> As soon as full screen video became an option, the only limitation was the actual content of the pixels, and everything could be prerendered. Competing as an individual with, say, Pixar in that context would never make your stuff look nice.
Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time.
In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it.
The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.
Not sure that was a factor. You could already earlier prerender things, just maybe not minutes of it, but for loops it always was a thing. Back then in the late 80ies/early 90ies, at least in the C64 scene, it was a huge topic sometimes and people stressed when especially spectacular effects where "realtime", so there will be no doubts, cause prerendering carried a huge stigma with it for a long time.
In fact, this was what held back the demoscene for a while, cause a lot of very stylish things just were not possible at least on C64 hardware without prerendering or at least doing the 3d calculations up front. The scene actually had to overcome their fixation on "realtime" effects before a lot of very artsy, stylish demos became possible, once people started focussing on what you see, not how you achieve it.
The latter part might not apply to stronger machines, though, admittedly. On the C64 any kind of long running animation is a feat in itself, even if you trade limited CPU for limited memory.