UI design focus: http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/ http://ignorethecode.net/blog/ http://interuserface.net * Blogs with a graphics / 3D rendering focus: http://c0de517e.blogspot.com http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com https://directtovideo.wordpress.com http://graphicrants.blogspot.com http://www.reedbeta.com http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/ https://blog.demofox.org http://eelpi.gotdns.org/blog.wiki.html * Other interesting / more general programming blogs (many of these have a "systems" focus): http://danluu.com http://ewontfix.com http://chneukirchen.org/blog/ http://neverworkintheory.org http://apenwarr.ca/log/ https://www.snellman.net/blog/ https://www.pvk.ca http://psy-lob-saw.blogspot.com https://randomascii.wordpress.com http://fastcompression.blogspot.com https://fgiesen.wordpress.com http://blog.plover.com http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/

As cool as those are, I've always found Numb Res to be the most impressive: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/ ( http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56900 ) ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOC_ajkRkU ) Subtle presentation a great effect, but this bit from the demo's nfo is kind of insane: 3d smoothed particle hydrodynamics with a fully-featured solver, supporting surface tension, viscosity and collisions with arbitrary meshes. rendering as metaballs converted to triangle meshes with marching cubes. simulating around 250,000 - 1 million particles per frame and generating & rendering several million vertices per frame during triangulation. except we wanted to do it in realtime. on a consumer gpu. on vanilla directx 9. no cuda/compute, no geometry shaders. (they'd probably be too slow anyway.) with everything else youd expect from a modern demo going on around it and on top. the best possible lighting, depth of field, post-process antialiasing. twice. (for stereoscopic 3d.) with style.

In my opinion there have been two great non-commercial (counter-commercial) software movements: The Cracker/Demoscene and the Open Source/Free Software Movement. Both movements came out of solving the same problem, commercial software is expensive and not as available (in several different senses of the word) as each movement would like. How both movements attempted to solve that problem is where that difference lies: The Open Source/Free Software Movement: 1) Prevent software from being closed in the first place with various licensing schemes 2) Recreate closed commercial software with open alternatives 3) Share the guts of what you've done with others The Cracker/Demoscene (for those that don't know, the demoscene is a spinout of the software cracking scene): 1) For software you want to use, crack the copy protection on it so licensing is irrelevant 2) Do it in as creative a way as possible 3) Compete with other groups of people trying to do the above, that means trade secrets Over time, these core philosophies dictated how the movements operated. They're both social movements in a sense, but very different kinds of movements: I also remember attending a few Linux User Group (LUG) meetings. A bunch of folks crowded quietly into a rented room, there were a few lectures, a bit of Q&A, discussions over various Linux distros, shared tips, lots of config discussions. A few people might show off how their desktops were configured or provide a demonstration of a…

Here's an article on a voxel raytracer focused on realtime operation: https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/real-time-ray-tracing-p… And here's a video of the raytracer discussed in the above link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8hSZGTXTx8

Quite impressive. Here is a blog post about the techniques used in this demo: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/category/compute-shader/

Smash of Fairlight wrote some articles on rendering millions of particle in realtime on a GPU: A thoroughly modern particle system http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-part… Agenda circling forth http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/agenda-circling-forth/

Definitely a common effect. I remember seeing this kind of thing in the demoscene a lot of times. In fact I remember seeing a larger evolution of this recently. What they did is used smooth particle hydrodynamics to simulate water, but then also use the text mesh as a local attractor. So the water would drip onto the invisible mesh, but then it would stick to the text just a bit more than normal allowing the words to form. Link: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/

Navis of ASD who wrote the winning demo is ex-games industry: http://www.hugi.scene.org/online/hugi34/hugi%2034%20-%20demoscene%20in… Smash of Fairlight who wrote the 2nd placed demo is in the games industry (at Sony Europe IIRC): http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/about/

That's one way of putting it. In the early 2000s, commercial production games were just as much "demos done inefficiently" (for good business reasons, mostly). Maybe I sense an unintended connotation with the term "kids", though. I remember ATI came to demonstrate their GPU at the Breakpoint demoparties (02/03 or so?) .. it was not unimpressive, and I didn't really understand what a "shader" was in the context of a GPU back then (it was also a dumb choice for a name, given what "shading" meant in gfx programming back then, the term "vertex shader" was borderline nonsensical). But they mainly showed stuff we could already do, except doing it in a higher resolution (on what had to have been the most high-end consumer hardware available, ATI brought themselves, it wasn't the official compo machine, for sure). Given I now know what a GPU shader does (parallelism, domain specific instructions but mainly parallelism), I know that "the same thing but on a higher resolution", is absolutely the most obvious thing you can do with a GPU over just a CPU. In demoscene terms, boooooring :-P This was a few years later, THIS is what a demoscener does to a GPU: https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-par… Either way, at some point (late 200X's?) professional game industry blew past the demoscene in production level. It did happen. I always thought it was the Hollywood movie level budgets (because those exploded too, in that era, didn't they?), but…

This kind of comment frustrates me. Not the original DHH comment, but the above one. So because DHH didn't like it, we're also obligated to? God forbid people enjoy things! It's a sad cultural meme to go to any post and see the top comment be something that tears down the content. Putting that aside, I think the DHH comment isn't the full story on demoscene. Demoscene people were interested in those languages because that's where you perhaps could do the most interesting things at the time. Some people still cling to that, and some don't. For example Farbrausch, one of the most famous demo teams, released the tool they were using themselves, called werkkzeug, which was basically a GUI way to generate cool demos that still were tiny and had procedurally generated textures and effects etc etc. Similarly, I've seen a neat demos that use modern tools, a lot use GPUs and shaders these days, but it depends what they're trying to do. Sometimes they want to squeeze all that into a tiny binary - can we have a fully running game engine in smaller size than a jpeg of my face? But a lot of times size isn't a consideration, and it's about how cool of a thing can you do! One example that comes to mind is Agenda Circling Forth. I think it's very beautiful. I wouldn't hesitate to call it art at this point. Here is a video of it running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5w7Gh7WBjw Some articles with more technical details:…

Here's a good explanation: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1096 http://scene.org/ is very active with news. http://pouet.net/ is the canonical site for searching demos, you can find most demos here. (Demos really should be run in real-time, but you can find video links if you don't have the hardware or don't want to download the program.) I'll just highlight one example that shows application to CS research: Numb Res by CNCD and Fairlight, video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTOC_ajkRkU and explanation https://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/