Amazing Demo Scene Guy (bit techy)

[limb_clock]

Microsoft could learn a thing or two eh!

Yeah, definitely. Today everything is totally out of proportion. One Megabyte RAM is really quite a lot, and one GB diskspace is an enoumous amount, yet normal computer Windows/Mac users think of this as being almost nothing and need to keep upgrade their hardware. If everyone wrote their programs with just a tiny thought about runtime/memory efficiency then we could use much simpler hardware for normal software, or have some really stunning (sci/fi movie style) software on the current hardware.

Mm, indeed. I think what happened for a long time was everything was constantly getting faster and bigger at a ridiculous rate, when Moore's Law was in full swing, and everyone thought they had more power than they knew what to do with and could afford to write lots of inefficient code. (Or perhaps they thought they needed to, to keep Intel in business)

I'm thinking/hoping that this might reverse soon. Desktop computers seem to be about as powerful as they're going to get for the time being - even the PC I put together 4 years ago is still good enough to near-match the one I built a year ago and the Mac I bought 6 months ago. Back in the day, a 4 year old PC would be a creaking old dinosaur...

The focus now seems to be on making that same hardware fit into smaller and more energy efficient packages (Apple being a decent example) rather than just making tower after tower of the best power they can. Hopefully we might see software follow suit.

Full graphical operating systems used to fit on a floppy disk (QNX, AmigaOS, etc) and apart from being a little prettier they don't seem much different now

I was tihnking about this a while back: Because the home computers are becoming more and more powerufl, does that lead to the programmers writing code, that could well be optimized to work under...more....not so powerful conditions? My question stems from the PDP hacking done at MIT in the 60s, where programs HAD to be as compact as possible, so that there'd be some memory to do something, and the program would take as little resources as possible, but doesn't anyone do this anymore? Is writing compact and efficent code a thing to worry about anymore?

[_TinOmen_]

Yes it is a good thing that battery life is a limited resource so for portable devices writing efficient software is still important.

I've seen lots of production code that is totally horrendous and does several orders of magnitude more work than is necessary, unfortunately doing redundant work (looping a structure sequentially for the same value millions of times instead of caching results) is not considered a "bug" so it is not fixed. It is not about spending expensive development time on optimizing either, the programs I've seen could have been written in less time and more maintainable code and still be a 1000 times more efficient. And I'm talking about the work of high-salary programming "professionals" here, not hobby amateurs.

[limb_clock]

One more question I just thought up:

When making a new version of let's say FooFinder, let's say that version 1. is basic, but there's a lot of code that doesn't need to be there, so when they make FooFinder 1.2, wouldn't it be more sensible to make the code more compact, whilst listening to consumer requests for features, which are then amde compact in version 1.3?

Or would development like that just be far too silly?

[Darkflame]

No,no,no you see consumers see using up lots of space as a good thing.
So you should always boast that no medium is big enough to contain your wonderfull work;
eg;

http://ps3.qj.net/Hideo-Kojima-Blu-ray- ... aid/114921



The irony is I'm sure the PS3 would be darn good at getting a lot from a little. The cell chip should be great for this sort of texture work no?

I just can't belive that pixar thing was done witth 4Ks! Unbelivable

Indeed.
Allthough I am curious why it seems a little jerky in places. I'm sure its not my hardware.
is it jerky for you?
Tweening between frames shouldnt add much cost to filesize.


I think my personal favorate is this one;
http://rgba.scenesp.org/iq/demoscene/pr ... noiser.avi

3D Slices of 4D Fractuals I'm guessing.

[Ollie]

No,no,no you see consumers see using up lots of space as a good thing.
So you should always boast that no medium is big enough to contain your wonderfull work;
eg;

http://ps3.qj.net/Hideo-Kojima-Blu-ray- ... aid/114921

A nicely ignorant quote in the comments there:

A compressed movie of 2 hours would be about 700 MB whist an uncompressed movie of 2 hours may hit up to 3-4 GB or so. Make it High definition and you'll be topping up to 10 GB.

Sounds like he's somehow got the idea DVDs are uncompressed. And probably doesn't know about dual layer, since the ones he's torrented have been DVD-Shrunk to single layer size.

[limb_clock]

@Darkflame:

It wasn't that jerky to me, but i felt that the timing was a bit off. When the lamp sees he's crushed the letter, i felt that the lamp was turned towards the viewer a little too fast. Tweenish? maybe a bit, but the motion is really close to the original work

[Cloudane]

No,no,no you see consumers see using up lots of space as a good thing.

