I know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like "elevated" from 2009 [1]. I've heard Iñigo Quílez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene).<p>1= <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE</a>
NuSan (<a href="https://twitter.com/NuSan_fx" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/NuSan_fx</a>) does regular livestreams where he writes a shader from scratch in a couple of hours. They're always impressive and you can learn a lot from seeing his process. He also puts the code for his work up on Shadertoy which is really helpful.
How much functionality does a demo like this get for free in addition to its own 4KB of code? For example, do modern GPUs have rich functions like createAmazingFractalGeometry() which these demos then piece together?
These demos are some of the last arenas in software development where real skills can be displayed. Elsewhere it's mostly shuttling data from one field to another with some business logic, API glue and other cruft and to hell with the RAM footprint. Awesome stuff, thank you for posting.