This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Tobias Luetke. Original Post: Spore and the Demo Scene Feed Title: too-biased Feed URL: http://blog.leetsoft.com/xml/rss/ Feed Description: Read the announcement: CD Baby rewrite in Postgres and Ruby, Baby!CD Baby is going rails. This is huge! If you don’t know CD Baby, its a distribution site with over 80.000 musicians under contract and its one of the biggest digital distributors of audio to Apple iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, etc.  Read all about it here. What is even more exciting about it is that I’m on board for the rewrite and I had chance to talk to Derek on the phone directly for a consulting session which might have played its little part in the decision to go with rails. Come monday I’ll work together with him and other rails contributor Jeremy Kemper to help crunch those 90k lines of PHP in beautifully compact code for which Rails and Ruby are known. Here is a quote from Derek’s announcement on his weblog: Like a lost soul walkin’ the earth, lookin’ for spirituality, that stumbles upon the right church with the right people at the right time, I’ve found my niche with Ruby. Its little itty-bitty community attracts some brilliant “think different” types with a love for beautiful code that do this for love, not money. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Tobias Luetke Latest Posts From too-biased

Mindboggeling.

I just watched Will Wright presentation on his new game Spore. It uses procedural calculations to create content from parameters, a technology which was previously mainly employed by the demo scene (mostly an european thing). Using procedural algorithms its not unusual to see some demo’s calculating gigabyte worth of assets from files smaller then a empty word document.

I have very fond memories of the golden ages of the demo scene when me and my friends where driving all over europe to attend these fantastic gatherings and see what other programmers have been up to. Remarkable times and its fantastic to see that one of the smartest minds of the gaming industry finally dreamed up a use for this art form.

Watch the video here.

If you are interested in the demo scene in general I recommend watching the farbrausch 64kb demos. My favorite is das produkkt from 2000.