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.
Demos
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.
Particles! This is the merlucin´s favourite theme for a demo. This production was done basically because AMB provided pizza enough to merlucin and isaac2 was coming to BCN Party 111.
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.
This is an intense 65-second demo packed with energy, movement, and synchronization. Built around a track by Little Bitchard bearing the same name as the demo, it aims to capture the spirit of 1980s demo music.
This demo is as we would like it to be: smooth in colors, glossy, long and easy of listen and watch. Although the demo itself was scripted using an old powerbook it needs a better machine to run seamessly. Try G4s with very good 3D cards or G5 configurations for better performance. We have also put a lot of care in the details. Find inside nice blurred and partially diffuse scenes, smooth color schemas, spirals and other iconography related with dreams.
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?
Kolian was working really hard in the demoengine for this demo. He got more than a 50% of speed increment, plus a texture and models cache, new realtime effects, plus the ability of rendering 3DS animations directly composed with 3D studio or exported from lightwave.
Until now, all our productions have been edited manually using a text editor. For this production we implemented a visual object-oriented editor, allowing us to accelerate the demomaking about 400%. This is the first production in which deekay participates as graphician. Take a look to his wonderful c64-like credits!
This edemo featured spline-controlled arrays of particles and objects, plus a versatile effect repeater very powerful to add sync points.
The particle engine was completely ended for this production. Kolian accelerated the demo to lightspeed with a new memory manager capable of track each allocated structure and remove it while the demo is being displayed, to avoid stops in the visuals. Almost all the appearance was redesigned and the engine entered partially in the generic phase, in which all the code becomes reusable for future productions.
This demo brought forth a new particle engine, reworked 3D routines, and a new title effect wrought from particles and texture-light detection.
We invested a huge amount of time and effort into this demo. Everything was done by hand: there was no demo editor, scenes had to be synchronised manually, objects were repositioned and adjusted with every new compilation, and the script (take a look at it!) was an absolute mess.
We experimented with all sorts of tools, such as KPT Bryce for skyboxes, LightWave for 3D models, Reason for music, Poser for characters, and so on. We were also beginning to think about how to eliminate the bottlenecks that made the demo creation process so slow and tedious.
Watch this demo, and let the old spirit of Spontz run through your veins. Many effects and scenes were forged for it, yet only the finest survived.
Beware the greetings and the final summons to the now-vanished BCN Party. After this, no demo shall seem truly bad again.
We placed 8th. Out of 11.
This was our very first production! Iit was pretty cool to meet other people who were also making demos and discover that there was this whole world going on around us. Turns out we weren't the only weirdos messing around with computers!