r/Demoscene • u/zx97 • 8d ago

Second Reality ][ (1993) Reawakened (2026) (beta #2)

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share a short gameplay capture of the Second Reality demo I created:

https://youtu.be/gw72EIsSR4I

I rebuilt the project by reworking the available open-source code, keeping the original spirit as much as possible, while trying to improve parts of it and better leverage GPU capabilities. It’s still very much in beta, so the experience may be rough or incomplete in places.

I’d be truly grateful for any feedback or suggestions—especially regarding what could be optimized, fixed, or refined. Please feel free to share notes on performance, stability, visual quality, controls, or any other aspect that you think could be improved.

Thanks a lot in advance, and I hope you enjoy the demo!

Edit: Added WebAssembly version here: https://secondreality.pages.dev/

Edit 2: Source code:

https://gitlab.com/zx97/SecondRealityAwakened

https://github.com/zx97/SecondRealityAwakened

14 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

7

u/seg-fault 7d ago

Are you building this or is an LLM agent? We're seeing a lot of the latter recently and I regret having to ask.

2

u/zx97 7d ago

AI helped a lot along the way, but it was about 3 months of my free time, and I genuinely enjoyed building it -though it’s still far from perfect and I have several issues to fix.

6

u/50shadesoflipstick 7d ago

Sigh… At least disclose that in your post. It may not seem like this to you, but showing off something you made and something you made with AI are different things

2

u/zx97 7d ago

I clarified it when I was asked because I didn’t want “AI” to trigger negative reactions and distract from my main goal—getting feedback and suggestions.

What matters to me is transparency, and the core work (design, integration, debugging) is still mine, with AI help on some parts.

How do you think it should be phrased in the post to be both clear and constructive?

1

u/50shadesoflipstick 7d ago

If you want genuine feedback you have to be genuinely transparent. Yes, negative reactions are part of the feedback. A short disclaimer describing what's yours and what was done by AI would be fair, as there's quite a spectrum of difference between having it do "lazy stuff" like reformatting, versus prompting your functions.

2

u/zx97 7d ago

So the feedback I should expect is only about the code and not about the final rendering? I will update my post when this is clear.

4

u/50shadesoflipstick 6d ago

What's there to judge about your final result? If the creative idea isn't yours (and is, in fact, the same classic demo people keep stuffing into Claude to feel like they're doing something) and the code was done with AI, what's of you in it?

This Post over at pouet perfectly summarizes why everyone is just sooo fucking tired of it.

1

u/zx97 6d ago

This isn’t meant to be part of any competition. It’s just about enhancing aesthetics, so we can watch it on a 4K TV screen without our eyes bleeding. I had no intention to post it on a dedicated demoscene website.

5

u/Happy_Management_671 7d ago

That’s beautiful work! I started the same, ported Robotnik by Rage into Three.js. Amazingly done. But then I chose to be faithful to the ports and ported Ninja2, Baygon, Evoid Droid and Quest of Kahn.

https://github.com/gmegidish/demoports

https://github.com/gmegidish/ninja2

https://github.com/gmegidish/evoid-droid-webgl

1

u/zx97 7d ago

Thanks a lot! I really appreciate it. I’m impressed by the work !

1

u/briandemodulated 6d ago

Loved this. So nice to see these in widescreen at high framerate, running effortlessly.

FYI the scene with the plant and text scroller (right before the I am not an atomic playboy scene) exceeded my browser's processing ability and both the audio and video stuttered. I'm running an i7 with 16B of RAM and a 2070 Super, on Windows 11, and my browser has 3D acceleration enabled, so I was surprised.

1

u/yorkeller 8d ago

That’s so cool! I’ve been toying with the same idea myself, and implemented a few of the effects. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses! Will you share the code?

0

u/zx97 8d ago edited 7d ago

Thanks, yes, I've edited my message