hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0452.txt

Episode: 452
Title: HPR0452: Demo or Bust 2010 Part 4
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0452/hpr0452.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:01:12

---

🎵
You are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which
means it's time once again for Demo or Bust 2010.
You are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A
-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30
on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening, which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening,
which means you are listening to W-A-R-T, where radio the time is 8.30 on a Friday evening,
why do I keep going on meetings?
Hello everyone!
My name is Sigанов.
This is episode number four of Denver Bus 2010.
In this episode, we are going to be talking about software rendering that is drawing triangles
to the frame buffer using the processor like for cave people or something and after this
we'll be talking to a black pond of explosive but before we get into any of this I do want
to dedicate this next demo to more or less dedicate well okay you see last time I played
this song by vert and trace told me this isn't tip-toon music you said this is chip-toon
music and I guess it was kind of chippy it's kind of sounded like a jealousy to me so I kind
of categorized it as that but I've kind of been known to over-categorize things as this chip-toons
so this is going out to you trace but this is entirely selfless it is a little self-serving
this particular demo I think is really interesting the concept of it is very unique but we'll get into
that after the break so enjoy we'll be back
oh okay welcome mag that was pit my spectrum
by eight bits that is ATE BIT now what this demo is it's a 64k for windows but it's not really
for windows right it's for the spectrum but it's not really for the spectrum right it's for a
fake computer they wrote an emulator within 64k and the program that it runs is for a sort of
spectrum which is embedded within the 64k of course and what they did was they made a fake
computer more or less I think they I think have like three AY interfaces or something like that
and ran really fast the processor and they had a custom GPU of sorts with it just drew triangles
to to the attribute table and the frame by first sort of stuff that's in the spectrum and
so yeah they made a fake computer for this which is I think a really interesting concept kind
of it is maybe a little bit inspiring maybe I should pick up my my dead Nintendo code but
yeah like well executed as well like I can't it's kind of pointless right making fake computers
so you might as well make a demo for it and they did a very good job and it fits this perfectly
this concept perfectly I think pit my spectrum so yeah you should watch it oh did I say the
pad ID on this no I don't think I did the pad ID on this is 50107 so go to pad type in HTTP
colon www.pouet.net slash prod.php question mark which equals 5017 I don't know if you've noticed
but throughout demo robust have been saying the pad ID that's what the pad ID means it's that
URL with it that number sort of tacked on the end of it but before we get into software rendering
and these things I do want to play something else I held kind of sort of a it was called the
international base off and the point of this was you were supposed to make people were supposed to
make songs out of this sample and I only there's only one entry right aside from my own but that
one mine doesn't really count right so this is the winner by Andrew I don't think it has a name
but he did a really good job so this is his song and congratulations Andrew whoo yay that's the
everyone cheering all right so we'll be right back right after this
okay
software rendering. Now, what I want to describe here is, well, first of all, let me open
up the phone lines. You can give us a call. This is a voicemail number, of course, because
this isn't live, but you can call a country code 1-206-312-1618. That's a country
code 1-206-312-1618. Send me your tips, send me your techniques, and things that you
do to optimize things crazy wicked for software rendering. If you want to leave other
sources of voicemail messages, you certainly may, but just tell me about your techniques
and you'll probably get on the show. I kind of want to make this a continuing thing where
you can call that number at any time, really, and have an interesting technique, hopefully
related to the topic at hand, but not necessarily, and you'll probably be next week's show if
it's a wicked awesome technique. But software rendering. Now, this is coming from my perspective,
of course. As I see 3D graphics software rendering is synthesizing of three worlds on a 2D
graphics. 3D graphics, as I see, it has been sort of split up into two primary paradigms.
You have rendering things, pixel by pixel, and then you have sort of drawing things, primitive
by primitive. So maybe you can think of the former as sort of raster graphics and the
latter as vector graphics. And I suppose we did talk a little bit about retracing these
things in the demo or brush number three. So number four is going to be dedicated to the
other paradigm, more or less. So again, as I see it, I think this comes from the latter
technique, drawing primitives and triangles and polygons and these things. It kind of comes
from this focus on geometry, vector geometry. I think it comes from computer graphics in general,
and a lot of the early work with sketch pad and these things in computer graphics. So imagine,
if you will, a 2D screen, a computer screen. And on the screen is a box. And this box is made
of four points and four lines, four vectors, and four lines connecting these vectors. And we
can call this box a primitive of sorts. We can call it a quad or a polygon or these things,
or we can put the box up and add a fifth line into two triangles. And so this is a 2D box.
If we want to add another dimension to this, we simply just add another dimension to it. And
draw our box with the x and y values of each courtesy divided by its z value. So if you have
something that is further awake, it's smaller. This adds perspective to this box. Of course,
it's a box. So maybe we make this box a cube and add 12 triangles or six faces as opposed to one or two.
So what we want to do is have a camera and a camera position. So we have a world built up of 3D
vectors. And in this world, we have all these objects made out of faces such as triangles and
polygons and quads and these things. Primarily triangles is what I'm going to be talking about.
And so we translate the entire world. We translate all the vertices by our camera position
such that 0, 0, 0 is where our camera is. Once we do that, we can rotate the entire world
around our camera's orientation. And then we take the x and y values and we divide by z.
There you have a 3D image. I mean, it's a little bit more complex than that because you have
to do clipping and these things that you would need in any sort of rendering pipeline in order for
it to be efficient and not crash when you have z values that are behind you, for instance,
and in things like that. So disregarding complexities of these, of course. So we have
all these vertices that are sort of brought from a 3D world and translated and rotated
and then divided by z. And then the z values, disregarding, is brought into a 2D world.
That's how a lot of 3D is drawn, right? So once we have that, we have all these vector objects
triangles and whatnot that need to be shown on our screen. They need to be rasterized, if you will,
because we don't have vector displays, unfortunately. Now to rasterize a triangle,
while there are, of course, a number of ways to do this is there is pretty much anything when it comes
to computers. So we have three points to make up a triangle and in order to draw this to our
screen, again, there are a number of ways to do this. And the way that I'm going to describe is
figuring out scanline for scanline where to begin drawing and where to end drawing.
Because it's a triangle, it's a convex object. There is only going to be one
filled scanline bit per scanline, if that makes sense. There's no sort of area that would be empty
between two areas. So we have the benefit that is a benefit to us. So we have to only figure out
where the scanlines start on the left edge of the triangle and where the scanlines end on the right
edge. Because most raster displays are just drawn top to bottom left to right. So the first thing
we can do is we can take the vertices that make up this triangle and sort them from top to bottom,
just the y values. So because we're drawing from top to bottom, it makes it easier for other
operations as well for other things as well. So we have say v1 equals the top most vertices
by the y value and v2 being the mid and v3 being the lowest or rather the highest, the bottom
most that is. So once we have that, if we think the triangle is a left side and a right side,
we can figure out where the scanline starts by the beginning of the side vertically
interplated by some value going down the screen. So if we have a triangle where the bottom is flat,
we only have one value to interplate on both sides if that makes sense. So the first thing we
want to do is we want to figure out how many different values we need to interplate by how
many different sections there are per left and right side. And so you can do this by looking at
v2 and if it's the same height as v3, well then we only have two sides or if it's the same height
as v1, then we only have two sides. But if they differ, then you have to take the overall
height of the triangle and we take the height of v2 minus v1 and we divide up by the overall height.
