Xphere

Released in Evoke 2024 in Köln (Germany) this is the first demo we completed with Phoenix, the flamant, new and updated demoengine created by Xphere in the scarce time he could gather at night after putting the kids to sleep.

Many years passed since our last production. Life has kept us busy, but this does not mean that we are still dead. Let's call it an active half-zombie state. Anyway, here is the last excretion of our brains: electroscopia, a 203 second endless demo.

The concept behind this production is a bit diffuse. It started as a elucubration of several space scenes in which there were some physical laws that were distorted, but then was slightly moved to a concept involucrating the mind and the creative process.

We changed our demomaking process with this one. We tried to put everything together telling kind of a story or heading somewhere at least.

This demo started like a small project to teach isaac2 how to use our demo editor, but the result was visually appealing enough to present it to the contest.

After the second part of Die Änderung, we made a promise to ourselves: no more demos until the engine had a realtime preview. We stuck to that promise for almost an entire year, working on the engine and trying to get everything into shape. And here it is: the demo that came out of all that work.

After the previous production, Kolian officially stepped away from coding, and Merlucin took over the work on the engine. He added ten framebuffer slots, allowing framebuffers to be stored and retrieved as needed. This made it possible to combine effects in layers, either independently or with one layer affecting another. For instance, a simple blur could be applied to objects in the middle of a layer stack without affecting those that had already been rendered.

Back then, the demoscene forums were buzzing with heated debates about art and the demoscene itself. Should the demoscene be considered some kind of weird form of art?

This edemo featured spline-controlled arrays of particles and objects, plus a versatile effect repeater very powerful to add sync points.

Born from a week of experimentation, 080808 pushed the Spontz engine into darker and noisier territory. What began as a technical experiment became a strange fusion of improvised music, recycled visuals and raw demoscene chaos.

Cosmosis was the only demo submitted to the Fiberparty 2007 competition, but it never made it to the screen, as the competition was cancelled due to a lack of productions.

Zon@ Neutr@ built this demo using our DemoEngine, and then we participated in the same competition, fighting for the best position in the ranking until reality kicked our asses.

This version of the demo editor is focused in bug fixing. As the new version will be a major rewriting, we want to leave this one as clean as possible. We got rid of the annoying tools window, integrating the working tools in the main edition area, added additional support for modern OpenGL graphics, created a new demo project with a complex scene, increased the number of simultaneous layers available and cleaned lots of dead code from the engine.

Although it's impossible to consider the Spontz demo editor stable, it deserves the 2.0 version change. The rework includes support to open multiple projects at the same time with copy and paste support between them. The demo engine now communicates through TCP/IP with the demo editor, making possible a realtime preview. Other features include GLSL shaders support, Frame Buffer Objects support (FBOs) and a realtime expression evaluator, that allows to vary almost all the parametrs along the time.

This version features the search and replace script contents, multi-bar selection, bar enable/disable, a loading screen editor, a pool browser window for quick media access and an images and audio preview.

This is the first public version of our editor! The tool excels at moving multiple sections at a time and there are also various tools for common effects like the 3D image or the color fader too.