How do people find out about the demo scene these days?

[Canopy]

i'm guessing a lot of people (like myself) who grew up with amigas and such like know via cracktros and trainers, and 'demo disks'  there's the odd small gui serial/cracktro for software but other than that.. 

how do 'kids' these days find out?

[nuclear]

I don't know if the term "these days" applies to 14 years ago when I discovered the demoscene, but since it's different than the way you describe I'll tell you how I did it.

It was when I started experimenting with graphics programming for the first time, so I was scouring the internet for tutorials and articles about all kinds of things like rasterization algorithms, clipping, camera transformations, curve interpolation etc. And it was then that I stumpled upon the webpage of Submissive/Cubic, which had tutorials on graphics algorithms (especially I remember reading about camera transformations and bezier interpolation from his site back then). From then I went on to Cubic's web site where I found their demos.

From there I ended up on usenet. Back then a lot of demosceners where hanging on the comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos newsgroup, where I met my first contact with my local demoscene community (greek demosceners), which was optimus :)  Having people nearby helps any hobby to really take off :)

That was all a long time ago, so I'm not really answering how people do it "these days" I know... but I'm not even sure they do...

[Canopy]

14 years is a little before the date myself and coworkers say "all these kids ruined the internet" (around 2002?) 

when i started work in  the mid 90s the (software/hardware) company i work for had a compuserve and a single 28k modem, and a handcoded BBS, one of my first jobs was (to my disappointment) to set up some swanky BBS software.  to go on the internet we had to basically take remote ownership of the modem using com port sharing software and go "online" which stopped the bbs and stopped all incoming email. time online was precious.

in under 5 years the world changed, went from not having a modem at home to those "flat rate 24/7" ones to having a guy come out and fit adsl!

never did demo's though just individual things, but one of the things that went down well at my job interview was my talking about the messing around i'd done with talking to a soundblaster card by making my own dos library.

Looking at my old code a few days ago I found on a caddy (some 2d directdraw and opengl) the dates were from late 1999! thats how long ago I last touched code with any intention at home, and how long I've had ideas bouncing in my head! I think what helps is that i've now got a dedicated, uninterrupted space to code in (I converted the garage and have PC/xbox360/big tv/guitars )

I think i went for GL even back then because of GLQuake and because I had an Orchid Righteous 3D card. The Nehe stuff even goes back that far, I have comments referring to them!

I used to be all over www.hornet.org which looks like it closed '98 - there were folders and folders of source in there on every subject. I've got a copy on my caddy, but it looks like it can found here  too ftp://ftp.scene.org/mirrors/hornet/code/

I do wish I had an earlier start at coding, I always wanted to but didn't have any support. I didn't meet people like that until college which changed my path.

I *think* I met two guys who were c64 sceners when I was really young like 10-12 years old. (one only lived 2 doors down, i believe he was good at maths and was later he was my judo instructor for beginner classes, but i progressed beyond that class eventually).

I also knew someone else who had amiga scene connects and would meet to swap (mostly game) disks in motorway services, that would have been caround 1993.

[hellfire]

I'm afraid what comes closest to a cracktro nowadays are keygens.
Unfortunately that makes it much harder to draw a connection to the demoscene.
That's why you can find dozens of chiptunes on youtube which are called "keygen music"...

[Canopy]

"keygen music" wow, never heard that one before.

so i guess "keygen graphics" would the cracktro equivalent..

*googles*

holy cow, it has been used before too...

it was something shockwave said in the udg challenge voting post that made me about new entries that made me realise that there obviously isnt the same culture around disk swapping that there used to be which is how my generation found out, and made me wonder how kids find out about the demo scene.

i guess the other thing is currently the platforms kids might aspire to program for, like ipads and iphones are closed unless you jailbreak, and android tabs have quite a complicated route to get going for newbs. i know the raspberry pi is meant to change that, and there are swathes of android/linux tablets and consoles coming (like ouya and . apart from microsofts offerings (also closed platform) they're all based upon "opengl es" and will often require a pc to build on before copying it over. high cost of entry. but in a year or two i think there will be a lot more "openness" with these ES based SoC platforms which will become more popular for demo's.  the ouya platform in particular looks a pretty strong candidate as its officially "rootable" and has some big name titles supposedly coming. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya )

i guess my point is, whilst i respect people that do "wild" stuff these days on old platforms like the c64/amiga/speccy, the new blood is mostly going to come from the "current" platforms these kids have anyways and its harder than ever to just tinker.