And then we multiply that by the overall sort of horizontal length of the triangle.
This way we get sort of a point where the gradient between v2 and v1
would be at the bottom if that makes sense. So then we take v1, x value and we subtract v2's
and we add it to that value. So if it's smaller than 0, we know that the right section has two
segments and if it's greater then we know that the left section has two segments. That makes sense.
We kind of figured out the longest sort of scan line and if it's going one direction then
the midpoint is on the left side and if it's going the other direction the midpoint is on the
right side. So now we know the sections of each side and we know what vertices the points are at,
what vertices start the section and these things. So we just go down the triangle,
figuring out the beginning and the end of the scan line based on these and if we need to change
a delta value because we're going into another section we know when to change it because we know
the height of that section and we know which side to change. So we go down the scan line and
go down the triangle scan line for scan line and there you have it. Like if we fill this with a
single color that's called flat shaded, called a flat shaded triangle but we can also fill it with
an interplated color between color values for each vertices and that would be like a
garage shaded triangle or we can interpolate it by the values between each vertices for a texture
coordinates and that could be a texture map more or less. Of course this is just regretting some
complexities but so yeah that's like the basic rendering pipeline for software renders.
Take a 3d world, translate, rotate, clip and restaurantize. Of course this
what you restaurantize lasts will be on top unfortunately so you either need to sort the triangles
as before you draw them so that you draw the triangles that are closest to you last
so they get drawn over everything or you can take per pixel you can store the depth of each pixel
again sort of interplating it kind of like garage shading with your triangle function to what's
called the Z-buffer and then compare it to that the value that's already in there from previous
draws and so if it's closer to you you draw it's then what's in there that you draw it if it's
further away you disregard it because it's behind something or you can take each scan line and
put them into a buffer and draw the scan lines and then do depth comparisons on the scan line level
perhaps interplating where the one triangle intersects with another. The latter approach also
kind of having the benefit of localizing complexity for drawing a scan line which means it's
a little bit faster doing it that way so again this is kind of a rough outline of software rendering
with the aim being you the listener calling in and telling us about your techniques because
there's a lot of different techniques right it's not not just one thing so again everyone that
phone number is country code one two zero six three one two one six one eight tell me about all tell
me about how you get those triangles out there or those polygons or whatever you choose to get out
there so we are going to break after we get back from this we will be talking to Black Pond of
Explosive we'll be right back
okay that was the function 2007 invite by our friends conspiracy and of course this is a demo
so you should watch it the pet idea on this is three one five eight three now we're talking with
Black Pond of Explosive and he Black Pond how's it going hey it's nice to hear yeah so you you
pick this one out in particular yeah this is one of my favorite demos I actually gave it a
critical around pull it how does that assembly 2007 so I got to see it on the big screen which was
really cool everyone like it at the party I mean what's that was it everyone like it at the party did
it oh yeah absolutely cool I think there was an issue though where like the first time they tried
showing it it only got halfway through and then they have to show it again I think that's happened
a couple times now I'm sorry it looks nice though it looks really nice before we started
recording you were mentioning that I mean it looks they have a sort of color gradients that go up
and down and whatnot that definitely add to the to the effect yeah it looks like they've got just
a linear gradient color overlay that they're using to sort of colorize your color to the different
parts so it's not so monochromatic yeah that's actually something we stole for one of our demos
and explosive and notice we did instead a radial gradient for under the microscope and use like
red and greens and different things oh wait so how are you doing the gradient in explosive it's not
a radial radial gradient what is it is it is it up and down what does the gradient look like
oh no yeah it is real centered on like the crazy twisty stuff that's growing yeah
well we'll get through this a bit later you'll understand what we mean by the crazy twisty stuff
so this is centered on the crazy twisty twisty stuff right for the question but I really
love the energy and tension in the demo yeah it's reinforced both of them music and the visuals
it's really yeah it's a really really good design it looks like like the the grading effect for
instance and it instance it almost looks like light is coming into like it looks like light is
coming to the lens and at a weird place and sort of how you see cameras and you have a lot of
light in the scene and so it just makes it look like everything's on fire or something like that
at least to me I think they're also doing like some radial blur or something
yeah for a couple of steps like the wireframe sphere also the wireframe the actual logo the
function logo when they have they sync it up to the music goes and then get smooth I don't
know if you remember that yeah yeah that that was pretty cool so you got to watch this people
but let's you are from Seattle as I understand
yep now where you were originally from Seattle or originally from Illinois and like the Chicago
area really it actually got introduced to the demo scene because there were a bunch of people
in that area that ran into it there was a demo group called Beyond and the organizer for it was
Pyramidiac so I met him my started college and that's what got me into the scene beyond
and now in Seattle where there's quite a few demo sceneers here there's Guy Russia
Northern Dragons there's Andrew in Portland there's a basement digital musician and I believe
in Northern Idaho Sarah's a few uprising lists there yeah got quite a few people you thought
uprising is in Northern Idaho um so what did you guys start explosive uh so I I had
collaborated with Mac and Trace when they were in the group three pixels on the demo MDMA
but then after that I was super busy with shipping a game at work and didn't have time for working
on the demos um the Mac and Trace started explosive started doing demos and they did the invite
for the first pilgrimage party I believe yeah yeah I joined up a couple years later um and started
building out okay so so you you weren't there for the pilgrimage invite no I actually didn't make
it to any of the total lunch party yeah either did I um it was in Utah I can't imagine we missed much
well that's not the little states here for a new place but uh I mean people can say there's
even people have said the same thing about Cleveland right so yeah but uh you guys should hold
one in Seattle there's so many seniors there yeah we we totally shouldn't I think it's just a matter
of time until we do I uh is it just the do you think just the west coast in general would be good
I mean I hear like a red man for instance I don't know how serious he is about this but uh I've
heard talk about hosting one at least in uh at least in california yeah I heard that too I can't
remember who was involved in it but they were talking about having one to sort of replace and be seen
yeah since Nvidia is not doing their party how they do you think Nvidia is gonna host another party
at all I hope so I the envision event and and be seen in demo party with spectacular I'm not sure
why they're not doing it again this year but I hope they they do again in the future yeah oh okay
so I got to tell you something and uh this is the secret just between me and you right I so don't
tell anyone but um my cue is he's moving to california oh really yeah that's awesome yeah I don't
know why he's moving to california and like you if you don't want me to like all right if this is
a secret I'm sorry I didn't say it was a secret so I'm assuming that it wasn't so uh okay we need
to steal more uh demo seniors bring him over here yeah well we also need to uh to generate more
demo seniors not necessarily steal them from other countries but uh let's uh get back to let's
get to actually one of your demos uh first one I think we'll play if you don't mind the 4K
mdr okay it's not good all right cool we'll be right back
yeah
I don't know how to do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure if I can do it, but I'm not sure
Now that was a 4K MDR, this is a 4K demo was released at BlockPretty 2007, and the Piat ID on this one is 305 for zero. Now how long did it take you to write this one?
