Talk:Second Reality

Images

Should the images on this page have some sort of copyright information? --plicease 17:56, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Yes. All of these images are fair use screenshots from the Second Reality demo and should be tagged as such. —RaD Man (talk) 19:14, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Actually not all of them are fair use. Some of them are PD since they're only images of simple geometric elements. After a bot was running yesterday, I've fixed that. --32X 05:41, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

I've tagged them. But are all these images needed? – Quadell ^{(talk) (sleuth)} 15:04, Feb 15, 2006 (UTC)

They may seem excessive, but I believe that it really helps to understand the demo -- at least to an outsider. To describe it otherwise would require a lot of vocabulary that is only common amongst programmers and demosceners. And this demo in particular is a great resource in understanding demos and the demoscene. My vote would be to keep them. -/Coplan 22:31, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

No problem anymore, as all content is under public domain now. Shaddim (talk) 09:06, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Hang up?

"After a while this scene fades and several small spheres begin falling down and bouncing on the ground surface in various fashions making patterns. Due to a bug in the code, the demo often hangs up at this part."

I'm certainly not familiar with this, and have been running this demo on various kinds of hardware and within emulators for a number of years. Has anyone else heard of this? I'm tempted to change it to 'occasionally' instead of often as it stands. Can someone back this up? --Overand 21:54, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

My personal experience: on emulators and computers over 486, the bug appears around 75% of the time, and i have to quit fast to avoid the lockup. running with "second.exe 2" seems to help sometimes. // Gargaj 07:40, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Wasn't there a 2nd_fix.exe that took care of this? Or does it occur after using that? --Vossanova 13:40, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the sprite fountain is where the crash sometimes occurred. I also recall a 2nd_fix.exe but I don't remember for certain if that was to address this particular crash. Pimlottc 16:26, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Inappropriate writing style

This isn't written like an encyclopedia article at all. It sounds more like your buddy from next door talking you through the demo. "This part is quite hard to explain..." I'm not even convinced this needs an article separate from Future Crew, as ground-breaking as the demo was. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.113.133.7 (talk • contribs) 07:10, 9 June 2006

I concur that much of that section needs to be cleaned up or rewritten, and it may be a bit too long broken down by part with all the screenshots. But, I think that Second Reality should still have its own article. --Vossanova ^o< 13:52, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

Unreal ][ - the second reality

I saw next to nothing about Unreal, not even the alternative name. Please write some lines about that, maybe before the spoiler. --32X 20:41, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Too many pictures

A demo needs not to be analyzed this thorougly. Second Reality is no different from other demos, this kind of effect analysis could be part some demoscene article. 195.148.99.252 09:23, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

This was addressed to some extent in 2006 (see further up this Talk page). However, my impression is that WP's attitudes towards limitations on fair-use images have tightened significantly since then, and that over using 20 images in this way is a clear breach of current policy. In particular, WP policy requires (not just suggests as a guideline would) minimal use of fair-use images. Simply saying "it helps people to understand the topic better than a single image could" is clearly not good enough, since showing a screenshot from every scene of a TV programme would help people understand that better than just showing one screenshot.

All that being so, I think the article needs to be rewritten so that it is not dependent on so many screenshots. (And, again, saying "but that would require technical terms" is not good enough. Use them, and either explain or wikilink to explanatory articles if necessary.) I do not have the necessary expertise to write an article about this demo, and since simply removing the images without that rewrite would leave a mess I won't do it. However, since the images are almost certainly in breach of policy, someone else may well delete them soon, and so the aforementioned rewrite needs to be done. Loganberry (Talk) 17:04, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

No problem anymore, as all content is under public domain now. Shaddim (talk) 09:06, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Description of the introduction in the demo

"The image then flattens and falls horizontally to become a 3D, polygonal checkerboard."

Is it really a polygonal checkerboard? To me it has always looked like a bitmap.

Kristensson (talk) 15:57, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

The demo runs best on an Intel 80486 computer - But What Speed?

The 486 is available in multiple speeds from 100 MHZ downto 20. What's the minimum speed needed? ---- Theaveng (talk) 16:47, 4 July 2010 (UTC) The machine used to run all demos in the competition was 486DX 33Mhz, GUS, 4MB memory and a 1MB VGA adapter (I'm not sure if it was local bus or not, I don't think many people cared about this until they tried to run The 7th Guest) so this should be what all groups were using as their performance maximum. I believe the same standard was used for Panic by FC but rules for The Party were likely different. The language used in this wiki is much too vague, it seems to suggest that a 486 is either viable or easily available to anyone but collectors or through emulation.

BS in 'Demo description'?

Added s to "Contrary to what the text says, this image was not drawn by the group members" and " The scene was rendered using Future Crew's homemade raytracing software.". The source code has a lot of POV files suggesting they used Persistence of Vision, not their own raytracer.

It's a wiki, please update the errornous parts with references. thanks :) Shaddim (talk) 08:52, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Raytracing in Second Reality

The text refers to Future Crew having their own raytracing engine which was used for parts of Second Reality, did they ever claim this to be the case? I know Triton used their own, I'm sure along with many other groups too but this doesn't sound right in the case of Second Reality and is definitely incorrect in the context of the water/sword scene. Perhaps FC did have their own internal engine but the source code uploaded by Trug himself to github includes files with the extension .pov which are for POV-Ray. POV-Ray is still available and with minor compatability settings will render the background image for this scene, only the sword bitmap and the "reflections" are drawn in real-time. I don't believe any major changes were made to the source before it was uploaded, certainly not porting their own raytracing engine scenes to one that remains relatively obscure outside of the demo/PC graphics scene. Limited support is included with Blender but seemingly only as a curio from the past and an easy way to demonstrate generating scenes from script, it isn't presented as an alternative to Cycles/Octane etc. It's possible their own raytracing engine supported POV-Ray's scene definition syntax but it seems highly unlikely that they would write a custom raytracing engine then do everything to disguise it as POV-Ray. FC were accused of "cheating" by various members of other groups due to some members' involvement in the organisation and running of Assembly (figuratively and literally as the machine connected to the projector playiung the PC demo comp submissions belonged to them), claiming authorship of POV-Ray would have been a bizarre assertation and easily disprovable. I don't believe the version of Autodesk 3D Studio (now 3DS Max) they used at the time supported "proper" raytracing either, Gore of FC listed Deluxe Paint and 3D Studio 2.0 as the main software they used during Second Reality and from memory 3D Studio 2.0 was limited to phong shading as it's highest quality output, raytraced shadows may have been available in that version or a minor before 3.0 but rendering an entire scene using raytracing wasn't an option. 3D Studio 3.0 may have supported it at the time of the demo's release but it was incredibly expensive software so upgrading was either for enterprise users or the very rich. The file format of some animations also line up with FC using 3D Studio, the supernova effect from the introduction was a pre-built effect in either 3D Studio or Autodesk Animator (my memory fails me but more likely 3DS, I never used Deluxe Paint and that effect is instantly recognisable), the animation file in the source code appears to be the unmodified file output from 3D Studio of a series of bitmaps which in Second Reality are then combined with the scrolling routine and the group's original artwork to create the introduction sequence leading to the main title image. I haven't had a chance to look properly at the bolt and logo image but I suspect it is hand drawn using a reference image and then FC logo added on top rather than rendered using any form of raytracing, there was a lot of disagreement about how reference artwork could be used but FC were on the side of it being fine as long as it was for good reason and the work was transformative rather than a duplication (have a look at the arguments about the Bear advert for booze if you're interested, I think it's safe enough to assume a member of FC doesn't need to rip off someone else's work)

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