The Hugi Scene Charts
Welcome, friends, to the charts corner of Hugi #12!
The charts concept seemed to have worked out: For this issue, we have got 101 votesheets (101 and not 100 because I have filled out a votesheet myself :). That's great considering that we've gathered the votesheets in two months and a week only!
Still, most votesheets rushed in after directly asking the people via IRC /msg or e-mail to fill them out. The number of votesheets that were sent in "voluntarily" or came from the online voting page at the Hugi Download Homepage was less than 20.
So you see: By directly talking to the people, you have the best chances to get them active. And I made the same experiences with asking people to write articles, btw! :)
For counting the votesheets, I used a self-written utility. It read all votesheets, converted the names into a uniform way (lowercase, all '.' converted to spaces, double spaces removed and stuff like that), then counted the votes and put them into an end file. Still, I had to do a lot of manual work afterwards because of the many ways you can write a certain name.
A good example is the demo "Vivid 2: Boost" by Doomsday. Most people just wrote "boost" into the charts, but there were also many votes saying "vivid part 2: boost", "vivid 2 - boost", "boost by doomsday" etc. I had to find those votes and count them together manually. At the end after the manual counting, Boost turned out to be one of the Top 10 demos, although "boost" had only 15 points. There were so many other ways to spell the name of the same demo.
Other examples are "2nd reality" aka "second reality", "tbl" aka "the black lotus" - about the same number of people wrote "tbl" as the number of people that wrote "the black lotus" -, and especially "Elektroniks", another demo by Doomsday, was spelled in many different ways: "electronics", "elektron" and "elektronics" are just a few examples.
Two people have also voted for "Matrix by The Fulcrum" instead of "The Fulcrum by Matrix", which was especially amusing while manually completing the charts. ;)
You see, even if you have a program that evaluates the votes for you automatically - or is at least supposed to ;) -, you have to do a lot of manual completing afterwards. I am glad that I don't have to make charts that often. :) All in all I think it took me one or two hours of manual processing until the charts were counted completely.
What also is interesting is to see how the people fill in the charts, I mean the layout. Mr.Pink has analysed this behaviour in his introduction to the charts section of the Atari ST/Falcon diskmag "Maggie #26". I want to do that here in Hugi, too.
The Hugi votesheet was especially tricky. First, my vote counting program depended on the line number where the single charts sections (pc demos, etc.) started. Unfortunately, quite a few people have re-layouted their votesheets by adding more lines at the beginning or cutting the ascii logo. Some people even submitted their votes in a loose form, so that I myself had to put their votes into a regular votesheet. TABs could also cause the vote counting program to behave in a wrong way.
This required quite a lot of manual processing already BEFORE starting the vote counting program. I had to check whether TABs were used and in what line the single charts sections started. As I often did that while I was chatting on IRC, though, I missed some errors. And then, after running the vote counting program, when I was about to complete the charts manually, I realized that there were still some faulty sheets. Argh. ;) So I had to check all votesheets again.
Fortunately I could rationalize the checking by having the vote couting program evalute only a few votesheets, then, if there was no error, some more votesheets etc. till the error occured. Then I only had to check these few votesheets.
One guy also used a Unix text editor for filling in his votesheet. This confused the vote counting program especially because in Unix, the code for the line-end is just one byte long whereas in DOS and Windows it is two bytes. Since my favourite text editor (Aurora) could also handle Unix text files and save them with the Unix end-of-line coding, I couldn't spot the mistake in the first place. My second favourite text editor (UFOEDIT) also did the same thing as Aurora, i.e I couldn't find the error either. Only when I started the MS-DOS-Editor 2.0 from Win95 by chance, I found out what was wrong and could fix it. Phew. :)
Why I said that the Hugi votesheet was wicked, however, is another thing. Check the following cut:
your handle/group or name .................................
way to contact you ........................................
How would you fill that out? Basically, there were three different ways the people used:
a) Simply filling in left-bound:
your handle/group or name Adok/Hugi........................
way to contact you hugi@netway.............................
Okay, I must admit, almost nobody did that because it looks ugly. :)
b) Filling in the name and directly under it the way to contact:
your handle/group or name ..Adok/Hugi......................
way to contact you .........hugi@netway.at.................
c) Filling in right-bound:
your handle/group or name ........................Adok/Hugi
way to contact you ..........................hugi@netway.at
Some people also deleted the dots. But whatever you used, everything was okay because the vote counting program made the same thing out of it.