I think it was just a month of free time. I remember I was doing some audio stuff or something beforehand, and then it was S-Tech who told me that BlockPretty was coming up and that I should wrap up a 4K for it.
So I figured I'd give it a try. I hadn't done a 4K before. It was really interesting. I mean, the different tricks of size coding.
Did you unpack down my music player and everything?
Well, you got it down to 4K and I'm impressed.
It wasn't easy. The last 7 or 8 hours of it, I was up all night before the competition deadline, just trying to squeeze out the last fight. I was at 4,097 fights.
Oh god, everything I was doing, I was trying to reorder math, or trying to implement things in different ways, and it was always making it bigger.
And I could cut a major thing, a whole camera sequence or something, and get the bikes. But I was determined to get that last fight down and get it down to 4,096.
It's like any hour or something ridiculous to just muck around to finally get that.
I don't know, it'd be interesting to... I don't know if... I mean, when you write a 4K or something like this, where the majority of the size that is saved comes from the entropy of the program.
It's not really... you don't get a good sense of what would compress well and what wouldn't. It would be interesting, maybe... I don't know, to have some sort of higher language or some sort of description of where things can move perhaps, or how things can change in this program will still work with these constraints.
And just go through a night and find the smallest one, combination of these things or something like that.
I think that crinkler does some things like that. Crinkler is the choice for compressing it.
So it moves around symbols and whatnot, I imagine.
Yeah, it replaces the linker, so it knows what the different functions are and what the different continent data is.
So it tries all the different permutations of ordering things to try and squeeze it down.
Yeah, suppose at the linker level that would be... that would be the ideal place to move functions around.
Yeah, it'd be kind of hard to... maybe kind of hard to probably not with the effort to describe something that is at a lower level and still have a work.
Well, it's certainly for within functions and within the shaders and so forth. Crinkler doesn't have any insight into those and can't reorder things.
Yeah. There might be some potential there. Right now you can't have to manually go and try out different ways of doing your math to see if she can reduce the number of bytes.
So are you using any shaders in MK4KMDR? I mean, it looks like the spheres will probably... it looks like it may be a cube map and then you have like a swirly thing.
Are you using any feeders in this... this swirly thing?
Actually, it started off by doing HDR rendering and spherical harmonic lighting.
Yeah. But then I wanted to add different cameras and add the music and sort of build it out from a simple scene to a full intro.
I had to keep making sacrifices on the graphics side so I had to keep making the shaders simpler and dropping different features to try and squeeze it down.
And that's where the MDR came from. That was high dynamic range. It became like medium dynamic range.
This has turned into a swamp of hacks to make it small.
But it's actually doing ray tracing for the reflection. So it's just a simple function for the swirl on the ground.
And then in the pixel shader on the ball, it's casting a ray intersecting against the ground and evaluating that function to figure out what the proper reflection is.
Do you... is this a technique that is normally for... I've noticed that a lot of your demos... you like reflections and reflections and things like this.
Is this a technique that you normally use for...?
I think that's the only one where I'm actually doing ray tracing and other ones that's just cube maps or in ones like Tokyo.
It's actually sampling from the frame buffer.
Yeah, yeah, look like you're... are you doing just that in Tokyo because I was watching this and it looks like maybe you're doing like for the metal ball sort of thing.
This looks like maybe that's a cube map and then the spheres at the beginning are sampling from the buffer.
The frame buffer is something like that. Are you... a combination?
No, throughout the whole demo, it's doing nothing but sampling from the frame buffer so no cube map or anything.
Oh wow, are you serious? That looks pretty good.
It's samples twice, so it does... samples in one direction for like a reflection and in one for a reflection and then blends between them based on for now term.
Yeah, it's kind of neat because it's, you know, really inexpensive compared to like rendering out the cube maps or doing something with the mouse.
So how is the... how are the spheres deforming in 4KMDR?
So that one's just a simple function in the vertex shader.
Maybe you just park the engine on X and Y to get the spikes and pushing them out.
And then there's just a shader content that says like how far it should spike out and that goes and sync with the music.
Is that interesting?
No, I'm sorry, go ahead.
So I was just going to say actually it's like the ray traced reflections and everything completely break down when it goes to the spike version.
Because, you know, it's not recompeting the normals or anything. It still thinks it's the sphere even though it's drying it as a crazy spikey thing.
Really? It doesn't look so bad. I don't remember. It doesn't look like it's out of place. Are you doing... are you compensating with anything?
No, yeah. The artifact isn't too bad, but is there?
Hmm, okay. I have to watch that again.
And I also understand that you are using a particular tool that you've written called the General MIDI DLS tool for 4KMDR. Is that correct?
Yeah, for the music I wrote a simple mod player. But, you know, in the 4K I can't use an actual mod with like wave data.
So instead I had, when Trace was doing the music he used the program mod plug and for all the samples, you know, he was restricted to using samples from the GM.DLS file on a system.
And that's like the MIDI sounds that are used for like the direct sound MIDI player.
Yeah, that tool lets you go through the GMDLS, find sounds that might be interesting. And then you've got some parameters that you can tweak for like the envelope.
And then it dumps that off to a wave file within a file name that puts in all the parameters. So you just drop all those into mod plug, compose your music with it.
And then when I convert the mod into just a byte stream for the 4K to use, I can throw away all the embedded waves data and extract it from GMDLS at one time.
Okay, cool. That's actually pretty cool. Do typically, when you're using sounds from a general DLSD, typically process them this way and then play them with some sort of mod-ish sort of player typically or do you do any sort of live effects in any of your other demos or anything like that?
Well, that was the first time I tried it. I think it was on the 4K wiki where I saw the trick of using skewing samples from GMDLS. There wasn't as much information about it then.
So I wasn't doing too many effects on top of the wave data. And I think actually in 4K and VR it's just straight taking the samples.
And it was actually later in the tool that I had added support for Envelope and some other things. And so the mod was composed without a bunch of those features that went in later.
And I traced and I wanted to go back and do another 4K or something. Now that we had wiki, we could do even better music.
Blackpond, have I met you before? Like, I don't know. I've been to a couple of block parties. Maybe I met you. Maybe I didn't. I don't remember you.
I don't know. I was at Block Party the year 4K MDR, which really set me up in 2007.
Yeah, that wasn't a bad one.
Yeah, and then the next year I think there was something at work. So I had plenty of tickets and everything but didn't make it out.
And then this past year I did the invite and I was working out and stuff for the competition and really wanted to make it. But then I got sick and couldn't go.
Hopefully next year I'll finally be able to make it out again.
Hopefully, yeah. Hopefully you won't be like a guy brush or something like that.
Yeah, he was 262. I think everyone wants to handle this thing.
Yeah, I think he broke his leg skateboarding or something.
Oh, I don't know if that's true.
I don't know if that's true.
Something like that.
