The past couple of months we see more and more demos that have great 3D code, but almost nothing else.
Actually one of the first demos to have this particular characteristic was Holistic by Cascada which scored high on Assembly'94, a great demo with almost nothing but 3D ... but the best 3D ever shown according to some people. Also at The Party 1994 we saw some groups come up with nothing but 3D. The winning intro Cyboman ][ by Complex was a complete vector intro with a touch of design but almost no other effects. It is clear that Jmagic has a great 3D engine but is democoding only 3D. Is the scene growing to a group of high qalified math wizards or is there still place left for the artists among us ??

So far nothing seems to have changed... Dope won The Gathering, and Expression / Abstract Concepts and Big Deal / Acme scored the top two places on X'95. People seem to like to invent as much new shading techniques as possible. Only a year ago we had Flat Shading, Gouraud Shading and then something people liked to call Phong Shading. Now we have Guru Shading, Metal Shading (really ??), Nix Shading and lot's of other... probably Larusse shading will be one of the next variations we're about to see. People are trying to get as much objects as possible real time on screen. Boasting that your object has over 12000 polys ... (on a P-90) and other guys only have 6000 (on a DX33) forgetting to tell you don't display em all at once. It seems like some people are more interrested in how big the object you display is than which object you display. Others are interrested in how fast you can display that dumb and boring already 200 times shown face or duck, just to tell hey... you did it one frame faster than the other guys, that's cool !

Not only the shading changed also some other effects showed up. Like Environment mapping combined with all possible kinds of shading. Or bumpmapping, some people consider bumpmapping simply as a different form of environmentmapping othres really map another object on the object.

But, what will happen if a company starts selling a chip that does BSPTrees or ZBuffering as a hardware feature ?? Will we allow the use of that chip in demos ? We should start to think if we shouldn't stop upgrading our machines for now. Maybe wait a couple of years. That's the good things about the C64 and Amiga guys. Their machines have stopped to evolute. The only thing one can do is code and make faster routines. Not upgrade his machine and make his lousy old routines go faster.

Luckily Abduction showed that scene wants also some other things but 3D. Who Else Can Upgrade a Robot showed us that it was possible to make a good intro without any 3D routine in it. And orange continued this way with X14 and some other stuff..

At Assembly some groups showed us it could also be different.. Start and Juice make a good combination of both. But then Capacalla did the oposite thing of what we are used from them. Well.. at least there also is Orange... although the orange style is getting kind of boring after all those productions :(

We'll see what the future brings us.. Let's hope it's better ;-)

Sleeping Dog / The Natives