About the case spelling: Most people used "normal" case spelling like I do now. Many people, however, wrote in lower case only. Whereas the number of people that used upper case was little. Only very few people used "eNk3WLiZeD" spelling.
In whatever way you spelled the words regarding the case, it didn't matter because the vote counting program converted everything to lower case for easy counting.
When you take a look at the voters list, you will find out what people used what way of case spelling because I kept the handles there as they entered them in their votesheets.
Some few people also didn't write
pc demos
1 Blablademo............................. by Blablagroup
but
pc demos
1 [Blablademo]........................... by [Blablagroup]
This, of course, wasn't recognized by the vote counting program and therefore together with spelling errors and stuff like "no entry" one of the things I had to correct manually. Anyway, it was not that much additional work. There were only very few spelling errors. Most different spellings were legal ways to spell (e.g. "2nd reality" and "second reality", as I have said).
And, of course, what's especially interesting are the jokes in the votesheets. :)
A well-known coder and main editor of a newsletter has written for example:
way to contact you .email/phone/snail/visit me at
my flat/parents house..
A Polish guy expressed his humor by adding "by? ;)" after each vote in the "top groups" section.
By the way, what is also interesting is what many of you wrote in the "by" field in the diskmag section. Namely as regards Hugi, most people wrote "Hugi by Adok". Interesting that you associate my person with the diskmag of which I'm just the main editor. :) Okay, it's right that I do the most jobs in Hugi, so you can certainly write "Hugi by Adok", although Hugi, published by the group "Hugi Crew" is actually intended to be BY and FOR the whole scene.
Some people also jokingly wrote "dunno ;)", "hey! it's you :)" or "you know :)", which was nice to read. :)
As regards the other diskmags, the "by" field was often empty. This shows that the groups which release the diskmags are often not as well-known as the mags themselves. However, the "by" field is superfluous for diskmags anyway, actually, because all good diskmags are intended to be FOR the whole scene and contain articles BY the whole scene. Therfore I left out the groups behind the diskmags in this charts results section but added a column with the languages of the mags instead.
One guy also voted for Hugi as the best diskmag, Imphobia as place 2 and "Hugiphobia by ...Bombe ;)" as place 3. (Bombe is member of the group Smash Designs, most famous because of their C64 conversion of Second Reality.)
Some people didn't just fill in the name of the diskmag but also the issue. Quite a few people wrote "Hugi #11" as the first place. This shows that after reading Hugi #11, they are of the opinion now that Hugi is the best diskmag. Well, Hugi #12 certainly won't disappoint you either!
If you filled in your votesheet for Hugi, you didn't have to fill in everything. Actually, there were two sections that were not so often filled in as the other two sections. These sections are firstly the diskmags, secondly the intros.
What can we learn from that? I guess that many people are not actively interested in diskmags, unless they release a mag themselves or are involved in the making of a mag. They only know one or a few mags they read regularly. So they don't feel to have enough knowledge to judge.
Other people are of the opinion that there are no good diskmags (except Hugi) around at the moment, and they don't always want to vote for Imphobia.
Concerning the intro section, which, however, got more votes than the diskmag section, it seems as if most people prefer watching to demos over intros. Maybe they also found it awkward to vote for 64k- and 4k-intros in the same section (as you will see, the intro top 10 in this issue contains nine 64k-intros and only one 4k-intro). The great majority of the votes concentrate on the first four places.
Conclusion: If you want to get famous with an intro, this intro must be really good and a 64k one. Getting famous with 4k-intros is almost impossible.
Now to the point scheme. It looks like the following:
1st place ........... 4 points
2nd place ........... 2 points
3rd place ........... 1 point
I chose this unusual 4-2-1 scheme because the proportion between the 1st and the 2nd place is the same as the proportion between the 2nd and the 3rd place. These proportions were a thing that I didn't like about the usual 3-2-1 scheme because there the second place is worth more compared to the 1st place than the 3rd place compared to the 2nd one, namely 3/2 instead of 2/1. In the 4-2-1 scheme, the proportion is always 2/1.
This, of course, also has a side-effect: If one voter votes for something as the 1st place, it has the same points as if four voters vote for it as the 3rd place. That means that in most cases, you only have a chance to get a high place in the charts when many people vote for you as place 1.
Okay, now let's come to the charts results!