Yeah, he was sick. There was some injury or some sickness that he was also preventive from going. So we're both stuck here.
And the next tech couldn't go. I think just for financial reasons.
Yeah, I didn't know he didn't make it.
Unfortunately not.
Yeah, it didn't seem like there were that many releases that year for this past year.
No, I'm kind of disappointed. I was going to release a Sega Genesis demo.
But I decided to do way too much of it at the party, if that makes sense.
Oh.
Like I had a bunch of effects and I had music.
And so I think these effects to the music during the party that I realized while I need like three more effects.
And by the time I got done with the second one, it fucked up my thinking.
So just because it fucked up some other person, the demo.
I was so dissatisfied with it.
Yeah.
But man, I should have.
Anyway, like the first two thirds was pretty good.
Like guys, they just stopped it or something like that.
I'm sure it would have been fine.
But oh well, maybe next year or something like that.
I can have that in the old school competition.
I think both the demos I've wanted to do and have been very similar where it's like.
There's a little done before the party.
And then at the party is this mad rush to get everything together.
And then it comes out with a lot of really unpolished unfinished parts.
Yeah.
Yeah, I promised myself that I'll have everything done before I go.
So I can enjoy the party.
I don't know if this will actually happen.
But I hope it does.
What I think about the party is it's like a great motivator or a tool to actually like.
It forces you to finish something.
Yeah.
Yeah, some people like Nesby, for instance, he does a lot of party coding.
Yeah, I think 2007 and 2008.
I believe he released a couple of party coded productions.
And I've talked to him specifically about it.
And he seems to actually really like that aspect of coming with almost nothing.
And then coding during the party.
Do you do any of that yourself?
Do you like party coding?
I guess at times I've done it, I really haven't had a choice.
I would have liked to have had the demo done beforehand, but it just kind of worked out that way.
Yeah.
So it is fun.
I mean, you know, you stay up all night for like three nights or four nights straight.
And your mind sort of goes into a weird state and it's fun.
I don't know.
Maybe we should have a party without there have been any parties where the focus of it was just demo party code,
where you come with nothing prepared.
Like you don't have that you don't have that stress of having something when you come.
You just everyone writes something there.
Don't be fun.
I don't know.
What do you think?
I'm not sure.
Like making images or making music.
I don't know if that people have, if any party organizers have done that for like full demos or code.
Yeah.
Oh, I guess when I host my weekly awesome party.
Yeah.
Sometime in the future.
In the way of future.
I think you have to do something like a lot of people have a lot of effects that they haven't used in the demo yet.
And a lot of code.
And so you might not want everyone coming in and just the person who had the most stuff beforehand can throw together the best one.
So you might want something like everyone comes in and they get like a bootable DVD or something.
And they can only use what's on there.
Yeah.
There would have to be some sort of enforced construction to guarantee that people don't come with.
Oh yeah.
I came up with this on the fly.
You know.
Right.
Yeah.
Like I think at the last couple of block parties there was a tracker competition where you had these samples like.
And use those and make a sound out of it.
So that.
But for code.
I don't know what you could use.
You are saying we would have a DVD full of things that you can only use.
Like what do you mean?
Like meshes and other such data that you can only make use of?
Well, I mean in terms of the library and things.
Like there's a couple groups and I know IQ has like a 4K, 64K framework.
Different things like that.
But you set them up with an image that has a compiler, a simple framework and libraries for just getting images off of the screen.
And then it's like, okay, go.
You have eight hours to code something awesome.
Hmm.
Okay.
I suppose yeah, if he's the same, then my only concern would be the amount of time someone would want to take to learn your constraint if that makes sense.
You're using particular libraries that maybe they don't like or something like that.
Yeah, if you have a bunch of Linux coders having to deal with Windows or Windows coders having to deal with the bunch of Linux libraries they've never used.
Yeah.
Yeah, they'll be fights.
Yeah, I'm sure.
But let's go to Tokyo since you mentioned it.
Okay.
We'll be right back fellas and you've got to watch this one because it's a demo.
It's not just sound.
So we'll be right back.
Maybe I try and get that across too much.
But we'll be right back after this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So welcome back.
That was, uh, that was Tokyo.
Now the Piat idea on this is, uh, 2559.
Uh, now this was, uh, really stayed to you, Skull, uh, 2006.
And I actually got first place.
Congratulations.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
It was actually neat that year because
a shine was also an explosive.
And whether they released, I think it was
embaldante that year.
Yeah.
But they released a demo and Trace and I
and Neurocan released our demo.
And so explosive took first and second place
in the Del Campo.
Oh, you see.
It was neat to see because they had,
oh, I think it's the Stravaganza vote counter
or something.
And so, you know, on the big screen,
they were showing the votes being tallied
and it was these two competing broadcast bars
both for the same group.
Now, this is, I like the,
this is kind of one of my favorites too.
I haven't favored it or anything like that.
But I really dig the music, for instance.
And I've never seen a better use of
glow ever.
It looks good.
Yeah, it came out pretty cool with the color collet
and fitting the mood of the music and everything.
There's certainly a lot of really unfinished parts
and Trace and I really wanted to do a final version of it.
But we've never gotten around to it, yeah.
Well, what are you unsatisfied with?
You don't mind me asking.
So, like the arrangement of the scenes is kind of random.
Like, we had a start off, you know,
it's falling,
kind of like tracking the floor,
fall falling,
and then you go into this interior of the building
and then that ball,
and all that.
But then it kind of goes off and I know where
we have that robot that Trace built.
Yeah.
I was, to be honest,
when I first watched it,
I was expecting it to move later on the demo.
Yeah.
But the, I'm sorry, I go ahead.
What were you going to say?
Oh, just that, you know,
we had a bunch of these different things
that we wanted to piece on that.
But then it was sort of at the last minute,
trying to figure out, you know,
we didn't have time to do a whole new scene,
so trying to figure out where to place the scenes
and how to arrange it and stuff.
And so, there's a couple that, you know,
maybe you don't really make sense.
Yeah.
Well, it looks good nonetheless.
So, other people agree, it seems.
Yeah, I was really amazed watching Trace's action,
like, you know, we built up a demo tool,
and this was the first demo that we were using it on.
And so, there's like, you know,
a brand new tool and all these effects
that we hadn't really played around with too much.
Particularly, the scenes where it's like,
the ball flying over the city
with all the clouds in the city
and the particles coming up out of the city.
And, like, if you look at how that looks
without all the effects applied to it,
it's pretty amazing how Trace was able to get, like,
something that was much more than the
some of its parts to come out of that.
So, what was Trace's responsibility
with this eroded tool?
Now, for this demo,
and this is the first demo using this tool,
before we talk about Trace maybe,
what is this tool?
What does this tool do specifically?
So, it was called Gamma Studio.
I guess, previously, in Explosive,
there was the tool Neon,
and then version two of Neon.
And then Trace has some ideas for a different way
of doing syncing and the ball format
for laying things out.
And we sort of built a new tool up around that.
And so, it's pretty much like Premiere,
where, you know, you've got a bunch of layers
and then the effect bars within the layers
and then there's controls for setting,
like, commands that occur at particularly times.
