

Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine - ginsweater
https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public

======
fredoliveira
Most people who were a part of the scene in 2000 remember The Product (1). I
remember it winning The Party and being struck by how impressive their work
was. If you're on windows, I guess you can download the demo itself (2). At
64kb, it should be a pretty quick download ;-) Their impressiveness has only
gone up since 2000, as you can see by watching Debris (3), which at 177kb
beats the living crap out of most things you see today.

The amount of work that goes into the tools these guys make is incredible.
Quite happy to see ryg, kb and team release all this stuff. There should be a
ton of things worthy of checking out in all this source code.

    
    
      [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkEsP9H2HGM
      [2] ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/demos/groups/farb-rausch/fr08_final.zip
      [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_efKXc4zd6w

~~~
wbhart
I imagined that demo skills would eventually die and the more recent stuff
would just end up being bloated or lame. But it really has improved.
Infeasibly improved. Debris is amazing. But it isn't the only more recent
amazing demo. Someone once asked me whether there was a limit to how realistic
demos can be made. I would normally prate on about Shannon information or
something, but it was a very smart mathematician who asked me. I did
eventually think of a reason though. A demo is never going to contain a model
of a piece of paper on which its own source code (plus additional information)
is written in the demo. So there have to be some limits. But the limits don't
seems to have been reached yet, especially with better and better modelling in
the hardware.

~~~
Scene_Cast
Your piece of paper example caught me a bit off guard. It sounds pretty
similar to a quine ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quine_(computing)> ). I
think that the same thing is possible with a demo - write the code to render a
piece of paper from an array of letters, and put that part of the source code
into the array.

~~~
wbhart
Yeah I'm wrong. What I had in mind I guess, is take an existing very
impressive 64kb demo, then do this. That might be much harder, but not
necessarily impossible in theory.

~~~
wbhart
A far better argument for me to have made is that it would be impossible to
have a 64kb demo which models a surface on which is printed the source code of
all 64kb demos written since the start of the scene decades ago. Of course, if
equations that describe all of reality are discovered and fit in 64kb, and the
graphics card contains a universe simulator, then maybe it's possible.

~~~
FreeFull
Such a demo would be possible, it would just take an infinite time to run.

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wbhart
I remember trying to figure out how a certain lensing effect was done in the
werkzeug a few years back. I really invested quite a bit of effort in this,
and I never did work it out (yes, I did use all of the umm, obvious techniques
for this). I'm really looking forward to finally figuring out this one thing
that eluded me for so long. Farbrausch are the greatest. Long live Farbrausch.

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mickeyp
Farbrausch are one of the most amazing demo scene groups out there today. I
highly recommend watching the video captures of their demos on Youtube.
Alternatively -- or perhaps more authentically -- you can download the
executable demos and watch them on your computer. Highly worthwhile!

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johansch
I have been incredibly impressed with their demos over the years.

Their wikipedia entry lists 28 (!) members.

Did these guys work with any well known software/game companies/products?

~~~
ginsweater
ryg has been at RAD Game Tools for a while now, and mentioned yesterday on
Twitter that he's been doing contract work on Valve's hardware experiments.
[1]

    
    
      [1] http://twitter.com/#!/rygorous/status/190907866037760000

~~~
psykotic
While at RAD he's also worked on the D3D stack for Larrabee under contract
with Intel and on optimizing the low-level graphics layer for Iggy (RAD's
Flash-based UI middleware) across several platforms.

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Tzunamitom
Heaven 7 by Exceed was always one of my favourites - watching it again now,
it's still incredibly impressive:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imRmVGFeaNQ>

~~~
wbhart
For the longest time, my favourite was Prophecy.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1tUfIbqKl8>

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web_chops
Wow, I never thought VC++ and MFC are this extensively used in demoscene
groups.

~~~
pavlov
The PC demoscene started out on DOS and Watcom C++, and switched almost
exclusively to Windows and Visual C++ around 1999. It was a natural choice at
the time, as Linux wasn't ready for primetime and MSVC really was the best
compiler around.

The choice of platform had to take the majority into account: most people
didn't want to write demos that ordinary people couldn't watch. The opinion of
programmers was not the most important factor anyway, simple because most
people in the demoscene were not programmers -- there were musicians, graphics
artists and all sorts of non-productive members besides.

~~~
newobj
Really, the demo scene, which started out in the 80's, was using Watcom C++?
Watch the behind scenes video of Second Reality (1993). They're coding Pascal
and (duh) assembly.

The demoscene was really born out of cracks/intros/loaders which means its
origins are C64/Apple/Atari etc and assembly language.

~~~
pjmlp
In a very distance past, Watcom C++ used to be the best optimizing compiler
for MS-DOS.

It was also the first to support extended memory in MS-DOS.

~~~
newobj
I'm not arguing the existence of Watcom C++ 9.5/386 :) But let's be clear the
first version of Watcom C++ was released in 1993. To suggest the demoscene
started there is ludicrous.

~~~
pjmlp
There I agree with you.

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brendanobrien
I didn't know this whole demoscene existed. This is amazing.

~~~
DanBC
A good place to start looking around is here:

(<http://www.pouet.net/index.php>)

Remember that a youtube capture of a demo will be bigger, and not as good
quality, as the actual demo.

~~~
xaro
But the processing power needed to run it will be less.

~~~
gaius
Depends if you're using Flash to play the video :-p

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Roritharr
Farbrausch is one of the few very good reasons to be very proud of german
programming!

~~~
kleiba
What does nationality have to do with anything?

~~~
ebiester
From what I remember as an observer, nationality always was a point of pride
in the European demoscene, even when tongue in cheek.

~~~
skrebbel
Eh, no. Or, well, not the last 15 years at least.

And especially not in Germany. Saying you're proud of Germans when you're a
German in Germany is considered _scary_.

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bbayer
piece of art..
[https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/genthree...](https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/genthree/_viruz2a.asm)

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foolinator
Great find. Holy crap does this bring back some memories.

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apembroke
the werkkzeug IDE was beautiful - you could take apart every scene in The
Popular Demo and see exactly what they did, all while rendering in real time.
The interface wasn't pretty, but after working through that first rusty-iron
texture, it made me feel like a genius.

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psykotic
Fabian just posted the companion blog post:
[http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/if-in-doubt-go-to-
th...](http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/if-in-doubt-go-to-the-source/)

------
bashzor
> To whom it may concern,

> Yes, this source code is a total mess. Good luck getting it to compile - I
> had to take out lots of things to make a source release possible.

Well that sounds promising for a release. Good for seeing the idea behind the
code though and then write your own tools I guess.

