A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

This is the final of the prod that won the Kindergarden intro compo this year. It participated in the compo at The Ultimate Meeting aswell where it came second in Low end intro (it was stated on the big screen that it had been shown before at Kindergarden, but they showed it anyway as the compo had so few entries). Credits are as follows

Loaderror/eph : code, music, visual stuff
Nerve/eph : size optimizing
Stingray/scarab : lots of size optimizing, fixing the 6 year old sound bug of death, c2p,cruncher and fixed some other bugs of mine :)

Also Skjeggspir/contraz sat patiently with me in the long hours at Kindergarden helping with size optimizing.

Zixaq/eph came up with the great romantic chord progression after hearing some initial attempts by me and explained lots of music stuff to me as usual. :) Also, the song was too slow originally so Frequent convinced me to up the tempo a bit. :)

Leech at

ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/tum/tUM_2005/Low-End_Intro/Loaderror_Ep hidrena_+_StingRay_Scarab_-_Gin_and_Tronic.exe

music super :) but with other not so good as i am was hope, but anyway very good :)

i'll try do add it sometime in the near future (it's a bugger when planet-d is down during the week-end)

Brilliant 4k, again. Haven`t seen similar visuals in a 4k production before, I think. Music rules aswell.
Why are guys like Loaderror and Stingray blessed with so much skills, while I have none?! Life`s unfair :)

Great.
What is the minimal configuration ? is FPU needed ?

Having watched the 'high end' pc 4k intros, i think this intro wouldn't have looked out of place in that compo instead of the 'low end' compo.

@krabob :
you'll need FPU for some sinus stuff

Some intro trivia

The theme is basically implicit geometry here.. Typically, find out if one is inside a circle x² + y² = r² type. Using this, the font was built from a series of circle sectors mirrored about. One can make different looking fonts too by using higher power functions.. f.ex x³+y³ = r³ gives a square form with rounded corners which makes some pretty cool letters.

The logos were drawn in 640x320 size (4 times the screen size) and then every group of 4 neighbouring pixels were averaged into one pixel. This makes the antialiasing of the font edges. Everybody should do it :)

The candy cylinders are essentially one map that contains each candy's height,colour, brightness and type. There are four types of ground geometry: cylinder, cylinder with hole, a rectangle with round corners and a set of decorative floor-rings. Each type has it's own "inside map" of 256x256 pixels and a shadow texture (should have been larger as one can see the voxels when close to the candy)...

The scene is a bit of 2.5d. It is possible to rotate and move up and down and from side to side, but a roll on the z-axis isn't possible. The cameras were a bit of a pain in the ass to make as the camera kept crashing into the candy all the time. There is also variable fog which needed to be finetuned to every camera to hide some curious horizon artifacts.

But the best thing for me was the snare sound! I don't believe in snares made out of white noise + a base drum. All scientific papers conclude after lengthy analysis that a snare is a base drum + noise.. and then try to hide the fact that their great theoretical snare sounds like crap to reap better results in press or somehting.. All sound papers should include sound clips included with the abstract so that one can hear if it is worth spending any time on reading them.

Regrets:
- No colour fading in the transitions
- No colour boosting to the music
- The candy doesn't move up and down in the typical demo fashion
- The music has more potential and there is space however there is not
motivation nor effects to fill a longer tune (the melody between the lead and the bass is pretty nice on its own played with a soft sine voice:) )
- Only 64 colours used even though the c2p is 256 colour so lots of banding in the colours could have been removed.
- a candy at night mode for the end could have been nice
- the speed sucked when I left it, but I hope it is better now after Stingray changed c2p.
- the shadow texture doesn't really work for the cylinder with hole shape.
- no infinite hexagon landscapes :)
- no candy in a tunnel effect.

I'll brag some more when I come up with more stuff :)

Is this intro a signal for breakpoint06??? Ephidrena+Scarab ruling over TBL?
I am anxious to see this years AMiGA COMPOS. Gtx, d!RT!E/mdS

- Only 64 colours used even though the c2p is 256 colour so lots of banding in the colours could have been removed.

I have replaced it with a 6 bpl c2p. ;)

Is this intro a signal for breakpoint06??? Ephidrena+Scarab ruling over TBL?

Hmm... i would be careful with that quote :) I thought i read somewhere that Kalms has gone back to study instead of working... He also promised a demo with far more code in it. So if indeed TBL is going to release something, we could be in for a surprise.

Now if only Jamie/Skarla would do as promised and release a demo from the leftovers he has. And Winden/Network ofcourse :)

Oh, and i don't hope Ephidrena will release something at BP because whenever i do hope, it goes tits up :) and nothing gets released (like last year...)

<old school big-mouthed brawling rethoric>
As if Kalmsen going back to study (and thus harder amiga democoding instead of harder ps and xbox democoding) wasn't enough challenge, Louie can't just keep out of doing great gfx and design... but the "TBL world domination" has to come to an end for once...
</old school big-mouthed brawling rethoric>

Any chance of AVI from this 4k?

@Winden: =)

can't wait for BP, going to book my flights tomorrow while they still are affordable.

I recommend using Oxypatcher or some other fpu replacemen thingy to get some extra speed.

Hey Load!

Very nice 4k! Though I never thought of it as candy, more like plastic pieces :)

Thanks for the inside information on the code, it's very interesting to read comments from real coders, which happens approximately once in a lifetime. More of this please! There are so many coder ideas out there but we have noone to discuss it with!

The talk about Ephidrena/TBL is kind of meaningless in this case, as this is a 4k and TBL makes 20mb+ demos.

finally saw the intro yesterday... very nice, looks like a tilemap (as in 2d scrolling games of chilhood memories) with the tiles themselves being drawn as voxels with correct X and Y tilting, am i correct?

that could be a good description yes :)
theres a height map and I derive what tiletype it should be from some bits in the heightmap.