And then for each effect,
you've got the list of properties to the effect.
And so, you can tweak the values
or you can also recurve
so that the values can animate over time.
So, there's logical functionality in there and everything.
And that's probably what allowed us to actually
pull something off in such a short time
at the party place,
because we sort of threw all the scenes together
through a bunch of effects on it.
And then, you know,
later on with curves
and later on with all the different parameters
and editing them.
And since it wasn't like a recompile link run
a loop that we had to go through,
it was really fast to iterate on it.
Now, you said that this tool,
you could time execution
of different routines or commands or whatever.
In previewing the demo,
you have to kind of go back to a point
where everything gets run.
Like, I don't know,
if maybe our audience is familiar with trackers, for instance,
you have to go to a point before the sample is triggered,
if that makes sense.
Yeah, I know what you're talking about.
Actually, to get around that,
if you skip forward in time,
it runs through the time looking for any commands
that you've skipped over to execute those.
If you go backwards in time,
it starts from the beginning,
execute the command up to that point.
So you could scroll back in forward in time
and have no problem.
Yeah, that's actually,
hmm, that's pretty cool.
And then it interplates all the data
that needs to be interpolated
and respectively, I imagine.
The only thing that it didn't handle at the time
was the particle systems.
Yeah.
So if you went halfway into the particle system
and there were tons there,
then skip back and forward.
That didn't work quite right,
but then in later iterations of the tool,
it did.
Now, how many people are,
how many coders do you have for this particular demo?
Oh, that would be great.
If not, that would be great.
Oh, that would be great.
I added the code,
and traced the visuals and design
and neurocams to the music.
Hmm, I see.
Okay.
How many coders do you have at any one time,
while with demos?
I'm asking this because
you had talked a little bit about
this tool that you're using,
and it would seem to me,
tools seem beneficial
to having multiple coders,
if that makes sense,
so that people can work on their own effects,
and then we can give these together later somehow.
But how many people do you have?
How many coders specifically
do you have on any of your productions?
Yeah, I think.
I can't think of an explosive demo,
where there was actually more than one coder involved.
So an explosive that there was Mac,
who's now retired,
and he did neon,
the first tool that was used,
and then there was shine,
and he did version two of it,
and then I did the demo studio,
and so she's done demos as well.
I don't know if she's built up a tool,
but yeah, a friend given demo,
I think it's only done one of us
on the programming side that worked on it.
How do you feel about multiple coders and demos?
If you don't mind, I'll ask you.
The only experience I've had is,
I worked on the three pixel demo MDMA with Mac.
That was the first time I'm working with him,
and Trace.
And so that one,
I had a bunch of effects and things
that I had previously done for 64Ks
that we brought over,
and then I worked on a couple of specific effects,
but mainly, you know,
we were working within the code
that Mac had already built up.
I guess on clockwork,
that was a collaboration with the Northern Dragon,
and in that case,
I was a programmer,
a guy brush with a programmer,
a black light with a programmer,
and we were also using code
from Parts of the Wall.
So that was quite a few people
throwing stuff in.
Okay, so let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's go to clockwork,
and we'll be right back.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork real quick.
So let's talk about clockwork-
So let's talk about pointwork real quick.
So let's talk about pointwork real quick.
so let's talk about pointwork real quick.
So let's talk about pointwork real quick.
states about pointswork real quick.
All right.
So that was clockwork by note-
or the北onchi thousands of boats on the morning.
All right.
All right.
All right.
That was clockwork by addictive and the northern dragons.
You worked on a common this guy brush did as well as black light and then you had something written by barzole as well
That's right over there any artist in this
So guy brush was doing some art. I did some random stuff and
Terrile
Explosive he did a bunch of the gear models and some afgi art as well
Nicey, so good. Yeah, a little bit of proper artist art and then lots of Coder art as well. Yeah
Well, this is for the
Text mode demo competition
So this is text for everyone listening and I must say I really like the
the black and white
foreground sort of what's happening in the foreground against the
very red background
And we tried to go with a very simple color palette so that we wouldn't mess it up and be able to claim
So you can't lose you can't lose with black white and red, I think yeah, it looks really good. It looks really good
One of the things that we did
was like I showed trace an early version of what we're working on and he had mentioned that you know a lot of text mode demos
They're doing like software rendering out to 80 by 50 image converting up to text and not really doing anything natively
with the text. Yeah, so at the beginning of this one you can see effects of like
Interlocking gears just all an afky would like flashes and things
And also at the very end there's a bunch of stick figures applauding
So we mixed in some things that were just like purely text and not just converting the text. Yeah, yeah, that's good
That's that's good. That's that's kind of a complaint that I have a little bit about
Text mode demos myself is just rendering to a to a buffer and then filtering through an afky
It's not very not very creative
So this one's this one looks pretty cool
How did you manage having some encoders now? I'm asking this specifically because
Nesby and I are kind of starting something and
like
I'm a Linux person and I like openGL and he's a Windows person and he likes direct X and I'm wondering how
much will come a shot collaboration
We'll actually have for code on particularly demos. I'm thinking that it might go along the lines of
The demos that he writes I'll contribute arts and music and things like that and vice versa for something like that
But how did you manage to have so many programmers at the same time with this particular demo?
I don't know maybe
Hey, so the code base was for the dragons and I think most of it was stuff that barzule had done
He's done a bunch of text mode demos
And so I don't think he did any code specific to this demo. It's just that we started with his code and then
Blacklight was working in Canada. I think he was doing some like well post-process things and some customizations to
how
The library that we use that converted from you know images to text
So like there are some scenes where you know it is very specific character sets like ND your xpls
V instead of a more general one
And then a guy rush and I we worked over I am initially
both walking around in the same code and then
I met up that my office after work a couple nights
So working side by side we have to buy each other's post too much in the code
We're using subversion source control system
So we could both be editing the same files submit and then we can resolve
and
If we were working on sub-ref effects
We didn't run into too many problems where we had conflict. Okay, cool. Well, yeah, it seems like the advantage
You have there is everyone is working under a common
Framework more or less. Yeah, the version really helped for
The source control side on that demo
Well, what do you like about
subversion?
If you don't mind me asking
Yeah, it's free
With three pixels
previously
We used per force. Yeah, but that one it's like free up to a certain number of licenses
Subversion works just as well for hobby projects and such
You've got some nice features to where you don't have to like manually check out files
You can just start editing them and then it shows you which ones you have changes to
I see so you both writing changes and then merging the manually without any sort of rigid version control would be
Would not be beneficial
Yeah, then that'd be nightmare
For clockwork, I think just about all the
main demo code and effects within a single file
And so we were both changing different parts of that file
But with the result tools and subversion of this pretty easy to figure out all the blocks that don't have complex and just handle those
And I'll show you you know the ones that you have to go and actually manually edit
That was mainly just for like things in the main loop where
When you're testing on your local machine you want to have that display only the effect you're working on and when they're testing
This is playing only their effect and sometimes you accidentally check in those hacks
How many text mode demos have you done yourself?
