The Scene is not dying

Written by Sagacity/Quad

Right, I've just read through Hugi#13 and noticed that a lot of people seem to agree on the opinion that the scene is dying. HELLO? IT'S NOT! Instead of taking on this depressed attitude, why not start working on a new production instead of yakking on about how crap everything is? Sure, I was also pretty sad that Hornet went down. I'll never have the thrill of actually getting more than 3.5 stars for a production. Shame. But there's still the PC Demo Fanclub for me to be delighted at, should one of our productions finally make it there.

The main problem is that quite a few "bad" things have happened recently. Like I said, Hornet shut down. The ASM'98 releases weren't crash hot either (some were, though, don't get me wrong :)) but on the other hand, were the ASM'97 ones a lot better? Or ASM'96 releases, for that matter? No, of course not. Since I'm writing this before The Party 8, everyone's still depressed. After TP8 I think a lot of people will get interested again. Tribes, Square and Eden sure did it for me last year.

Also, pessimists seem to enjoy saying "Demos always looked much better than games. Nowadays the exact opposite is happening!". So effing what! Games tend to have much larger budgets than demos, especially now. Also, most games use 3dfx, whereas most demos do not. The reason? More freedom of effects, I guess. But I, for one, am more impressed by a stylish demo than another Quake-clone. I'm not saying that demos should not keep up with the latest technology, far from that. I just want to say that having a demo that presents a proper theme (or just plain looks nice) does not NEED the technology that is present in most games, nowadays. Furthermore, most coders simply don't have the time to do these complex tricks in an instant. It takes time to do.

And what about those OS wars? Pah. Demos run perfectly under DOS thanks to Protected Mode (Basemem? You don't need no stinking basemem!) and stuff like MIDAS and PTC ensures you don't need UniVBE anymore (whee!). And 99% of the demos run under Win95 as well. If they don't, then it's just lame code, pure and simple. There's no excuse (says the coder who just crashed his Win95 dosbox). As for the minority using Linux: Take a look at Skal's work or just install DOS on a small partition (or use your favorite DOS-emu).

So, shut up and start working. :)

/Sagacity:Quad

PS: The last few lines in the Hugi#13 Quad interview about us being the best group ever do not necessarily convey the opinions of other members. (subtle hint :))

"...and so I said to him that he shou... oh? I'm on already? But tha..."