Demos

If you you fellows have never been exposed to the Demo Scene, I highly suggest you check out some of these sites. There is really some amazing stuff going on.

http://www.scene.org
http://www.ojuice.net
http://www.infuse.org/demoscene/news.php3
http://www.pouet.net/
http://www.calodox.scene.org/demoo/

In case you don't know what a demo is: (taken from ojuice.net)

What is a demo ?
A demo is a way to show others what some demomakers can do in programming (that's the coding part), music (zik) drawing (gfx) and/or modeling (3D). It is a kind of non-interactive multimedia presentation, the difference with a classical animation being that the display of a demo is computed in real time (like people playing a play contrary to showing a movie) making a biggest challenge (because of some computing power considerations).
For now a demo is mostly composed of 3D animations mixed with 2D effects.

There are three main kinds or types of demos :
- intro 4k : limited size and no music (mostly)
- intro 64k : limited size, no other restrictions.
- demo : virtualy no limit.

Restrictions change from a competition to another, it mostly depends of the machine the programs are runned on (486 or Pentium III ?... ). The demos are mostly designed to run on PC computers, but not that long away there were mostly designed to run on C64, Atari and Amiga. We can even find demos running on TO7, BeBox, RISC PC, Macintosh, Amstrad CPC, Gameboy, Playstation, etc...

i still don;t quite get you but i sort of do. Those sites load so quickly like in a flash man cool. I wish everysite was like that no matter how big the files sizes of your pics were.

Actually I was referring more to the coolness of the demos, not the web sites themselves. Although they are very nice too.

A demo is basically just a program that works a lot like a game, except that it's non-interactive. The programmers make interesting 3d shapes and animations, the artists do the textures and 2d art, and then the musicians make the music. There are hundreds of groups of these people all over the world that make these demos. It's basically just an art form, but it's really cool because it's actually being run on your computer, not a pre-rendered 3d movie that was done on a Silicon Graphics supercomputer or something. Download one of them and watch it, and you'll understand a lot better. Some of the most amazing ones are the ones that have to be under 4k. Most web sites can't even get that small, and these things are doing 3d animations!

This site also has a good description:

http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained/