The demo experience

The demo experience


I may qualify myself as a power user sometimes - I'm not afraid to go dabbling in a system merely using a command line interface and an alien looking text editor (alien looking to those who think Notepad is pushing it in terms of bareness).

Still, some very enjoyable experiences are still difficult to have under Linux - for purely technical reasons.

Why still dual boot?

Games, the Return of the Revenge Afterburnt 2.5 Omega... Whatever.

There is one thing that forces me back under Windows these days: some softwares I really enjoy that would run only on a Win32 platform. My previous blog entry was addressing the gaming problem (thanks for the comments BTW!):

  • a good deal can run under the LGPL'ed Wine, Transgaming's Cedega or CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office,
  • a lot of games are available for free, or completely free, under GNU/Linux,
  • some proprietary games are natively cross-platform.

Meaning that with a bit of care, you can game at will under Linux - blastin', fraggin', run'n''jumpin', rollin' etc. So that's yet another reason to boot into Windows that pretty much goes away.

Of Near-Useless Eyecandy That Nobody Can Live Without Anymore

An excellent piece of news came from Google yesterday: Google Earth 4 beta came out on most of the consumer grade OpenGL-capable x86 OSes. Yes, Google Earth was another reason for me to keep a Windows partition. Not anymore.

Don't scoff, I know you also have it installed on a spare Windows-equipped machine somewhere.

Not much left, is there. Which leads me to the present subject.

...demos?

Do some of you remember the days when young programmers tried their skills at programming nice visuals and music on their computers? Yes, the demoscene. Well, they actually never stopped - some groups came and went, others stayed, some fused, others broke off. Still, some of the stuff produced is downright incredible.

A long time ago (when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth - the Golden Age of the 386) I would watch, transfixed, a 64 Kb demo reproducing the scenery and fly-by experience of the very well known at the time game Magic Carpet 2. No, really! A complete scenery and 3D rendering engine (all in DOS/VGA/SB splendor) in 64K!

Nowadays they do even better: 64K demos make use of incredible compression and optimization technologies that would allow a group like Farbrausch to create a complete Quake-like demo in 96 Kb - textures, levels, weapons, AI, enemies, sound, speech - or... well, anything else, all in a file smaller than a bad quality JPEG file. Really. It's called .kkrieger - with a dot.

Well, as you may guess, those delicate files are using extremely advanced functions and optimizations, and their source code is a closely kept secret (or was merely scrapped at the end of the demo party) - when it's not just pure assembly.

Meaning that seeing a Linux port may never happen.

I like watching those: creativity is a must for those works, and coding expertise a requirement. These 'script kiddies' would give any chief developer in any project a run for his/her money with the efficiency displayed in those little pieces of art. Thus, sometimes, I spend a few seconds downloading a file, unpacking it, and I run it under Wine - and I cross my fingers that it would work. But then it often doesn't, and I have to boot under Windows.

I must say however, that it is quite an accomplishment for the Wine programmers that some demos run at all: in fact, I often find little to no difference between the 3D rendering done on a 'native' win32 environment and its LGPL equivalent when the demo actually runs. And it gets better on almost every new Wine release.

What's the point, you may ask? Well, users of free software usually started using free software because of one of these reasons:

  • it's free as in no ca$h,
  • it's very good quality code: efficient, fast, hardly (if ever) crashes,
  • you can make yourself feel important by contributing back to it,
  • it's free as in freedom.

Pick your own - I enjoy all those aspects.

Still, what's more entertaining than watching a very nice demonstration of artistic and technical skill on a free system?

For me, it feels like visiting a very nice artistic exposition, at will, for free, where even the building hosting the exposition is a piece of art.

Bibliography

http://produkkt.abraxas-medien.de/, .theprodukkt/Farbrauscht website

http://www.scene.org

Category: 
Opinions
Tagging: 
games
wine
cedega
demos

Author information

Mitch Meyran's picture

Biography

Have you ever fixed a computer with a hammer, glue and a soldering iron? Why not? It's fun!

Most forwarded

Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.

TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.

Most emailed

Free Open Document label templates

If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.

Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!

So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?

More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.

When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.

Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?

Fun articles

Santa Claus - the most successful open source project

It dawned on me the other day, as I was shopping for the dozens of gifts it seems I have to buy every December, that Santa Claus is the most successful open source project in history. (Bridget @ Illiterarty would agree with that). Santa Claus is essentially a marketing development that is embodied by everyone who stuffs a sock, gives a gift, hosts a dinner or wishes Merry Christmas over the holiday season.

Most emailed

Editorial

When I first started thinking about Free Software Magazine, I was feeling enthusiastic about the dream. I had Dave, Gianluca, and Alan willing to help me, I had established members of the free software community willing to help me out, I had writers volunteering their time and energy for free, and I had a generous offer from OpenHosting for servers, all before I'd proved myself. There was a sense of excitement in the air, and I thought maybe, just maybe, I could make this work.

Free Software Magazine uses Apollo project management software and CRM for its everyday activities!