That was the first one I did and I haven't done another one since but I'd like to it was really fun working and with those constraints
Well, I imagine as far as well the resolution you can get away with a lot of stuff
Yeah, I'm not saying that that would be the goal for you or anything like that like how much can I get away with anything like that?
So yeah, it's interesting how much compute power you have per pixel. Yeah, so so few pixels
You know you can do some amazing things
But also I do know you mean that it's like
It's very forgiving
So you can have some artifacts and it kind of gets lost and the other artifacts that are there
Have you seen the have you seen the
Forget what was I think it was TMDC as well. Yeah, I was TMDC. I got first place a demo by
The trailer per demos by us tech
This text mode demo. It's a scrolls horizontally ends at the picture of Bach. Have you seen this?
I have seen that. I don't remember it now. It was it was a while ago
But I didn't know what you're talking about. It was gorgeous. I was sure to remember it
I would like to talk about it
Yeah, I think in general as text demos are like really awesome like really clean design. Yeah, really clean design
Right
He's got a really good eye for that and keeping things simple, but then it also looks it looks good. It doesn't look simple
Yeah, I mean it's it's minimalist famics. Right. It's that ugly
Simplugly, but let's uh let's go to another demo of yours. This is n 0 5 0. I'm sorry n 0 5 0 5
Is that the way you say it or do you say it and 5 5 or something like that?
Actually, no sense. No sense. Okay. This is no sense. We'll be right back
Oh
Okay, that was noses. The cat idea on this is 51455. Now this was a, this is released at
NV scene and it got third place as I understand.
Yeah, it was really cool. We tied FD for third place.
Really?
Both were the night who were at the party and we're kind of demo. We're, you know, really
big fans of the FD and Mike forces her favorite demo. So it was really cool. It was also kind
of odd because now this was giving a talk on like, you know, what to do, what not to do
or, you know, how he approaches making demos. And really night we're both looking at each
other the whole time because pretty much everything he said, like not to do or that, you
know, he didn't recommend doing that exactly what we were doing, you know, those nights
trying to shut up our demo.
Well, what didn't, what did he recommend not to do that you do out of curiosity?
Oh, I can't remember. Probably things like, you were talking about, you know, smooth
transitions between things or, I don't even remember all of them. But I just remember like
during the talk and we're like four or five things, we just look at each other and
like, oh my god, that's exactly what we had on our demo.
It doesn't look bad. Like, whatever you should not do, I don't, don't see any problems.
I mean, aside from maybe, you went with the commercial track, I can see that maybe
this would cause controversy. And we expected a more controversy than we got actually.
We were really worried that would be disqualified because I haven't seen any other demo of that
had taken creative common music to use. And certainly none that had used non-inchnails.
This was from Turnruth Nurse Ghosts project and usually status creative comments. And then
posted a video to YouTube where he asked his fans to create the visuals for it. And so it was like,
oh my god, this is like the perfect opportunity to create a demo around his music.
He's like, apt enough to do it.
How has he seen this?
I have no idea.
He had talked about doing something with the different entries that people created.
So a lot of people did short films or music video type things and posted them.
There's a big channel on YouTube with all the different submissions.
Yeah, you put the demo.
I'm like, maybe you would show them in a concert or together DVD or something.
As far as I know, he hasn't done anything with it yet.
Okay, since everyone's listening to Adio, right?
And this is a radio show. Allow me to describe very briefly what Nosis is.
Fucking squiggly things. Growing out, like there's no tomorrow.
They're disgusting.
But now you have a, it's, everything's in a microscope for most of it.
I guess the, I don't know, like it seems to me the trick to have things look like they're in microscopes
is to have a bunch of plankton stuff floating around and maybe have the faces as the z-normal
becomes sort of, like as it kind of becomes perpendicular to where you're viewing it.
It gets lighter or something like that.
So it seems like that's the trick, I don't know.
There was also, like, overlay images and then lots of text drawn on there to try and make it look like, you know,
you're looking through some sort of machine that has sophisticated tracking or something.
Yeah, it looks good. It really looks like it's in some sort of a wicked awesome electron microscope or something like that.
Yeah, we were sort of inspired by the first part of Resident Evil with sort of this organism getting out of control or something.
Yeah.
So, you know, first part is like it's doing it with meta balls.
This exponential cell division starts with like two and then four and then eight.
It goes up to a huge number of these balls and then grows out to the crazy tentacle things.
And keeps zooming out until you're out of the microscope and into the actual lab.
It looks really good that when it begins to grow and when it begins to zoom out
and you have the tentacle thing sort of, it almost looks the way you do it,
it almost looks like it's pulsating and growing and pulsating and growing.
It's, I think it's really well done as far as creating the illusion that this thing is growing the fuck out of the microscope.
So we're hoping to do a bunch of cooler things once we pulled out to the lab as well.
But this is another one where we're doing so much at the party place that we ran out of time and just tried to polish what we had to get it ready.
Yeah, we wanted to have like out of that microscope.
We're going to make a explode and then flow down the walls and across the floors and everything.
It's sort of tearing the lab up.
But instead it kind of just fades to that mucky texture.
Well, you have one, the camera goes back and forth in the lab.
You have this sort of blood splatter.
That looks pretty cool.
I imagine that was supposed to be the fluid that this is in.
Or was that supposed to be blood or have you given that much thought?
Yeah, it could be blood or just the red fluid or something.
Throughout the lab all the vials are filled with this red goup that presumably has these organisms or whatever is being experimented on there.
So yeah, when the camera pulls out fast from the microscope, it's like a bit of that got on the camera.
Well, it looks good.
Even if that weren't related, just having sort of red goup on the camera.
Yeah, I hope it's having some extra color or visual elements there.
Yeah, well the contrast with the lab sort of being black and white and you only see,
it looks almost like it's just the occlusion of the lab or something like that.
Or the radiosity of the lab or something.
And to have red sort of contrasted with that I think being black is pretty good.
Yeah.
Like maybe I have given this a little too much thought, but clearly like...
Are you satisfied with this demo yourself?
You said you were very proud that you got retired with ASD.
Yeah, I really enjoy it.
It's one of my favorites that I've worked on.
But yeah, like the others, we do or did want to do a final version,
because there was still so much that we wanted to do that we didn't get a chance to.
How many final versions do you actually do?
I have done none.
There are demo groups out there that do take the time to polish things after they release them at a party.
Yeah.
I guess the closest, and I wasn't directly involved on it,
but the MDMA demo that I worked on with three pixels,
traced, released a couple versions afterwards.
But there were maybe like remixes and not so much finals.
Okay.
Do you have anything else that is interesting about this demo?
Yeah, actually, after the competition on the big screen and everything,
Gloom, he was the musician for the first place demo stargator.
And he stopped by and sort of chastised us or something for using a track from Trent Resner.
When there are so many good demo scene musicians out there, he said,
we should really be using music from other senior.
And then he said, you know, if you can't find anyone, then ask me.
I'll do music for you.
And we actually took him up on that offer.
And so for our block party invite, he did the music for it.
It's good music for the block party invite.
Yeah, he did a great job. It's a really cool track.
