pouët.net

Electronic (+coding) achievements are categorised as wild, together with raytraced/camera/flash films etc... I think it would be cool to separate this and add a new electronic+coding category.

from a demoparty perspective, it's all wild.

it would be good to separate the 'serious' wilds (homebrew electronics, demos that don't fit in the compo for whatever reason etc) from the "my journey to the party place" and "random puking scener" videos. Having them all in the same compo is almost insulting, a bit like having a merged demo and counterstrike compo would be.

on smaller parties these videos are often composavers though..

psonice: ultimately it's video vs video.

Well, the type can still stay "wild", but with "platform" set to "rare platform that does not happen to have its own category but really is not a video so should be set appart" kind of thing :)

I agree that something like "Craft" would deserve to be in some actual platform category instead of being sorted with the rest of videos and cg stuff.

Now of course, how do you classify the video "making of" of an electronic device used as a demo platform (I'm thinking of the "how to" from Darklite). Are they "videos", or are they "super cool hand made hardware"?

Such a distinction already exists at some parties: At Breakpoint, there was "Animation / Wild" (= videos and animations) vs. "Console / Real Wild" (= demos on platforms other than PC/Amiga/C64).

gargaj: if it's running realtime on hardware but doesn't fit in the regular demo compos for whatever reason, it's not a video and doesn't deserve to be put with the videos.

If there's separate video/real wild compos it's ok, and if there's too few entries for separate compos then it's acceptable (although often these demos should be moved to the demo compo instead of with the videos!)

There's a lot of issues around what platforms are supported too. A PS2 demo would definitely be wild/console, but how about a mac demo running on a standard intel CPU + nvidia/ati gpu? I've been told before that such a demo must go into the wild compo with the videos.

what keyj said. many parties these days have either an "all other platforms" competition (like breakpoint did) or just put those demos into the democompo (instead of into the video compo). i think that that's the way to go.

then again, i'm not sure if baah is talking about pouet categories or compos. if an glöpper adds a demo on a custom Atmel platform as a "wild" then that's just his mistake. pouet already has a category for those entries, it's called "demo".

demo vs 4k is also just exe vs exe.

The electronic category is interesting to differentiate between using off-the-shelf hardware (regular consoles, but also ready-built AVR boards such as the arduino) or homebrew hardware, such as the AVR-based boards by LFT. The latter category has more panache.

Or.. implement tags.

but then you download both and you can tell them apart. in the case of e.g. craft, you can only trust good faith that the given platform DOES exist and DOES in fact perform the demo. the only TANGIBLE version most people can watch it in is the video.

or just give everything one supertype 'demoscene production', voila, taxonomy problems solved!

Gargaj: LFT publishes his schematics so one can build the demo platform. Verification is possible.

@skrebbel: i was thinking about pouët categories, i understand that demoparty organisers must sometimes merge categories (4k+64k for example).

But as psonice said, a "serious wild" category would be welcome, and would allow us to find thkis interesting stuff more easily.

Gargaj: even if (and this is worst case) we can only watch the video, do you not think it's insulting the authors work to put it in the video category? Regardless of how many people have seen it realtime, it still exists as a demo.

I mean I've seen pretty much zero PC demos realtime recently, but I wouldn't even consider saying they're the same as your average piano playing cat on youtube..

still, it's the presence of the real thing that makes even a .jpg of the mona lisa more appealing than a random photoshopped picture of a horse doing the macarena

I pretty much agree with what everyone else said. To me 'wild' as a platform makes sense (i.e. made for a hardware platform that doesn't have its own category), but having 'wild' as a prod type is a bug in Pouet's categorisation IMO: a production is either a demo or a video. Wild is a type of competition, not a type of production.

Craft *is* a demo, even if it was submitted to a competition in the form of a video and is most commonly viewed in that form.

but who will decide what is to be considered "serious" and what is "uninteresting"? the categorization you guys propose is rather subjective and will inevitably lead to lengthy discussions (read: pointless bickering). pouet admins/gloperators are already lacking time and motivation to fill the current dataset correctly (just look at how few of them give a shit about fixing stuff, i for one gave up on that completely), increasing the complexity of the database therefore makes no sense at all...

Well separating videos/animations/console demos/homebrew hardware etc. seems pretty obvious. But isn't that already in place on pouet?

If there's not a homebrew hardware category, there should be one (there's a few of these things around now and more interest in this stuff).

Also, is there a category for all the platforms that don't deserve their own category (I'm thinking things like that pokemon mini demo, it's not homebrew and there's not likely to be more that a couple of demos on it ever). There's quite a few 'one off' demos like that, and I'd say they deserve their own place to live so we can find them and they're not buried under a pile of random vomit videos.

(All of that applies to pouet only of course, what happened to the discussion of party rules? :D)

On closer inspection, it appears that searching on type = demo, platform = wild returns exactly the sort of demo-on-a-fridge productions you're looking for. Not a complete list, but that can be fixed with some appropriate re-categorisation.

Going further in that direction, I'd suggest that renaming the 'Wild' prod type to 'Video' (but keeping the 'Wild' platform unchanged) would be a good idea, as this will hopefully encourage people to tag these prods as type=demo in future (because that's what they are, dammit) to distinguish them from animations/random-puking-scener/random-nerd-running-through-a-forest videos, while not massively breaking existing entries or adding any complexity.