> This is a raytracing engine contained in a single Mysql SELECT statement. In the beginning of the code there are a few parameters that can be modified. The scene can be specified using the @triangles and @squares parameters, but everything is explained in the comments. The whole query returns a bitmap file which can be written to the filesystem using the "INTO DUMPFILE" syntax at the end of the query, if mysql has filesystem write permissions.
> The raytracer supports shadows and reflections, which makes it, to my knowledge, the most advanced MySQL raytracer on the market right now.
Now this is art! I think us geeks have finally hit upon the formula the high brow art people are used to. Now we just need to start a physical market so that:
the problem with "demoscene art" is that the final product is often only impressive if you know how it was done. really you want to display it in a way that shows off the mechanism. i guess quines don't have this problem.
A nice demoscene example is "Piledriver", which contains all of the last 2 decades worth of demoscene tropes, no exceptions. Hexagonal cones, walking robots, purple explosions, drum'n'bass with rap vocals, television walls with earlier scenes, it's all there. And it's extremely well executed, which hides that it's a parody. So I guess it only works as a work of art if you saw the demos it mocks.
A lot of art derives value from craft, but when craft is systematized, it becomes product design and targeted towards consumers instead. Demoscene folks have often crossed over to the industrial side of computer graphics and gaming.
A good proportion of the art-as-art world either finds new and original ways to push craft, or focuses on medium facilitating message(which in turn falls neatly into the product-marketing framework).
I think you could physically implement demos (especially very very small ones) in such a way as to demonstrate just how compact their implementation is. E.g. use ancient computer hardware, load from 5.25" floppy when you press a button to start it, etc.
The best example (counter-example?) of this that I can think of is one of the realtime raytracing demos that came out circa 2000 when it was all the rage. I can't remember the name but basically after doing well in a compo the authors revealed that it was just a rasterizer running at low rez with some hacked reflections, which everyone had believed was super impressive because they thought it was raytracing and the deliberately low resolution made it look the part.
I'm thinking the democoders could create scarcity. I'm imagining e.g. Future Crew making a Third reality. Or Triton making Crystal Dream III. Release at like a 300p video for the world and like AM audio mono sound quality and sell the binary to the highest bidder. Or perhaps smarter, release it at 1:1 quality for the first minute, but only for the first minute.
;)
Edit: of course this would be a horrible future. Also, there's no way these now old guys could recreate the magic they experienced together in the early 90s.
You can create scarcity by marrying the software with a physical object.
William Gibsons poem Agrippa [1] is easily accessible, though it was distributed as part of a program that'd overwrite the floppy it was distributed on.
But it was sold in various ridiculously expensive collectors editions.
While the point of Agrippa is ostensibly the poem, the mechanism of delivery was very important to the appeal of it as well as the media attention (of course the fact that Gibson was well known by then was important), and you could imagine something similar for a demo. Add a hardware element, and packaging that forms part of the whole.
Anybody in North America who's interested in this kind of technical magic should consider attending one of the few demoscene parties (meetings/competitions) in the U.S. such as Demosplash [1]
This is actually a pretty neat mechanism that builds a string (including BMP magic number and header) and shoves it into a dump file, doing a ray trace per byte. I wish there was a commented/not collapsed version of it to better enjoy reading. Right now it's just a blob.
"Released under the do whatever the fuck you want license. If you use it for commercial purposes, like rendering your Hollywood studio's new big animated A-Movie, please let me know at holtsetio@gmail.com.
" -- https://demozoo.org/productions/268459/info/2923/
Now that PostGIS outputs pngs directly, we can imagine future databases handling 3d assets (select * from objects where can_fit_in(x);) and even rendering them.
And here's another production which is an insane tech-feat:
https://demozoo.org/productions/268576/
Moving cubes with pathtracing, lighting and ambient sound in 64 bytes
This is nice.
So this is one SELECT statement in which the triangles and/or spheres are defined, and the raytracing-engine is written.
Then it calculates the Pixels and dumps them into a .bmp-file.
Calling it "the most advanced [...] on the market" is probably tongue in cheek. Notice that this is being given away free and there is no mention of price anywhere.
(or click [nfo] in the right top)