VOTING RESULTS
MOST POPULAR DEMOS # demo group pts ---------------------------------------------------------- 1. Sunflower Pulse 58 2. The Fulcrum Matrix 45 3. Hyperventilation Byterapers 42 4. Tribes Pulse 32 4. 303 Acme 32 6. Vivid Part 2: Boost Doomsday 29 6. Second Reality Future Crew 29 8. Shad Cocoon & Syndrome 26 9. Square Pulse 24 X. Robotnik Rage 23
With a pretty small difference to the second place, "Sunflower" by Pulse, which is also one of my personal favourites, has won. Although on the Gravity '97 party where Sunflower was released, Sunflower made only the second place, it is dominating the international scene charts now, whereas the winning demo is hardly mentioned anywhere.
The second place is Matrix' winner demo "The Fulcrum" from Mekka & Symposium 1998. As you can see from the growing popularity of Fulcrum, Matrix and its members, Matrix has really created a smash hit with Fulcrum. By the way, if you want to learn about the creating of The Fulcrum, check out the interview with digisnap/Matrix in this very Hugi issue.
Further, we have "Hyperventilation", another recent kick-ass demo by the famous Finnish/Swedish crew Byterapers (2nd place at Remedy '98), whose members are also involved in Mikrobitti, the largest Scandinavian computer magazine. Then a tie comes: "Tribes" by Pulse, the winner of The Party 1997, and Acme's legendary "303", made in only one week, share the fourth place with 32 points.
Doomsday's "Vivid Part 2: Boost" follows, having the same points as Future Crew's legendary and never-to-forget "Second Reality". By the way, Future Crew wants to get active again and work on a new demo soon. Will it be another revolution? Or do other groups like Pulse create better demos than Future Crew, which is only that famous because in 1992, no group was better than Future Crew?
Finally, we have "Shad", the winner demo of Wired '98 with a packed size of 9 MByte, "Square" by the French division of Pulse, also released at The Party 1997, and Robotnik's "Rage".
Apparently, Trauma's Assembly-98-winning demo "Gateways" isn't too famous yet. It got only 14 points, thus making the 12th place - too few to be listed in these charts. The winner of Summer Encounter '98, "Plastik" by Purple, got one point more and is at rank #11.
MOST POPULAR INTROS # intro group pts ---------------------------------------------------------- 1. Stash The Black Lotus 127 2. Paper Psychic Link 75 3. Jizz The Black Lotus 73 4. Clone Meets Clone Acme 38 5. Omniscent Sanction 10 6. Theta Quad 9 6. Cyboman 2 Complex 9 8. Sink Pulse 8 8. Final Isi Pwp 8 8. Bill G Force Complex 8
All these intros except Omniscent (place 5) are 64k-intros.
As you see, most votes concentrated on the first four places. From the sixth place on, many intros follow that have less than 10 points.
The Black Lotus appears in the first three places twice: Their hit "Jizz" has got the 3rd place, and its sequel "Stash" has got the first with a huge difference to the second place (though a tiny difference to the third place), Statix' epos "Paper". According to rumours, the sequel to Stash, "Jizz3", will be released at The Party 1998.
Then Acme's "Clone meets Clone", winner of Takeover '98, comes, having only a little more points than the half of Jizz. The inofficial sequel, "Kill the Clone" by Fudge, winner of Summer Encounter '98, hasn't made it to the top 10 yet, though: It got 7 points, i.e the 11th place.
The most popular 4k intro, Sanction's revolutionary clone of the first level of Descent, "Omniscent", follows as place 5 with only 10 points.
The second most popular 4k intro, by the way, is "Mesha" by Picard of Rhyme, which won Assembly '98. However, it has got only 7 points, i.e place 11. Too bad. Anyway, check out this really awesome 4k intro, which is, according to Nix of The Black Lotus, even better than the winning 64k intro at Assembly '98! Also read the interview with Picard in this Hugi issue.
Places 6-10 are already intros that got less than 10 points. We have Quad's "Theta", two intros by Complex ("Cyboman 2" and "Bill G Force"), Pulse's "Sink" and Pwp's "Final Isi". For "Final Isi", by the way, only two brothers have voted. So you see that after place 5, nothing can be considered representative anymore in this intro section.
Let's advance to more interesting charts sections!
