
Interview with Demoscener “kb” of Farbrausch - bane
http://6octaves.blogspot.com/2014/07/interview-with-demoscener-kb-farbrausch.html
======
swift
Farbrausch has stood out to me for a long time as one of the strongest demo
groups. They consistently produce demos that are not just technically
impressive but really beautiful as well. I highly recommend checking out their
back catalog if you haven't seen their work.

Another group I highly recommend is Andromeda Software Development. They are
less about "check out these cool techniques" and more about putting together a
cohesive, music-video-like experience. I've heard different perspectives on
whether that's a good thing, but irrespective of where you come down on that
they produce some demos that are really enjoyable to watch.

~~~
bostik
As this is my personal opinion, please take it with a big grain of salt -
ASD's Lifeforce is the new benchmark for demo effectiveness. It is just so
_beautiful_.

When I first saw Farbrausch's Debris I thought it was a bit boring. After all,
it's repetitive. The soundtrack is like some cheap industrial techno, and the
demo itself doesn't really show off that much.... Until you realise that the
whole thing is less than 200kB. An amazing feat.

There is just one experience more profound the demoscene has given me. It must
have been no later than 1995 or 1996, or about the time when the Amiga and PC
groups had just discovered 3D toroids, vector castles and phong shading in
general. Half of the demos shown in the party had some kind of
floating/rotating phongs-shaded toroid, and about a third sported a zoom-
in/zoom-out view of a castle. It got pretty dull, pretty fast.

And then finally Byterapers showed off how to outdo everyone by using the same
effects with better timing. On C-64. Jaw, meet floor.

~~~
andor
_ASD 's Lifeforce is the new benchmark for demo effectiveness_

Wow, pretty good. I haven't followed games and the demoscene in the last few
years, so modern graphics always impress me a lot.

My favorite demo is Sonnet by Threestate:
[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3282](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3282)

~~~
royjacobs
As the coder of Sonnet that's wonderful to hear, 13 years after its original
release! :)

~~~
insipid
Oh my god! You're sagacity of threestate?! I'm swooning! "melrose space" is my
all-time favourite demo! To this day, I still watch it regularly, I love it so
much. (As well as the other 3s ones -- like enjoying a favourite album.) Thank
you!

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=162](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=162)

[http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65](http://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=65)

~~~
royjacobs
Good to hear! I never thought people would still be looking at these things
such a long time after the fact but I guess that's the internet for you :)

Btw, the things we released as threestate were a clear testament to how
important design is (and more accurately in this case, the design of Steven)
when you're doing demos. Before that, some of us (me, sarix, inopia) did a
bunch of releases as Quad that were also fairly impressive technically but had
no design and...pretty much nobody cared.

~~~
insipid
Yeah, I can't tell you how much pleasure all those demos have given me over
the years, so the opportunity to thank someone directly is really satisfying
to me. Thanks again. :)

I recognise your/those names from other releases (like quad, and haujobb). And
like you said, others may have been more impressive technically, but it's the
threestate ones that have always stuck with me, for that amazingly perfect
(IMNSHO) combination of technical impressiveness, visuals, and audio.

------
theandrewbailey
Pretty much from the moment that I became interested in the demoscene about 12
years ago, Farbrausch has been my favorite group. It was something about 64k
intros that intrigued me. Even in 2002, a 3" floppy held almost no data, but
you can fit 20 or so of these amazing things on one.

~~~
MichaelGG
How much of modern demos is in the system libraries? Like, if you didn't have
D3D or OGL but had to write code that drew at the per-pixel level, how much
larger would these demos have to be?

~~~
Svenstaro
I did the math for you and it comes down to about 8.6MiB on my Linux system.

An OpenGL application that displays a triangle links to these libs:

libc.so.6 libdl.so.2 libdrm.so.2 libgcc_s.so.1 libglapi.so.0 libGL.so.1
libm.so.6 libpthread.so.0 librt.so.1 libSDL2-2.0.so.0 libstdc++.so.6
libX11.so.6 libX11-xcb.so.1 libXau.so.6 libxcb-dri2.so.0 libxcb-dri3.so.0
libxcb-glx.so.0 libxcb-present.so.0 libxcb.so.1 libxcb-sync.so.1
libXdamage.so.1 libXdmcp.so.6 libXext.so.6 libXfixes.so.3 libxshmfence.so.1
libXxf86vm.so.1

Now to be fair, we'll only count those we directly link against:

ibSDL2-2.0.so.0 libstdc++.so.6 libGL.so.1 libdl.so.2 libc.so.6 libgcc_c.so.1
libm.so.6

These few turn out to be the biggest in our bunch, totalling to 5.5MiB.