Was anyone there from that was involved in the demo?
Want to play it at the party?
For Nelson?
No, no, no, for a block party invite.
Oh, no, none of us were there.
It was good. Everyone started cheering. We're really liked it.
Oh, cool. Yeah, I didn't even know it was played at the party.
It was great.
Yeah, yeah, at the very beginning, like everyone really liked it.
Like it's really set the atmosphere, if that makes sense.
So I wish I had live footage for you or something like that.
Yeah, it's always more rewarding when you are actually there at the party place to see people's reaction to what you did.
Yeah.
Also just a cool vibe because it's like people cheer for cool effects that they like and things like that.
Even for me, even things that, I mean, I haven't really been to many parties, right?
So even demos that I have no involvement in whatsoever.
Like, I like, oh, I wonder how, I wonder if there's live footage for that.
I wonder how people reacted to that. I always ask. I'm always wondering this.
But since you've mentioned it, let's go to the block party invite.
Alright, we'll be right back. Ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Queue back.
Oh, welcome back.
That was the Block Party 2009
Invite the PET ID on this is
52734.
Now, again, if I had the
Live footage for this, I would
totally show it to you.
And during the show.
actually we were just talking about your AST as I understand you are an assembly when life
force showed.
Right.
Now that was probably the best live experience I've seen or whatever just because of the
epicness of that demo.
The camera's going through all these different sequences and you know, so everyone's like
just amazed and then it gets to the park where the hand reaches up and grabs the movement.
And that everyone goes quiet and it's just off-struck and it pulls them down.
This nuclear explosion goes off and it's just cheering and it's so cold to be there for that.
Yeah.
Did you get up off your seats during that point and did everyone just get up off the seat
and cheer when the explosion happened?
I was completely sleep deprived.
Trace and I were both blown away by the other demos that were being shown because
ours went up on a big screen and there were a bunch of problems.
The aspect ratio was wrong.
Oh no.
It was like completely blown out.
The colors and so it looked horrible.
And then you know it goes to all these other demos like the function one we heard at the beginning
and we had life force and so you know ours was just completely blown away.
So we were just kind of sitting there like oh my god.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry that that happened.
That's it.
We wound up getting last place in the competition.
But you didn't work.
You probably would have gotten it.
You probably would have scored better.
So that's unfortunate.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
It was super fun to work on everything.
It was a great experience.
So this is kind of like a globe.
Where did you get these?
I assume you got the one it zooms in to Cleveland.
I assume you got a lot of these textures from Google Maps or something like that.
Like there were also taking these, right?
But it settles like photography and sort of inspired by that.
It seems like a good use for an incident zoomer effective zoom in on the party location.
Actually you know we had a mat in like January or something while working on the demo
and then just a week or something before we released the invite.
And that's actually released their invite for breakpoint.
And they had a familiar sequence where they had like a planet
and through a couple of shops that can't resume zoomed in on Germany
where the party was held.
It was like really terrible time and we were afraid that everyone was going to think
that we just kind of ripped that off.
Yeah.
Well the Black Party is very forgiving.
So from what I found just because of the, I don't know,
there are so few seniors here, just like anything.
It's good.
Not to belittle this at all by any means.
Sure.
But yeah, no one noticed.
Everyone.
Yeah, it didn't seem like anyone cared or noticed.
Yeah, it was like, oh, I wanted to happen.
So you go to this sort of hackrish sort of,
it looks like you're in the fucking Gibson.
Right.
We took inspiration for the last scene from the movie Hackers of course.
It seems where they have like the obnoxious view to non-computer users
of what it's like to choose a mainframe.
But it seemed appropriate as the Black Party is paired with the Nauticon,
which is like a hacker convention.
Yeah.
I'm really interested in that aspect of it.
Yeah.
And Mike Sam apparently was the first to notice that a lot of the,
okay, so you have this hacker sort of seen and you have these buildings
and instead of the garbage file or whatever,
you have the compel rules.
But they're so small.
For instance, the text mode, you have a line that says,
no one can possibly read this text.
So you pretty much put anything we want.
And I understand the music compo is something like,
I really like tacos and a lot of burritos.
Pretty much all Mexican foods.
Yeah, I was just going in random stuff on there.
When we were showing the demo to a bunch of people as we were working on it,
just get feedback and stuff.
Everyone said like, oh, I can't read any of the text on those buildings.
Which was a little annoying because it's like the attention was
that you wouldn't be able to read it kind of like in hackers you're flying through
and you're not really reading what's almost building.
So it's supposed to just kind of add texture or something there.
But everyone thought they were supposed to be reading the text.
Yeah, then I wound up just putting silly things in for the last stuff.
So this is how it used to be.
It's because he was doing the video capture.
So he's probably able to pause on the frame and actually read it and be like, what?
Hopefully other people can read it because the last,
the last on the wildcard compo,
you're better off reading this on the website.
Hopefully people have taken that cue and read the competition rules on the website.
But yeah, I don't know.
I've had people go, I can't read that.
I keep things of mine too.
I'm like, well, you're not supposed to read it.
I think it's kind of annoying.
Yeah, yeah.
Another case of that though,
this was maybe even earlier it was in clockwork.
We had a scroller that Guy Brush did.
And that he goes into this just massive story about the epicness of the collaboration
between explosives and northern dragons and just all the awful sorts of tangents.
And of course, it's impossible to read.
It scrolls by so fast.
That's cool though, to have a story.
Maybe that would be kind of fun.
This is much text about this, the epic union.
Kind of hidden easter eggs or something.
Pardon me?
There's kind of like hidden easter eggs in the demos.
Yeah.
While the text it seems in demos generally is taken on such a visual sort of aspect
where it's no longer information necessarily.
You know and is reading this text with a lot of scrollers there.
So the text is so long that you can't read it at all.
You might as well just call the way and feel crazy with it.
It will give people the opportunity to try and figure out what you said if it's cool.
Yeah, the text on the other buildings in there were the greets.
We say somewhere so like in no sense.
We had a lot of text spew on there and got the same thing where it's important.
There's too much text on the screen.
I can't read it.
But yeah, again, it's just to add texture.
Just to have some extra movement or you know, elements going on.
Are there any, are there any whole techniques that you've used in this demo?
You don't mind me asking.
Yeah.
The thing that started on the demo was that first scene with the blocks and sync with the music.
I decided to play in a bunch with audio sync and trying to make different tools to do better
syncing between the music and visuals.
And I found this online tool called Echo Nest.
And for that, you upload an MP3 to their servers and they analyze it.
And then send back an XML file that has all sorts of data like the average beats per minute.
And then for different notes, like when it next day occur.
And there's tons of information that you can use to try and sync visuals with.
So I took part of it that had the note information and mapped that to the boxes there.
Okay.
Cool.
So now, do you mind me asking something a little bit not related?
Sure.
So like you're at Envision for instance and there's a 4K there.
I believe it was a 4K called Texas.
Yes.
And I was interested to hear that the timing was actually done with a good new rocket.
And apparently a lot of seniors use good new rocket for the demos and timing.
Have you heard of this yourself?
