6 ms·

Farbrausch (demoscene group) releases their tools and engine

270 points by ginsweater 14y ago

psykotic 14y ago
Fabian just posted the companion blog post: http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/if-in-doubt-go-to-the-source/ http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/15/if-in-doubt-go-to-th...
web_chops 14y ago
Wow, I never thought VC++ and MFC are this extensively used in demoscene groups.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  VC++ nearly exclusively. Some GCC'ers, but that's it, really. There's some more recent demos written in, say, Python, Java and C#, but they're pretty exceptional. Demoscene is also nearly entirely Windows-only. It's a good platform for games, and thus for demos. Plus, culturally, demos are about as closed-source as you can get, so there's this natural repellent force between the hardcore Linux zealots and the hardcore demoscene geeks.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    Exactly VC++ is much easier to work with than GCC on Windows (and I'm not talking only IDE but API support, debugging, binary size, etc) Also, video driver support is best on Windows. But of course, demos are made for Linux/OSX as well. You can try them on Wine as well under Linux, it's worth a shot.
    - pjmlp 14y ago
      The demoscene for Linux never really took off. Most of the demos I've seen were ports of existing ones.
  - skrebbel 14y ago
    > Demoscene is also nearly entirely Windows-only. Pardon, I meant the PC Demoscene. Don't want angry C64 demosceners here.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pavlov 14y ago
  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.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    Early demos were also frequently attached to warez, so they had to be on the same platform that the game/app being cracked was on.
    - aw3c2 14y ago
      That origin was really really early and not too relevant here.
      - _delirium 14y ago
        There wasn't ever really a clean break afaik, and the association (some groups more than others) continued through at least the 1990s. Fairlight were active in both scenes for over a decade, for example, though from what I can tell the group did slowly internally divide in terms of who was focusing on warez v. demos. More to the point, though, I think the association with reverse-engineering culture had a significant impact on the technical culture and choice of tools/platforms. Unix culture had more of a C ethos, and less of a patch-asm-into-a-running-program type ethos.
        jonbro 14y ago
        in fact, razor 1911 is still releasing both demos and warez. I don't know that they have any in the running for the scene awards, but they are getting ranked.
- pjmlp 14y ago
  Demoscene and open source were distinct worlds. Demoscene started on the 8bit world and as the PC world started focusing on MS-DOS, so did the coders. As one of the goals of the demoscene was to see which groups were able to push the machine to the limits while minimizing the amount of code, the used algorithms were worth gold and thus kept secret. So open source was a foreign word in the demoscene universe and everyone was happily coding the latest demo, instead of getting alternative OS to run on their PCs.
- gaius 14y ago
  For a demo you need every ounce of performance. http://willus.com/ccomp_benchmark2.shtml http://willus.com/ccomp_benchmark2.shtml for a modern take on this.
- angersock 14y ago
  I imagine that having a solid set of system libraries, useful abstractions, and a fixed ABI helps a great deal.
mickeyp 14y ago
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!
fredoliveira 14y ago
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
- leon_ 14y ago
  fr08 was their best work to me. I remember that summer - bought a new graphics card only to watch fr08 :)
- web_chops 14y ago
  It's amazing how they can fit that much detailed demo in 64kb along with sound. Feels magical :)
  - aw3c2 14y ago
    Prepare to be amazed by 4k, Elevated by RGBA and TBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
    - psykotic 14y ago
      Or the 4k remake of Chaos Theory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAIaclLrKE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAIaclLrKE. Elevated is a classic and a complete aesthetic package, but it's still a one-effect intro. Chaos Theory 4k is more varied but unfortunately it has a shitty synth.
- frou_dh 14y ago
  Fantastic tiny demos are truly the closest thing I've seen to magic. You know it's really a bag of tricks but it's simply so good.
johansch 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  Having 28 members isn't really considered a big accomplishment in the demoscene :-) I can get together a group with 28 members in a single demoparty. We'll all be drunk idiots who forgot we signed up the day after, but we'd be 28 members. Many of the Farbrausch guys work or have worked in the game industry. In fact, for a long time .theprodukkt (FR's somewhat more elitist and commercially feasible spinout) was planned to become a game company, but it never really did. The same holds for most other good demomakers currently active. The entire Finnish demoscene makes mobile games, the Norwegians all work at ARM to make mobile graphics chips, and p01 works at Opera winning js1k competitions. Meanwhile, the only somewhat active Spanish demoscener left codes Three.js at Google. The Dutch are all unemployed.
Roritharr 14y ago
Farbrausch is one of the few very good reasons to be very proud of german programming!
- kleiba 14y ago
  What does nationality have to do with anything?
  - ebiester 14y ago
    From what I remember as an observer, nationality always was a point of pride in the European demoscene, even when tongue in cheek.
    - skrebbel 14y ago
      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.
foolinator 14y ago
Great find. Holy crap does this bring back some memories.
wbhart 14y ago
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.
Tzunamitom 14y ago
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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imRmVGFeaNQ
- wbhart 14y ago
  For the longest time, my favourite was Prophecy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1tUfIbqKl8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1tUfIbqKl8
brendanobrien 14y ago
I didn't know this whole demoscene existed. This is amazing.
- DanBC 14y ago
  A good place to start looking around is here: (http://www.pouet.net/index.php 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 14y ago
    But the processing power needed to run it will be less.
    - gaius 14y ago
      Depends if you're using Flash to play the video :-p
bbayer 14y ago
piece of art.. https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/genthree/_viruz2a.asm https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/genthree...
apembroke 14y ago
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.
bashzor 14y ago
> 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.

270 points by ginsweater 14y ago

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

web_chops 14y ago

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

skrebbel 14y ago
VC++ nearly exclusively. Some GCC'ers, but that's it, really. There's some more recent demos written in, say, Python, Java and C#, but they're pretty exceptional. Demoscene is also nearly entirely Windows-only. It's a good platform for games, and thus for demos. Plus, culturally, demos are about as closed-source as you can get, so there's this natural repellent force between the hardcore Linux zealots and the hardcore demoscene geeks.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Exactly VC++ is much easier to work with than GCC on Windows (and I'm not talking only IDE but API support, debugging, binary size, etc) Also, video driver support is best on Windows. But of course, demos are made for Linux/OSX as well. You can try them on Wine as well under Linux, it's worth a shot.
  - pjmlp 14y ago
    The demoscene for Linux never really took off. Most of the demos I've seen were ports of existing ones.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  > Demoscene is also nearly entirely Windows-only. Pardon, I meant the PC Demoscene. Don't want angry C64 demosceners here.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pavlov 14y ago
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.
- _delirium 14y ago
  Early demos were also frequently attached to warez, so they had to be on the same platform that the game/app being cracked was on.
  - aw3c2 14y ago
    That origin was really really early and not too relevant here.
    - _delirium 14y ago
      There wasn't ever really a clean break afaik, and the association (some groups more than others) continued through at least the 1990s. Fairlight were active in both scenes for over a decade, for example, though from what I can tell the group did slowly internally divide in terms of who was focusing on warez v. demos. More to the point, though, I think the association with reverse-engineering culture had a significant impact on the technical culture and choice of tools/platforms. Unix culture had more of a C ethos, and less of a patch-asm-into-a-running-program type ethos.
      - jonbro 14y ago
        in fact, razor 1911 is still releasing both demos and warez. I don't know that they have any in the running for the scene awards, but they are getting ranked.
pjmlp 14y ago
Demoscene and open source were distinct worlds. Demoscene started on the 8bit world and as the PC world started focusing on MS-DOS, so did the coders. As one of the goals of the demoscene was to see which groups were able to push the machine to the limits while minimizing the amount of code, the used algorithms were worth gold and thus kept secret. So open source was a foreign word in the demoscene universe and everyone was happily coding the latest demo, instead of getting alternative OS to run on their PCs.
gaius 14y ago
For a demo you need every ounce of performance. http://willus.com/ccomp_benchmark2.shtml http://willus.com/ccomp_benchmark2.shtml for a modern take on this.
angersock 14y ago
I imagine that having a solid set of system libraries, useful abstractions, and a fixed ABI helps a great deal.

mickeyp 14y ago

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!

fredoliveira 14y ago

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

leon_ 14y ago
fr08 was their best work to me. I remember that summer - bought a new graphics card only to watch fr08 :)
web_chops 14y ago
It's amazing how they can fit that much detailed demo in 64kb along with sound. Feels magical :)
- aw3c2 14y ago
  Prepare to be amazed by 4k, Elevated by RGBA and TBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
  - psykotic 14y ago
    Or the 4k remake of Chaos Theory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAIaclLrKE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFAIaclLrKE. Elevated is a classic and a complete aesthetic package, but it's still a one-effect intro. Chaos Theory 4k is more varied but unfortunately it has a shitty synth.
frou_dh 14y ago
Fantastic tiny demos are truly the closest thing I've seen to magic. You know it's really a bag of tricks but it's simply so good.

johansch 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
skrebbel 14y ago
Having 28 members isn't really considered a big accomplishment in the demoscene :-) I can get together a group with 28 members in a single demoparty. We'll all be drunk idiots who forgot we signed up the day after, but we'd be 28 members. Many of the Farbrausch guys work or have worked in the game industry. In fact, for a long time .theprodukkt (FR's somewhat more elitist and commercially feasible spinout) was planned to become a game company, but it never really did. The same holds for most other good demomakers currently active. The entire Finnish demoscene makes mobile games, the Norwegians all work at ARM to make mobile graphics chips, and p01 works at Opera winning js1k competitions. Meanwhile, the only somewhat active Spanish demoscener left codes Three.js at Google. The Dutch are all unemployed.

Roritharr 14y ago

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

kleiba 14y ago
What does nationality have to do with anything?
- ebiester 14y ago
  From what I remember as an observer, nationality always was a point of pride in the European demoscene, even when tongue in cheek.
  - skrebbel 14y ago
    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.

foolinator 14y ago

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

wbhart 14y ago

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.

Tzunamitom 14y ago

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

wbhart 14y ago
For the longest time, my favourite was Prophecy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1tUfIbqKl8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1tUfIbqKl8

brendanobrien 14y ago

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

DanBC 14y ago
A good place to start looking around is here: (http://www.pouet.net/index.php 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 14y ago
  But the processing power needed to run it will be less.
  - gaius 14y ago
    Depends if you're using Flash to play the video :-p

bbayer 14y ago

piece of art.. https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/genthree/_viruz2a.asm https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/blob/master/genthree...

apembroke 14y ago

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.

bashzor 14y ago

> 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.