[Optimus]

In the past it was quite harder to even have access if you knew about it. You either needed to have access to some BBS or have friends in your hometown who are deep into demomaking. The first one was expensive and I was a small child to even think about trying, the second would be a bit easier if I was living in a north european country. While I have heard much later of BBSes in Greece and a small starting demoscene from 1992, some of the old greek sceners or friends that learned the demoscene early, where either living in Germany or Sweden for example or having penpal geek friends from western or northern countries. Personally, while I read few things about demos in a greek magazine in 1992 (I was curious but didn't know who to contact or didn't dare) there wasn't much exposure and I only got into later during 1998 when I went in the university and had my first year in the internet and searched about it (but maybe I searched first for Quickbasic stuff and I slipped from some mention there).

Nowadays everyone is on the internet, it's easier to get into, but the question remains from which sources? Demoscene is just a niche creative community, there are other ones, moding for games, making videos, web programming (and there could be processing or WebGL and other interactive stuff, reminiscent of demoscene but not), machinima (game moding again but like demos, but not demoscene) and then there is facebook, WOW and other stuff. They say demoscene is overshadowed by several other geek hobbies and online activities one could preferably do today. But I think it's not hard to spot the demoscene there, sometimes when things like Kkrieger or Elevated reach well known sites then it's some kind of outreach, many people already have heard of demos but are not interested enough, and from those who didn't know, they might find something they would love to be involved while the majority might still not be interested and that's ok. Others attempt to present demos in art exhibitions today. I know the majority won't be interested but there might be a minority who would find this the thing they would love to do. So, I guess internet, outreach attempts, even a local LAN party with some demoscene compos would do.

p.s. Oh yes! Keygen music is the new joke just like Demoscenes.

[Shockwave]

Back in the 80's and 90's it was nearly always the Crack intros which sparked the interest in demo programming (well it was for me at least).  Nowadays who knows?  Maybe it's people like yourself, Canopy who remember the old cracktros and the nostalgia is enough to spark a search on YouTube or the internet and perhaps some people find their way into the scene that way...  Or maybe not...

20-30 years ago the intros often looked better than the games that they were attached to, these days it's never the case, and I'd go as far as saying that nearly all modern demos offer little or no improvement compared to today's in game visuals and music... Be honest, how many demos do you know that offer better visuals than can be produced with the Unreal 4 Engine for instance?

Quite a few of the old guys from the C64 and Amiga days are still around, most of the people I know are tired of their intros having the shit kicked out of them by today's effect junkies when they're posted on places like Pouet and in it's understandable too, a lot of the top programmers are employed in the games industry so it's not in their interests to promote anything to do with piracy, it would be career suicide for them.

If we did a poll of ages of people here who actively code effects, I wouldn't mind betting that nearly all of us are over 30 years old.

I think that people are mostly here because they saw some effect in a game and wanted to learn to program it, or they are middle aged and nostalgic, or they've never really left since they started..

There's definitely no going back to the old days, and believe me, there is no way today's warez group leaders would risk having an incompatible intro embedded in their release in the same manner as a cracktro on a game disk in the old days for fear that the release would get propered by another group - So the only underground stuff that seems to prosper these days are the ASCII's and Keygens which are very basic.

Also most of today's PC crackers don't know how to code...

[combatking0]

I discovered the scene through the Yabasic demo program on the PS2 about 10 years ago.

While the program itself held no references to the scene, a reply to an email I'd sent to Sony asking for further information regarding PS2 Yabasic referred me to the Yabasic forum.

When the Yabasic forum was hosted on Yuku, everyone left. Most of the members came here, but there was a heavy scene presence on the old forum which blended quite seamlessly with the atmosphere over here.

That said, I'm not sure how expansive the scene is, but I reckon there's a world-wide following. I'm not sure how the scene is discovered by newcomers these days, but I'm recommending it to the fledgling programmers I work with on a daily basis.

[Hotshot]

First Demo I have discover was from my old mates who had ATARI STE showing Yellow Blobs on the screen called Aciddddds which was back in 1990

I think I have Discover Demoscene in 1992 when I bought PD Demo called JESUS on E(2 Disks) on Amiga and that was Amazing at the time....

[jace_stknights]

Shockwave tolds everything...

I began codeing just because of the intros before the game. I wanted to make one too. If I'm still here, it just because I still want to try some effect, and I feel nostalgic.

But scene will definitly not be as good as in the 80 & 90's... It was like the Far West conquest!

[beacon44]

I try to keep an eye on pouet.net, myself. I can't say I've participated in the scene, but I wrote some little demo effects in x86 asm when I was younger. Mode 13h, fire effects, particles, rotozooming, that sort of thing.

[ttemper]

These days... I used google and searched around and finally ended up here at DBF. Other than that I browsed csdb, pouet, asciiarena and a couple of others that I can't remember (I'm sure to have them bookmarked).

I know of demo sceners still around (from c64/amiga days... http://csdb.dk/) whom idle/chat on IRCnet from around the place. I use to idle in there... but then didn't. I did get ignored a lot.

DBF is certainly a great way back into the demo scene, I for one have appreciated everyone's help and input into helping me learn/relearn to demo code. DBF FTW!