MOST POPULAR DISKMAGS # diskmag language pts ---------------------------------------------------------- 1. Hugi English/German 141 2. Imphobia English 112 3. Cream German 36 4. Shine English 33 5. Pain English 28 6. Fleur English 23 7. Scenial English 19 7. Measure Polish/English 19 9. Insight English/Dutch 18 X. Daskmig English 15
Yes, that is the most interesting charts section for me. And, as you see, Hugi itself has won, 30 points ahead of Imphobia. Hugi has already been on the first place in the charts of all earlier issues, when we got only 12-20 votesheets per issue. So you see, if it's allowed to vote for the diskmag that collects the charts, and it's a good diskmag, this diskmag will always win. As Imphobia has also always been the number 1 in the diskmag charts in Imphobia, this isn't tragical. :)
Having only the third of the points of Imphobia, the German-language diskmag Cream follows. This comes from the fact that many voters come from Germany.
Afterwards, we have the supposed-to-be-a-chartsmag-but-rather-looking-like-a- tiny-normal-diskmag Shine with only five points ahead of the Swiss "lamer intrigues monthly" magazine, Pain, which itself is five points ahead of the promising Hungarian-Polish English-language magazine Fleur.
Then we have a tie: The jokes-mag Scenial, which got famous by its latest, fourth issue, released a year ago, making fool of everybody in the scene, has the same amount of points as the great Polish charts- and diskmag Measure, which is also quite well-known among foreign swappers. Among the 1 MByte of articles in Measure #5, though, only 100 KByte are in English.
Measure and Scenial have only one point more than Insight, the famous Dutch magazine. When will Insight #3 finally be released, by the way? Let's hope that the delay between Insight #2 and #3 won't be two years like between Insight #1 and #2. In fact, already more than half a year has passed since Insight #2.
Finally, Daskmig follows with 15 points. Daskmig, once considered as the defeater of Imphobia, brought out five not-so-good issues till a new staff took over it and created one of the best diskmags at that time. However, the mag was given up too soon, namely after issue eight, and therefore Daskmig is only famous in Norway now: The Norwegians' scene IRC channel is even called #daskmig. Let's hope that Dominei's plan to revive Daskmig ("Daskmig 2000") will work out.
There is one difference between the diskmag charts in Hugi and the demoscene publication charts in Hornet: Whereas at Hornet also DemoNews and TraxWeekly are in the top 10, these two newsletters, which aren't released any more, got no points in Hugi. The reason is probably that the people are of the opinion that ASCII-only newsletters are no diskmags (like I wrote in the mags.faq). If I had explicity written "top pc diskmags/newsletters", this charts section might look slightly differently.
Interestingly, the great diskmag Autark by N-Factor was only voted for by two people and got 3 points - one of the very last places. A possible explanation is that Autark had only one issue, released back in 1996 at about the same time as Imphobia #12, and Autark #2 was never finished. So, if you want your diskmag to get into the charts, you'll have to release more than one good issue.
Also the rather good diskmag Armor of Gods by UniVerse and T-Rex (check out the review in this Hugi issue) got only 6 points, which would be the 16th place. This shows that Armor is still unknown.
MOST POPULAR GROUPS # group pts ---------------------------------------------------------- 1. Pulse 124 2. The Black Lotus 80 3. Orange 40 4. Doomsday 35 5. Trauma (including Dubius) 21 6. Future Crew 20 7. Matrix 18 7. Byterapers 18 9. Quad 14 X. Bomb 17
And the winner is... Pulse! This huge, hyperactive crew, combining some of the most talented sceners from Poland, France, and other countries, has got more votes than place 2 and 3 together. Go ahead this way, Pulse!
Then follows The Black Lotus, another huge group, the masters of 64k intros. Orange with their creative and unusual style is place 3. Furthermore, we have Doomsday, Trauma (including the votes for its predecessor Dubius) that is obviously more popular than its winning demo of Assembly '98, Gateways, then of course Future Crew, Matrix, Byterapers, the great newcomer group Quad and the well-known French group Bomb.
