Aaah, it brings so many fantastic memories. I still remember the excitement and awe when watching the new stuff released on Assembly. The pure fan admiration for guys from Orange, CNCD, Nooon, Complex, Halcyon and many others.
I wonder if it's still as exciting today? Nowadays, when there's abundance of productions, effects, impressive games, wonderful animations, powerful hardware to run all this stuff, I think it's harder to impress people. Especially when they can instantly find 10 tutorials and 5 code examples helping to achieve something similar and as the result everyone immediately depreciate other people's work.
I quite enjoyed that. It really does amaze me how far computer graphics software/hardware has come since those days. I'd love to know what the guys who worked on that bit of kit went on to do.
I have fond memories of this time as well. It is the first time I have seen an article where I am seeing old names like Joshua Davis and Jared Tarbell. Manny Tan and Keith Peters were similarly cool.
I don't get a lot out of the art side, but I have always been fascinated by this particular topic. Where little pieces of code, depending on some inputs, can generate some really fun output.
Between this and Fravia I probably learned more about how computers worked than any other course or article. I remember running through most of these to build up my own personal GFX library. Silly things like "draw random lines" versus "draw random lines REALLY FAST" kept me interested long beyond any reasonable attention span. Thanks @tdicola for the link to the texts!
I'm only sad that I've forgotten so much, and that it's getting harder and harder to make cool stuff like this - there are still ways to get a 1:1 array:pixel mapping and have at, but they're all more complicated than MOV AX, 13h; INT 10h; and $A000.
It's very fun to go watch the presentations from years past. Stuff we now take for granted (e.g. rendering glass using ray tracing) used to be bleeding edge not too long ago.
I love these types of videos. It continuously amazes me to learn how much ingenuity and creative coding was necessary to create video games in the 70s, 80s, and even 90s.
Even more amazing is that they did a lot of it without tools like version control, graphics engines, and frameworks that most programmers take for granted today.
Today we stand on the shoulders of the giants that created these early games.
For example the water effect in the video was probably the culmination of many all-hands meetings within the team that figured out how to "cheat" the system into doing it, while literally bouncing off the graphics ceiling that the console was capable of producing. Nowadays we would just send the intern off and tell them to add some water to the scene as a trivial task.
Hilarious. I wouldn't have expected that ever to happen.
So much talent in the Finish scene and they were so good at advertizing their accomplishments in a way that was energizing to fellow nerds.
It was the biggest reason I ended up getting so deep into computer graphics -- I wanted to be as "cool" as they were. How else could you be "cool" by sitting at your computer BBS chatting all night doing math and algorithms? Such an awesome time.
I know that mrdoob of three.js also got into coding via the demoscene.
Yes, it's amazing how many game development techniques appeared and faded out in the 90s, in that window of time between fast-enough CPUs and affordable GPUs. I have a copy of the Black Art of 3D Game Programming on my shelf and it's full of awesome tidbits.
I recently browsed flipcode.com and sadly parts of it are broken and only available thanks to the Internet Archive.
Oh, man, the nostalgia. I remember borrowing this. It taught me the basics, mode 13h, direct memory access (0xA0000000 anyone?), palette swaps, the works. I remember getting a wave file extract from Duke Nukem 3D playing in my primitive cyclic buffer.
I never went in to game dev, but I did learn a lot from the experience.
It truly did allow for very artistic interactive assets. The ide, tooling, actionscript were quite revolutionary.
Today it could be a paradox of choice situation, for an aspiring creator to produce anything today would require them to pick up a bundle of technologies.
A lot of people are really nostalgic about development back then but I'm honestly happy to have entered the industry at a point where excellent tools are readily available.
Apart from engines, the evolution of graphics debuggers such as RenderDoc, NSight, and PIX over the last ten years has been amazing.
It's hard for me to capture the level of nostalgia I have for those 4px graphical elements that you could use for graphics. They allowed you to control graphics with the conditional logic of Basic. I had so much fun making animations with different scenes.
To be fair to them, they were hella good C++ programmers and used Shockwave to prototype and lock down the business requirements. You can do an amazing amount of specification like that. It was basically CRC cards put to animation as people and things interacting.
They provided quite a bit of short and long term value by being better at giving clients an understanding of what they were actually getting. They cared about the internals and making sure their clients understood the logic the internals would use.
If I was skilled in some animation tool like they were I would do the same.
My earliest forays into CG were on amiga and earliest paid jobs were with video toaster / lightwave and softimage on SGIs. Great times. With tools we have today they seem so primitive in comparison.
I wonder if it's still as exciting today? Nowadays, when there's abundance of productions, effects, impressive games, wonderful animations, powerful hardware to run all this stuff, I think it's harder to impress people. Especially when they can instantly find 10 tutorials and 5 code examples helping to achieve something similar and as the result everyone immediately depreciate other people's work.
Or maybe it's this old guy in me speaking? :)
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