Creating the Software Art In Tron Legacy

hownottowrite writes "A software artist has posted an overview of the coding behind the tools used to create Tron Legacy's special effects. 'In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance — splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie.' Ok, it's mostly a lot of awesome images, but there's a nifty reveal about an homage to Bit."

Comments

TRON needed more TRON

[bpgslashdotaccount]

Can't post anything intelligent about the article, (MCP seems to have locked me out), so I'll say something about the movie: I mostly loved it, but it needed more TRON. He should have been a much more important character. Users' sake, his name is half of the movie title!

Re:TRON needed more TRON

[bpgslashdotaccount]

Coral cache has it: http://jtnimoy.net.nyud.net/workviewer.php?q=178

Re:TRON needed more TRON

[Digital Vomit]

TRON: Legacy should have had a lot of things. It should have had more lightcycle action. It should have had some Recognizer action. It should have had some tank action. It should have had sets that looked like they were from a computer world and less like the real world. It should have had the feel of a computer world instead of just a futuristic world. It should have had a good story.

It should have had a lot of things.

Twenty-eight fucking years...

Google's Cache

[sgtstein]

This might be helpful... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PDbfWzLJrQUJ:jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php%3Fq%3D178+http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php%3Fq%3D178+cache&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com

Re:So emacs was in a blockbuster movie

[Anonymous Coward]

You're exactly right. It doesn't change how bad emacs is.

uh oh, talking out of channels

[Anonymous Coward]

Stallman and the FSF may now insist that the movie be released on DVD as GNU/Tron Legacy.

Re:Windows

[RobbieCrash]

Aside from the fact that Encom is/was a free software company.

Re:So emacs was in a blockbuster movie

[davester666]

Who cares. The Net showed off Jasik's Debugger!

Real men edit with vi

[GodfatherofSoul]

I spit on your keyboard, noov ctrl-x ctrl-x ctrl-i b ctrl-dd...awe, damnit...

Barely on topic: pkill/pgrep

[bipbop]

ps | grep? I've been happy since pgrep was added (to Solaris first, but then reimplemented on Linux and FreeBSD/NetBSD). I thought I'd mention it here in case some people reading haven't run into it yet, 'cause even though it's a pretty minor thing, it's neat :-)

Interesting Tie-In

[Mister Transistor]

Since there is nothing to see here I've got an interesting Tron story. I must have watched the original at least 25-30 times through the years, I own a 12" laserdisc and DVD's of it, and never really noticed before, but after re-watching it on TV the other day due to sheer boredom, I finally noticed a name at the end credits I never recognized before - Peter Jurasik. It suddenly dawned on me that was the actor who played Londo Molari on Babylon 5 - you know, the Centauri ambassador with the Peacock / Bozo hair. I tried to think of who it was in the movie, and realized it's the accounting /actuarial program that gets imprisoned at the beginning along with ROM? CROM?. He says of the MCP - "Who does he calculate he is, anyway?". That's him! Just thought I'd share that bit of trivia with everyone.

Re:Interesting Tie-In

[pacbowl]

IMDB actually has some interesting trivia about TRON. Such as the random pulses in the light ribbons on the background walls were glitches in the effects so they added sound to them and incorporated them into the world.

Re:Interesting Tie-In

[sparkz]

Don't keep us waiting - what's the interesting story? ;-)

Anyone catch the output of uname?

[tlhIngan]

Well, now everyone will copy and paste the output from the DVD, but I saw it in the theatre.

And I saw Flynn key in "uname -a" and I tried to parse the listing for interesthing things.

Alas, all I caught as the OS was named "SolarOS" and the arch was "sun4m". A tribute to ye olde SunOS, I guess (SunOS/sparc).

Though, I'd love that nice popup history window...

Re:Anyone catch the output of uname?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since noone seems to actually do it, here you go:

$ whoami
Flynn
$ uname -a
SolarOS 4.0.1 Generic_50203-02 sun4m i386
Unknown.Unknown
$ login -n root
Login incorrect
login: backdoor
No home directory specified in password file!
Logging in with home=/
# bin/history
488 cd /opt/LLL/controller/laser/
489 vi LLSDLaserControl.c
490 make
491 make install
492 ./sanity_check
493 ./configure -o test.cfg
494 vi test.cfg
495 vi ~/last_will_and_testament.txt
496 cat /proc/meminfo
497 ps -a -x -u
498 kill -9 2207
499 kill 2208
500 ps -a -x -u
501 touch /opt/LLL/run/ok
502 LLSDLaserControl -ok 1

And of course he straight goes to running it, instead of cat'ing the testament, or actually checking what it does ..
# bin/LLSDLaserControl -ok 1

Re:Anyone catch the output of uname?

[troff]

(The following is a meta-post, with only the hint of a threat of a future on-topic posting.)

I don't know who's downvoting all these comments. I appreciate the "informative" and "humorous" nature of this.

Fine, mods. Downvote me, I don't give a flying. It'll just prove the point; there's a lot of downvoting of perfectly reasonable comments and criticisms here. Parent AC is right, it was stupid to run a program without even trying to know what it does. ... I'd include a further criticism of the movie's poor writing and handling of Flynn even HAVING the laser in his basement, but the last criticism I posted of the writers got a 0 and I wouldn't be surprised to see it dropped further. Sheesh. It's like being on ${other_fora_I_won't_name}.

Re:Processing community?

[Haven]

Processing is a set of libraries that I think use Java to do "creative coding"

lots of generative art is made with "Processing"

I do a lot of work with openframeworks, which was also used along with cinder and houdini.

check out my work @ http://university-records.com/

Re:So emacs was in a blockbuster movie

[slimjim8094]

Hey, at least it doesn't make me enter a new mode to start editing text - you know, the 'delete everything' mode instead of the other one, 'beep constantly'