I do remember hearing about that for Texas.
And I remember when I heard that, I googled it to try and figure out what this thing was.
Yeah.
Did I use it for music or just camera paths?
I don't know.
What it was used for?
It's, I don't know.
I don't know.
Like maybe camera paths just for the fact that it seems like you can control the pitching yaw of rockets and whatnot.
I think like a total random thing of this project for like controlling rockets is being used.
And then I'll see.
Yeah.
Be interesting to do some research and just find out who's the one this first started.
Getting rocket.
What?
But let's see here.
Okay.
So you're going to, you're going to Block Party 2010.
Do you plan on going to any parties before that?
Or once you're next party?
Yeah.
I'm hoping to make it out to Block Party because I've missed the last couple.
I've also been tempted to go to a break point.
I definitely want to go there sometime before I die.
I'll see you in the break point.
No.
I talked to Andrew.
He went there last year and really enjoyed it.
And it sounds like he may be going in again this year.
At some point I have to get out there.
Unfortunately, it kind of happens that roughly the same time as Block Party.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I kind of find that unfortunate here.
I quite want to go to break point before I die as well.
Yeah.
And I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
I was just going to say that assembly, when I was there, everyone was telling me, like, oh,
a break point.
That's the one you really need to go to.
You know, assembly is probably the biggest by the number of people.
But, you know, it's so many gamers there.
Whereas break point is the, you know, seniors only.
Yeah.
Did you attend booze assembly at all?
I did.
It's kind of low key, so I didn't realize I was at booze assembly.
I think I've seen an invite for booze assembly.
Yeah.
I think it's an intent to invite or something like that.
If I understand correctly, I think it's, you know, there's some big rock or something.
That, you know, everyone goes up there and just kind of hangs out with the spirit and socializes.
Yeah.
I think that's what they call a booze assembly.
I did just think it's becoming an official party, more or less, just in the way it's treated.
So, that's kind of funny.
Are you going to go to another assembly?
I'd like to.
I definitely had a good time.
I think I want to go to a point or a sundown or some other European party that I haven't been to before.
I do a repeat with assembly.
Have you been to function?
What's that?
Have you been to function?
I have not.
Hungry?
I don't know too much about it, but I'm not sure if that's an interesting tourist place.
Okay.
Yeah.
Curial and I are working on, you know, our next demo already with no idea what party will wind up really seeing that.
So maybe break point, block party, maybe something sooner if they have remote entries, but who knows.
So, what do you think about for your next demo?
Have you, what have you worked on so far?
Do you have any plan for this?
Or are you just working on particular effects?
Or can you tell me about it at all?
Or is it much too secretive?
Yeah.
We've got a lot of different ideas of things we want to do, some much too ambitious.
So we're kind of going in the average of all those directions and building out the effects and different things that really interest us at a time.
And then kind of, as we get closer, we'll start piecing together all the different bits we have, important to, you know, some cohesive demo.
Okay.
Do you have a, do you have any modeling tools that you've made within your group or texture generating tools?
I know that is fairly common, especially for the size-constrained, size-constrained groups that produce a lot of 64Ks or 4Ks, for instance, it seems like they have a lot of tools for generating procedural textures.
And procedural this and procedural that, and I'm wondering, do you have any tools for generating like procedural geometries or anything like that that you've used for your demos?
Well, I've got a texture generator that I did many years ago, and that's something, you know, if we go to do a 4K or 64K,
and Carol's actually really interested in playing around with it and seeing what he can do.
And for the geometry and the fourth half-tour, after Soku's second demo that we released at Assembly in 2007, we stopped using the demo studio demo tool,
and sort of switched over to kind of style that Navis and IQ and those guys are going where it's, you know, no tool manually do it in code.
And as Navis says, get that sort of handcrafted field to it.
So I've built up a lot of routines in there for doing procedural things with meshes and so forth, and right now it's still all for like, you know, demo, not necessarily an intro,
but since it is procedural at some point, you know, I could take some little school bits and then work that into an intro.
I've seen on your blog you have these worms that come out of skull.
Yes, and that is actually for, you know, the next demo that we're working on, I want to have this creature that's maybe the evolution of the organism from Nosis that is smashing and destroying an environment.
So I've been prototyping, apparently, this is kind of simulating, you know, these tentacles or these different shapes that I want to look like they're animating or flowing over surfaces.
I haven't gotten quite the looks that I want yet. I do have some cool stuff that I haven't posted yet.
I think I'm getting pretty close.
The ultimate idea for the sequence is really ambitious stuff, so I think I won't get anywhere near close to what I really want it to be, but hopefully it will turn out cool.
Yeah, hopefully it will be satisfied with whatever, with whatever it turns out happens to be the demo.
So a lot of the things, it's hard to know when you're starting, you know, how it'll turn out and things kind of take on a life of their own and kind of pull you in the direction that they want to go.
Now, do you have music for this out of curiosity? I'm asking this because I found for me just having a track or something, having generated music first and listening to that and coming up with ideas from the music seems to be a lot easier.
Like, I've never done it the other way around. Of course, I have early released too many demos, but I have a few, right?
So, like, how do you start to think about the design of a demo?
Yeah, most of us that I've worked on have done that way where we started from the music and then build up things to try and sit with it.
But it is really constraining. Like, oftentimes you will wind up with some really cool effect or something that worked out really nice, but then in the end it doesn't sit the music or when you're trying to piece it together with the sync points.
You can't sit at them and it's really painful throwing those bits away.
So, for this next one, I think it'll be kind of like the block party invite where we work on a bunch of the main visuals we want and then we'll bring in probably gloom again for the music.
That's cool. So, gloom, gloom, did he make this music in response to the style that you have sent them with the block party invite?
Yeah, I'm not sure all of his process, but I had a different piece of music that I developed the intro sequence with the boxes and the sync for.
And so, I gave him that video and then also, you know, me, him and Carol talked about kind of a design and what we're going for with the end scene in the different parts.
And so then gloom created the music and then gave it back to us and then we started sitting more of the visuals to it and then, you know, asked him for some changes to the music again and then worked more on finally thinking everything up.
Yeah, really like how that process worked out because we got things flowing both ways that we got the visuals that we really wanted and music that fit it really well.
And then when we get the music from him, we find places that sort of inspire us to do something different and so that also fed into it.
How is your process with your graphics artists? If you don't mind me asking.
So, it's really key work as a company I do. And so, you know, we live in the same town and see each other almost every day at work.
So, we get to talk about the different ideas that we have and we started recently having a short folder where we throw in cool concept art that we find or screenshots or videos of other things that we think are inspiring.
And so, we sort of collaboratively work on the design that way. He's an amazing model editor and you can do 2D texture art and that as well.
So, I'm very fortunate to be working with him. I know the Northern Dragons, they don't have someone that's kind of like a professional, you know, artist.
So, they have to do a lot of things themselves trying to figure out Blender and that.
Alright, cool. I think I'm going to close this interview if you don't mind.
And we will be closing with 1995 by FX and Coolers.
And so, we'll see you next week. Take care.
We'll see you next week.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.