The demoscene is comprised of programmers, artists, and musicians who produce audio/visual presentations that are computed in real time on a computer, often with limited hardware capabilities or extreme constraints on program sizes.
The demoscene tag is for questions related to techniques used to produce real-time audio and video effects under constraints required by demoscene conventions, like extremely small executable sizes or running on older hardware.
- Demos are audio/visual productions computed in real time using an executable that is bounded to a maximum size, typically 64 KB.
- Intros are similar productions that are even more severely size constrained, typically to just 4 KB.
- Effects are animations that often rely on cleverness in order to compute quickly using extremely small code and/or data.
There is significant overlap between demoscene topics and video games. The key differentiation between them is that video games are interactive while demos typically are not. Video games are typically designed and implemented to create an enjoyable experience for gamers using modern hardware. Demos are generally produced by small groups of hobbyists who are interested in exploring the limits of what can be done on older hardware or within other arbitrary limits like 64 KB caps on executable size.
