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.
More info
merlucin and kolian had started discussing ways to improve the demo engine they had built some time earlier, after the presentation of Hepilektic at FIberParty 2002.
There was still a lot of work to do. After presenting Spontz Goes to Dixieland at Euskal Encounter, kolian returned to the code, and the two of them began working on this new production. It was our first demo built on top of SDL. This library allowed us to abstract the code from the underlying platform, making it possible to compile versions for Mac OS X and Windows, and eventually Linux as well.
The music was heavily influenced by the tool used to compose it: Reason 1.0 for Mac OS X.
Some effects required a considerable amount of work. Two notable examples were the fire tunnel with the falling man and the rotating planets. The fire tunnel was particularly challenging because of its complexity, as the tunnel geometry was generated in real time, although the fire texture itself was static.
The rotating planets, on the other hand, were a great way to debug the positioning and relative movement routines in the demo engine. Each planet was carefully designed and positioned by hand.
There was a third effect that also took a lot of effort: the water-like surface towards the end of the demo. Our approach to simulating water wasn't particularly good. What you see is a simple grid of nodes simulating the water surface. We weren't very happy with the result, which also behaved differently depending on the speed of the machine running the demo. Still, it did the job, and the effect was never used again, much like the fire tunnel.