So there you have it, by linking a minimal graphics demo on Linux, you are
implicitly linking to about 5.5MiB of direct system libs and 8.6MiB of
indirect system libs. These numbers will vary wildly for other OS, but I guess
the DirectX stuff would be larger.

~~~
MichaelGG
Neat! Although if you were just writing to a framebuffer you would probably
use much less code. OTOH, the graphics drivers are doing the rasterizing
right?

~~~
Narishma
No, the GPU is doing the rasterizing.

------
andor
One of the Farbrausch members is currently making a crowd-funded game. The
trailer looks quite promising:

[http://www.duangle.com/nowhere](http://www.duangle.com/nowhere)

~~~
dkhar
Actually, your timing is really fortuitous: Just yesterday, the aforementioned
Farbrausch member/NOWHERE developer posted a progress report[1] for the game.
Somewhere near the end, he mentions that they had to delay the game's Steam
Early Access release to finish a few things, that they had factored the
release into this month's revenues, and that they are now borrowing money to
pay the rent on their home (the developer and artist are married).

Please check the game out and do consider supporting Paniq (apparently
Patreon[2] is the most convenient way to do this). There really could be no
better time for a small bit of exposure!

[1] [http://blog.duangle.com/2014/07/nowhere-progress-report-
its-...](http://blog.duangle.com/2014/07/nowhere-progress-report-its-going-
great.html)

[2] [http://www.patreon.com/duangle](http://www.patreon.com/duangle)

------
CountHackulus
The entire series of interviews on the site is very interesting. Nice to see a
variety of perspectives on the demoscene.

------
MichaelGG
Here's a really neat article on the math for animation:
[http://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-
glory/](http://acko.net/blog/animate-your-way-to-glory/)

Sort of revealed to me how some of this stuff works in a very easy-to-
understand way, along with great visualisations.

------
shimshim
I still miss the old days of Ascii art, demos were around back then, probably
what killed the ascii art scene.

~~~
CountHackulus
Ascii art is still alive and well.
[http://tmdc.scene.org/](http://tmdc.scene.org/) I've done this compo twice
and it's a ton of fun. Plus it's really easy to get started.

~~~
shimshim
Wow, I didn't realize. I was in s0ap for a little while from 96-97 but hadn't
checked it out in years. Thanks for providing the link.

------
angersock
Is anyone aware of a demoscene in the US? I'd be really interested in seeing
that.

~~~
anateus
Here's the NVidia one that just happened a few months ago:
[http://nv.scene.org/2014/about/](http://nv.scene.org/2014/about/)

The winners were also screened in SF at CODAME.

~~~
eccp
The invtro to the NVScene party this year was very stylish and featured music
from Dune/Orange:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYOBq4NLjtY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYOBq4NLjtY)

~~~
theandrewbailey
The one for NVScene 2008 kicked ass. It's about as close as you can get to
color intoxication (which is the rough translation of "farbrausch").

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQhgEJuExY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbQhgEJuExY)

------
pjmlp
The old demoscene was great.

It is still cool to see what demos the groups pull off nowadays, but we are
far far away from C64, Spectrum, Amiga and Atari, PC days, doing algorithms
considered impossible in such hardware.

~~~
bostik
> _algorithms considered impossible in such hardware_

The show-off factor is still alive and kicking. Check out the utterly
impossible Cubase-64 by Mahoney:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDrqBYkco-Y](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDrqBYkco-Y)

Once you've collected yourself and accepted that the thing really was done in
real-time, read the full description how the impossible was made possible:
[http://www.livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Cubase64_White_Paper_b...](http://www.livet.se/mahoney/c64-files/Cubase64_White_Paper_by_Pex_Mahoney_Tufvesson.pdf)

That thing is like extremely well done stage magic. You _know_ you're being
fooled and mislead, you may even know exactly how it's done - and you still
can't but admire the flawless execution.

~~~
pjmlp
Thanks for pointing this out, it is great!

------
pezz
It's probably not rated as one of their best, but I've always loved "fr025 -
The Popular Demo".

Beautifully done, search it on Youtube.

------
dharma1
someone should interview Smash. Legend.

[http://directtovideo.wordpress.com](http://directtovideo.wordpress.com)

~~~
z303
[http://6octaves.blogspot.jp/2013/10/interview-with-
demoscene...](http://6octaves.blogspot.jp/2013/10/interview-with-demoscener-
smash.html)