This is a big part of it, yes. It's a poor example (because everyone hates it and says it's bloated) but I'll use it anyway... can you imagine if Windows Vista had system requirements equal to or even lower than XP? "OMG it must be so rubbish if it doesn't even need a decent computer"

Maybe this mentality will change, too. Efficiency and the "carbon footprint" buzzword are all the rage at the moment, software programmers (especially Microsoft/Apple) should exploit this while they can.

[Nixie]

@Darkflame:

It wasn't that jerky to me, but i felt that the timing was a bit off. When the lamp sees he's crushed the letter, i felt that the lamp was turned towards the viewer a little too fast. Tweenish? maybe a bit, but the motion is really close to the original work

It was jerky/ wobbly for me, I put it down to the lamp not actually having a rig; instead, its vertices were probably key-framed. - Maybe this saves space also?

Id seen kkrieger before and was impressed, but I had'nt seen ,debris; its fantastic! 177kb!!

I'd love to put something like this together, but I don't code.

[fog]

A nicely ignorant quote in the comments there:

A compressed movie of 2 hours would be about 700 MB whist an uncompressed movie of 2 hours may hit up to 3-4 GB or so. Make it High definition and you'll be topping up to 10 GB.

Sounds like he's somehow got the idea DVDs are uncompressed. And probably doesn't know about dual layer, since the ones he's torrented have been DVD-Shrunk to single layer size.

I wonder if he's related to the person that had a letter published on Teletext yesterday claiming that the XBox360 couldn't possibly produce HD graphics because it only has a standard DVD drive and not an HD-DVD one.

[RedOktober]

I love people who think like that.

[Darkflame]

No,no,no you see consumers see using up lots of space as a good thing.
So you should always boast that no medium is big enough to contain your wonderfull work;
eg;

http://ps3.qj.net/Hideo-Kojima-Blu-ray- ... aid/114921

A nicely ignorant quote in the comments there:

A compressed movie of 2 hours would be about 700 MB whist an uncompressed movie of 2 hours may hit up to 3-4 GB or so. Make it High definition and you'll be topping up to 10 GB.

Sounds like he's somehow got the idea DVDs are uncompressed. And probably doesn't know about dual layer, since the ones he's torrented have been DVD-Shrunk to single layer size.

Indeed.
An uncompressed movie for 4GB ?
Thats one short movie :p

I think theres a mentality going around that less compression = better results. And its mostly emperor's new cloths stuff.

Id love for those people in the comments (@Charlybob) to have a blind test and I bet you not one could tell the difference between a raw file, and a (decent bitrate) compressed one, either audio or visual.

If you got hardware sufficiantly powerfull to do decent decompression in realtime, theres absolutely no reason to use uncompressed data.
It should be automatic.
In very rare case's loseless compression might be nesscery, but I'm skepetical even of that.

It wasn't that jerky to me, but i felt that the timing was a bit off. When the lamp sees he's crushed the letter, i felt that the lamp was turned towards the viewer a little too fast. Tweenish? maybe a bit, but the motion is really close to the original work

No question of that at all.
Its stunning.

software programmers (especially Microsoft/Apple) should exploit this while they can.

Well, if they are expected to build up to a spec for the sake of it.
Make the thing as small/efficiant as possible, then add a massive file somewhere that is there for the most feedble of reasons, or no reason at all.

That said, I think its far more likely that they would shug their shoulders, and just not worry about optimising.

[gumboot]

I think you lot are forgetting that inefficient code is considered good form in many cases... to the point that people often write deliberately inefficient software just to meet the standards that their peer group encourage.

There's a tendency for the inept to over-generalise their code, and to use faddish constructs that aren't really appropriate, and to use the latest libraries and languages and things like XML (a universal wrong), because that's what it's cool to do. On top of that there's a constant de-optimisation of code to be "more readable" because the compiler is supposed to fix it up anyway.

It's all down to developers being so rabidly modernistic and excusing themselves with current hardware capabilities and a supposed "maintainability" and standards conformance (standards which grow ever larger and demand increasing complexity and rush the development cycle unreasonably).

[sty]

I think you lot are forgetting that inefficient code is considered good form in many cases... to the point that people often write deliberately inefficient software just to meet the standards that their peer group encourage.

