pouët.net

thanks for all the nice comments we really havent expected so much feedback. :)

dane,

how about having code for displaying 4x1024 dots (some on the borders) in the memory, and while the effect plays loading beside it a koala picture with sprite overlay which extends to the borders. (dottunel and the "tiger" afterwards)

or how about drawing filledvectors into 3 different layers, playing digi, displaying a rasterbar while data is being loaded and decrunched, all at the same time? (melon scene with countdown)

maybe we have made it look too easy.

Hollowman, a list of csdb links with the effects that were done better would help to see your statement in its full glory.

Jack, sorry I cannot accept unfair criticism.

lets see,

our chessboard vs gameover's one:

soul vs desert dream xrotator

dane, our chessboard moves lightyears nicer, and we only dont switch d021 each line since the original has solid chessboards aswell. also gameover is much more inaccurate at the edges. doesnt pays off for the extra 8 lines if you ask me. The soul effect is on the borders, but has half the resolution, now which one wins? if I'd do an allborder 8x8 cube, bet you would say it has been done better before since there are higher resolution cubes.

now list some more parts, as you have stated these are just a few examples of what have been done better so far.

Dane, your bashing here is only done due to your envyness. to quote yourself: "I'm quite sad to see such a positive hype" yes that tells it all. We have dozens of original productions both chorus and resource, however you only feel like commenting our demos when you think they get too much attention. Very brave move man congrats. You could come up with 3 parts out of 16 which were done better so far, quite a weak argument when stating that its not filled with hardcore effects. These days I could do fill 3 mindblowing demos out of 16 effects.Fact is that you only dont like the effects since they are not original, you have written yourself: "would have been very impressive if only you had designed it all by yourself." I can accept that but that doesnt prove your statement that our effects are not hardcore.

now go back to your cave, and come back again commenting when you feel again that a demo gets too much hype for your taste. cheers.

Thanks for the positive feedback. Really cool to see so much positive feedback. :) It also justifies somehow it worth the serious effort we put into this project. As for the motivation from my part behind the reamke, JAC! already told it perfectly. We didn't make this to cheaply win at Bp or something like that... I wouldn't care if Oxy wins with their demo they would deserve it.

As for the trivial 'originality' critique, you all are right. We prepared for that since the beginning of this project and it glances off us easily. :)

Anybody with a little knowledge about c64 coding can see that there were serious issues realising this demo. It wasn't like a trivial thing to do all these effects in a c64 trackmo with decent looking. Hollowman you're wrong, we were seriously concerned all the way during the process that we will fail with it, it wasn't trivial. 14 years or not it was an Amiga 500 demo, and 80% of the effects gave us serious problems. One of the biggest concern was to be able keeping the quick pace of displaying all effects without losing the timing to the music (30-40 different screens), since nearly all parts were quite demanding with memory usage. Doing effects like the blown up filled vector or realising the intro vector scene or the falling bricks transition effect were very hard to get over with. We will make a final more polished version with a readme file to the people who liked the present version and are interested about the obstacles we had to solve.

@Dane, since you attacked 3 effects of mine, I have to respond in short:

- X rotator+Jelly picture: going to the borders wasn't a probelm, but one have to consider the aspect ratio of the original picture and the visibility area of the effect. However the interlace mode I think is an improvement to hide the blocky resolution there and works well.

- Zoomscroll: +H2K has better resolution yes, but one have to consider the Z movement. Look at the calm sinus of my version when the scroll approaches the minimal size, and compare with +H2K. This is due to my totally different approach realising the effect.

- Chessboard bender: complaining about 8 pixels height difference is out of the point, since one have to consider the rastertime I left for depacking the next part (remember it's a trackmo). Notice the better looking and longer waves (I faked an 512 long sinus movement instead of standard 256) despite the resolution difference due to more accuracy. The every line d021 was intentionally avoided to have solid colors in every chessrow.

All in all, It was very hard to ponder all possibilities and choose the seemingly best compromise for most effects...

@Optimus: the Reflex balls were smaller (12*12) and have a fixed Y movement thus not having real 3d movements, so we decided to skip that approach. Our version has lower resolution and speed but has 24*24 big balls, transparency, clipping, and using a 80 pixels wide 4x4 fli mode (covering the fli bug as well). As I said it was a question of choosing the best compromise here too.

hi there. thanks for all the kind words. i expected massive feedback like this but wasn't aware that even my music conversion job will be marked in such a way. =) thanks again! some people asked about the player... apart from the hidden part tunes *hint hint* which were made in goattracker, all demo tunes are composed in the somewhat faster driver 6 from laxity/MoNs sidfactory. thank you thomas for implementing some requested stuff for your favourite bugger! you see, i even didn't use the most powerful player around and also had to deal with some out of instruments/effects issues so the result could have been even better. however... one last word to all the "originality" whiners. we have been involved in other more original releases but this time, we took the challenge to do a remake and believe me it WAS a challenge in every aspect! WE KNOW it lacks on the originality side of course and it's a bit pointless to tell us we should stick to original demos, really! for me, not only focus or fairlight demos are good and i think it's the different demo concepts that makes the scene so colourful and this also includes a remake if it's well done like in the case of desert dream or simply a traditional hardcoded oxyron demo without proper concept. ;-P the worst comment came from dane (I'm quite sad to see such a positive hype over something that is neither original nor filled with extremely hard stuff). sorry stellan but this was dissapointing and even sounds a bit jealous - but of course you are not, maybe it's the words that are chosen in a clumsy way. ;) hugs to kefrens, the C64 DD crew and all downvoters, i love you! =) /fanta

tempest... well, actually the tunes were much better. but i used a sid2spectrum tool afterwards as i didn't want to beat all jeroen tel tunes at once.

stage7: sids have finally been released, you can grab it from the csdb page. Subtune 4 plays all tunes in a row without loading pause.

Forgot to post this here... Live recording from the Commodore 64 demo competition at Breakpoint 2007 of the Desert Dream. Turn up the volume real loud if you want to get an idea of the atmosphere there IRL.:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6429666401378358044