VOTERS LIST
Aborygen/Dragon............................................Poland acryl/scoopex,acme,abyss...................................Germany Adok/Hugi..................................................Austria ArraKiS/k!Prod^DefCoNMag...................................France Asman/Proxium..............................................Russia Atom/Platoon...............................................Poland BAM/eXtensive..............................................Germany Bassie/De Brasserie/iMAGE!.................................The Netherlands beryl/deranged.............................................Germany Black/Twilight.............................................Slovenia Black Shadow^NoLogic.......................................Germany Bushy......................................................Australia C-StORm^Obnoxious..........................................Germany cockroach/wire maniacs.....................................Switzerland Chemik.....................................................Poland Civax / Moon hunters.......................................Israel coc^numb^obn...............................................Germany cochrane / nogroup.........................................Germany cremax/nothing.............................................Portugal cro/funny.makers.crew......................................Poland dAS/memyself&i.............................................Canada Dave / PhyMosys............................................Spain dee kay/grinders^alba^sc...................................Poland dentoe /sdi................................................Germany dfj/dinasty................................................Hungary disco......................................................Switzerland Diskhawk...................................................Germany distance/tpolm/monotonik/orange............................Finland dReAmDaNcEr^nWo wolfpack/role..............................Germany e2-e4 / OBN................................................Germany e605/sdi...................................................Germany exocet/just for fun........................................France fiszi/grinders.............................................Poland FoG/OBX....................................................Germany fontex.....................................................Germany franky^riot................................................Austria fthr/tpolm.................................................Finland gandalf/PULSE..............................................France garfield/ipc^core^lo2+7....................................Poland Goblin.xtatic..............................................Australia gfy/replay&shine...........................................Sweden GREco / K2, Oblivion.......................................Slovenia Greenpix7/UniVerse.........................................Russia griesse....................................................Austria gutek/blur^lo.2+7!.........................................Poland hate.core^prism!^SCREAM!...................................Poland hC / The Imago Project.....................................Brazil Iustus/Dazed Productions...................................Finland Jestyr.....................................................Australia jude miguel/jff............................................France linqs......................................................Germany Maharaja...................................................Austria Makke / Comic Pirates......................................Sweden mcbyte.....................................................Germany melcom/Nebula,Hoax Arts,Crystal............................Germany Mercator / OoZE Labs.......................................Austria MinMax/Septic Productions..................................Slovenia misha/tatanka/defect/nothing...............................Poland MM iD6/October Labs........................................Germany moses of pyorrhoea (short pyo).............................Germany Mr.Dsteuz/Proxium..........................................Russia Mr.SEQ.....................................................Germany nooze......................................................Germany nucleon^pyorrhoea..........................................Germany ollie(olli3)...............................................Slovakia Picard/Rhyme...............................................Hungary Prof.X.....................................................Germany Programmer/UniVerse........................................Russia Psychic Symphony...........................................Portugal Quartz / Officium..........................................Italy Street Raider // DDT Ent...................................Russia RAM / Zero OR One Productions..............................Germany rappid/appendix/suspend....................................Poland Red XIII...................................................Germany remdy......................................................France Sagacity/Quad..............................................The Netherlands salice.....................................................Germany Sengir.....................................................Germany shock[xtatic^ramjam^dimension].............................Australia SilentBreed / Move.........................................Belgium SIMON KING/PROCREATION^FUSE^MYSTICBYTES^THELO0P^DOMINIO....Poland Small brain / Ivory........................................Israel snifFA^sukKAZ..............................................Germany snukey.....................................................Germany Steffo / Cryonics..........................................Sweden Sweeper / eXCiTe^Vantage^Trip..............................Switzerland szum/cryogen...............................................Poland TemuZ/Serious Men^Dazed....................................Finland [TMB Inc.].................................................Germany tommy of CRyogeN...........................................Poland trashey/quasars............................................Israel Twelve/Rbi.................................................The Netherlands The Update / CoPro.........................................Germany Variat/AD^Shz..............................................Poland Virago/Level-D.............................................The Netherlands Wayfinder/303dim/KFMF......................................Germany whizzter/woorlic...........................................Sweden Wolle/deranged.............................................Germany xcene/dance................................................Norway Zack of Endzeit & Spaceballs...............................Norway Zippy/The Utopians, Utopia.................................Norway
THANK YOU FOR VOTING!
WE LOVE YOU ALL!
Last but not least I want to apologize for this charts section probably being the last charts section in Hugi for a while. We are of the opinion that it's better to have one big, central charts place than dozends of charts run by different diskmags.
Therefore, we encourage you to vote for the Hornet Charts, accessable under http://www.hornet.org/ha/pages/hc/.
We are also planning to start a new chartsmag together with [TEN] (The E-Mag Network) and another well-known diskmag. Nothing more will be revealed yet because nothing is fixed and nothing is done yet. As soon as something has happened, you will hear from us!
For easily submitting news, adverts, messages, comments, and articles, a so-called "supportsheet" is attached to this Hugi issue. Please regard this as the sequel to the Hugi votesheet, fill it in, and send it to me. Thanks in advance!
- adok^hugi
HUGI - I want to GIVE this mag a HUG!