There's a tendency for the inept to over-generalise their code, and to use faddish constructs that aren't really appropriate, and to use the latest libraries and languages and things like XML (a universal wrong), because that's what it's cool to do. On top of that there's a constant de-optimisation of code to be "more readable" because the compiler is supposed to fix it up anyway.

It's all down to developers being so rabidly modernistic and excusing themselves with current hardware capabilities and a supposed "maintainability" and standards conformance (standards which grow ever larger and demand increasing complexity and rush the development cycle unreasonably).

There's a really fine line between producing effective code in a modern 'business' workplace and the waste and crap coding that we all talk about.

I lead a development team of about 30 people, of which about 18 are coders.

I encourage the guys to produce code that is readable, and therefore maintainable. We do this by developing and using frameworks efficiently and correctly (we optimise our frameworks quite tightly), structuring code properly to remove redundancy and duplication of code, and using best practices and patterns where ever appropriate, oh yes and we have coding standards that everyone follows.

Occaisionally someone has a brain fart, or follows bad code in the legacy system, or simply doesn't get it, and does a repeated sequential search through a data structure where a 'Dictionary' or a Cache would be much more effective. When we fix these we usually get all our speed-ups and performance hits a level in excess of what is needed. This is usually what I call 'Bad Coding' and is caused by people not thinking in a professional coding manner, ie. the way we all used to back in the day, and it doesn't usually surface during dev time because they work with limited data sets so their sequential searches don't show up as a problem with 10 data records, but they do with 10,000.

I think this is perfectly acceptable in the real world of business application development where you are maintaining millions of lines of code (should really be hundreds of thousands) and you have ongoing development and enhancement.

Now what you really highlight here is that there is a difference between professional software developers and people who choose to hack, or do demos, or write games, or in general who code for fun and a hobby. BAsically 80% of your professional SW developers just treat it as a job, and they learned enough to get the job and keep it. There is little passion in these people and they certainly don't sweat performance issues or anything else difficult unless they are forced to do so, there objectives are to keep their, non-technical, bosses happy and move on to the next task etc. Recruiting for developers is incredibly difficult and you have to take the 80% while you really only want the top 20%, you need to design you products and systems so that they can be worked on by the 80% and you have to take the frustration that some of your 80% really don't get more advance topics that were common place back in the day or to us the 'hobby coders' (things like assembly language, how memory works, how lists are actually stored and implemented, how parsers work and how you can work with them rather than against them, etc.)

It's a fact of life that while you can get carpenters, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, plasterers, carpet layers, etc. who are actually just on the acceptable side of shit. These are the people that build 90% of our houses and do 90% of the maintenance jobs for us, and earn an enormous amount of money. What we truly long for are the Artisans, what we get are the plodders, and we pray that process and regulations mean we get a safe job if not a great job. So it is with coding in the real world.

It cheers me up no end when I see truly great coding, things like the demo writers, low level driver writers, and if I'm honest the guys who write the engines and frameworks upon which our games are built. These are the people that make the quantum leaps upon which the donkeys can move the whole industry forward again.

So remember that it is probably the 'hobby developers' that are breaking the new ground and saving the industries.

[Darkflame]

Well, the thing with code is (unlike physical products), one skilled artisians work can be used again and again.

I think big companys will never write as "tight" code as a signel person could. They will always have to be readable, and understandable by more people, and thats fine.
But I think a lot of companys could at least use techiques and ideas the artisians do.
Workflows can be developed inspired by them
eg. Procedral textures in games.
3DSMax, Maya ect...all the 3d packages already use procedural internally, but you burn them out if you want to use them in a game.
I'm sure material plug-ins could be made for the software that allow the development and previewing of procedural textures in the workspace, that look exactly the same in game.
It would just be a mixing, layering and filtering of existing procedural algorithms, but even if it could only be applied to 50% of the textures in the game it would be a huge saving on file size. Not to mention completely removing the necessary for ANY repeating textures.
Youd just be able to say "brick wall, these colours, this old and with this png of graffiti stuck over it" and the engine would give you a unique looking wall for those critera. Gradualy games firms would build up a whole lib of texture types to alter.

The 80% should be able to easily handel and use the 20%'s work if its framed correctly.

I just dont think there is the motivation to bother.
We justify the need for bigger disks because we use up the space of the smaller stuff. But the content increase is never in preportion to the gain in space.

The only time games are optimised these days is for download distribution.
And even then, I dont think many are really looking at the demoscene are doing.

We cant all have the uber-l33t skills, but we should all be aware of whats possible.

[_TinOmen_]

Good post Sty.