Demopati in Russia: Summer 2010

This thematic blog is not very popular with Habr's readers. Perhaps the time of art has passed and new values ​​have come: startups, monetization and business angels. However, once a year you can (take the bloodworms and go fishing) remember where we are from!

There are plenty of definitions of the demoscene as a cultural phenomenon. From Russian-language materials to choose from Wikipedia , Lurkmore and the only thematic Russian resource demoscene.ru . In English, everything is much richer. Here is one of the Finnish demoscenters wrote a thesis on the topic “Computer Demos — What Makes Them Tick?” (.Pdf, 134 pages, 17 MB). Read not read again ...

It would seem that all this is happening somewhere very far away . Bearded geeks and very young schoolchildren are going to demoparty in small and large European cities . They demonstrate each other the heights of programming on pure asm , the mastery of shaders 3.0 and the taming of home-made ARM-based microcomputers.
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And what do you say, if the demoscene has already come to YOUR CITY ?!

ArtField 2010

June 19, 2010 Voronezh, (Lizyukova str.) Pr. Revolution, 22

• Free admission
• Website: http://zxparty.nedopc.com/
• VKontakte group: http://vk.com/club15034427
• Rules for the conduct and acceptance of works: works@zxparty.ru
• Some works of past years: graphics

The event is traditional, held since 2005, the main subject for competitive works: retrocomputers + tracker music. This year is promised live video broadcasting and on-line voting (June 19 from 11:00 to 18:00, demonstration of competitive works at 15:30).

DiHalt 2010

July 10-11, 2010, Nizhny Novgorod, outdoor openair

• Admission: 300 rubles. Girls do not pay
• Website: http://dihalt.org.ru
• Rules and acceptance of work: dihalt10@flatrate.ru
• Some works of the past years: graphics , demo

This party is even more traditional and counts its history since 1999. The main spirit of this event: true ZX Spectrum and Amiga. Traditionally accepted work in competitions in the category PC and flash. The preliminary announcement of DiHalt 2010 was already on Habré last month.

Chaos Constructions'10

August 28-29, 2010, St. Petersburg

• Admission: traditionally paid
• Website: in the stage of filling
• Twitter: @chaos_construct
• VKontakte group: http://vk.com/club225689
• Rules of conducting: unlikely to change much
• Some works of the past years: graphics , demo

Chaos constructions are considered to be the largest event in Russia. Since far 1999 this is the 13th festival. Positioning on modern platforms (PC, MAC, flash), tracker music and realtime hackquest. At past festivals, there was an exhibition of retro computers and game consoles that will be this year not yet fully defined. In any case, from past experience, I advise you to pay close attention to this event.

Why all this?

The main problem of the global demoscene is the lack of new blood. The guy in the photo on the right is one of the participants of CC'09 realtime coding compo. Without knowing anything about the Z80 assembler, he was able to deal with the SDK in 1 evening (if such a concept is generally applicable to a debugger and assembler on a 5'25 disk) and, along with venerable participants, “navigate” the procedure for the contest task. I have never seen such interest in programming and mastering the architecture of "new" platforms like his. But there are thousands of such hidden nuggets in Russia!

I do not encourage you to write code for computers made 30 years ago! Try to take into your own hands the existing hardware and go a little deeper than ready-made frameworks, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, etc. Try to get into the very essence of programming and reach the heights of enlightenment in the hardware. And if you succeed, you will experience the deepest motivation in your life. Motivation to learn about the world through code (graphics or music).

We will be glad to see you on our domestic demopati. Russia is waiting for your releases!

Special section for materialists

Since it is unlikely that we will be able to reverse the trend without material incentives, my colleague on the zno project decided to correct the situation a little. For each of the above demopati we provide a valuable prize . This is the Dingoo A320 gaming console, which, no less than the demoscene, is now in need of an influx of fresh blood from the developers. The review of this device on Habré is here , and for deep seeding I advise a topic about the development of Dingoo over the past year.

For each party, only one console will be provided, and it will be received by the one whose work will make the most impression on us (not critical in which category and category). Dare!

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