Slashdot Mirror
The Assembly In Review
codetalker writes: "Assembly 2001 ended on August 6th and it seems that the demo scene hasn't died yet. Head on over to their ftp and download the latest marvels from Helsinki's massive annual programming and digital art/music competition.
Wired also has a couple articles on the subject here(1), here(2) and here(3)."
Check out this demo, the only linux demo at assembly: (it came 5th)
mfx - dose2 (on pouet.net)
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
After you've watched the original you should definitely see the C64 version of Second Reality (I'm not kidding) to help put things back into perspective. 1MHz/64kB should be enough for everyone. You can download it at ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/parties/1997/theparty97/c6 4/smash_secondreality_d64.zip and it should work on any good C64 emulator. At least Vice works just fine.
It seems to me that demo crews would be more interested in writing for Linux than they are. It just seems like the two cultures would mesh well, but apparently they haven't very much.
Why are most of the demos these days for Windows? Is it a cultural thing, or a technical thing? Are there multimedia limitations under Linux that are not addressed by SDL, etc?
Sigh. I used to run a BBS dedicated to Amiga demos. The stuff back then was some amazing shit. I've still never seen anything on a PC that impressed me as much. It would be cool if a free OS someday became the demo platform of choice.
If you read through the FAQ on slashdot you'll see that the FAQ clearly says that slashdot very much IS US centric. The staff is mostly American I believe, and US news is more interesting to Americans than the rest of the world.
Anyway it shouldn't be too hard to make new topic like 'Europe' or even mirror the site in Europe.
Dude, I still have my GUS. Too bad I no longer have an ISA slot to stick it in :(
I agree with you, FC kicked the most ass overall. But I still remember the demo from Into the Shadows. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, ItS was a game written by a group called Triton. Man, it rocked! Imagine a 3rd person action/rpg with 3D characters, non-orthogonal walls and lightning. The characters casted MOVING SHADOWS on the wall. Yeah, big deal, you might say... but try to do this at a decent frame rate on a 486/80Mhz. In software. To put in into perspective, at that time, Doom was the ultimate 3D engine on the market.
Unfortunately, the game was never released. Guess they stumbled when it came to business...
I hoped they would release the source code. I still haven' figured it out how they did it...
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Skaven's music still absolutely rocks.
I still look at the "chaos clouds" sequence in 2ndreal written by wildfire (or maybe it was psi) and I still have no idea how he coded that. You figure out how they did all the other scenes, but that one sequence is still a mystery. It looks so smooth and chaotic and complex. I suspect that he is using 3 different plasma fields drawn separately on neighboring pixels in such a high resolution that your eye blends them together. That still doesn't explain how he draws each field though. It doesn't look like your usual Perlian noise, and it certainly isn't as ugly as a typical recursive "plasma" function, so how does he do it!??
That's the beauty of demos. If you've ever tried any graphics programming before, then you appreciate how tricky it is, and you ask yourself "How did he DO that?!!".
Tragically I can no longer hear the music for the demo because SB emulation doesn't seem to work under DOS for my Vortex2 chip - probably some conflict with my i815E chipset mobo. If anyone has suggestions on how to get that working again, I'd be really grateful to hear it.
-OzJuggler
Life's a buffer; you can only get out of it what you put into it! C:-)
If you like those eye-candy demos, you can download from this repository at: www.scene.org Browse their archive!
They have all sort of demo collections from various groups and various fests. Cool! Gigs of download. Don't forget to check out the Java demos too. It will make you wonder how can they make such a cool (and very fast) demo like that in Java.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
I got into the demo scene, like many others, after seeing Second Reality from Future Crew. I immediately went out and bought a GUS. I still have it, I recently plugged it into an Alpha but it doesn't seem to work...
Imagine my delight when I look under MP3-musiikki and find this. I downloaded it and I'm really impressed. They haven't done a big demo since Second Reality (a couple of mini-demos only) but I am totally happy that Purple Motion is still at it.
I'm going to have to try some of those demos at work tomorrow where I have access to a Windows box. If only they were all SDL like iXalance, which I found about a month ago...
Module music in the "scene" carries samples of the instruments along with the file. Yet Discover magazine thought an MIT researcher's work in the field was so novel that he was a finalist in their 1997 Discover Awards (see "Bringing Music to the Web"). A project (whos name escapes me) combines audio data with the music to play it, and calls it a new format.
Anyway, there are plenty of players out there if you want to listen in. For MS Windows users, there's Winamp, although I personally prefer Modplug over Winamp, hoping that my favorite player of all time, Cubic, will be worked on again and make a comeback.
Linux users have their choice of a variety of players. XMMS has a plugin available with the engine from modplug. Several others also exist as well.