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Excellent atmosphere !

cool

Definitely the best demo in the compo, I loved it!

Great!

Awesome production, best demo in the compo.

Best demo in the compo, not empty at all! Love the particles and super nice design!

Further very good looking AGA demo. My second favorite.

but how does it work???

Rulez

Fresh and cool effects. The particle stuff and the hex stuff were really neat.

Excellent demo!

Probably my favourite from the compo, excellent design, polished presentation with technically interesting effects and wonderful music. Well done!

Really nice and coherent style in this one, and nice usage of dithering to keep both color resolution and screen resolution strong :)

great

I like it a lot.

Quite an excellent demo with great design (as expected) and really nice effects. Music is very nice as well. Thanks for the Cognac Frequent, I'm gonna enjoy it with the better half soon. :)

Top-notch AGA demo!
Nice bluish color palette. Hexagons are sexy!

Excellent music and a lot of well designed effects (that are, by the way, not just the usual c2p but a bit spiced with a clever use of the custom Amiga hardware).

That hexagonal voxel landscape with fog looks quite good and smooth!

Love the design and the 2d overlays. Effects are all done with good style too. Love the crunchy Foley sounding percussion on the music, top work frequent.

Beautiful effects and fitting music.

Simply excellent. #2 in the compo for me, narrowly behind Unique. Those particles are no doubt the best I've seen on Amiga. Consistent colors, pro music, this here is a prime example of how to properly package together a demo.

Nice evolution and remixing of effects we've seen in 6-7 other Ephidrena prods. :) Especially the radialblob was pleasing.

The demo has a lot of glitches and hiccups on real HW (060/50mhz) though.

(oh and in the linked youtube cap from AmigaOmega the voxel landscape doesn't seem to be hexagonal? plus the sync appears to be waay off )

I don't know well about Amiga but that particles are amazing

My favorite demo of the Amiga compo

mesmerizing!
really cool style and excellent music.

Nice.

what TheMechanist said =)

Good one

Pulsating, fascinating, technically masterly and with great, relaxing electronic sounds. You know how to make demos shine!

Love it. Maybe missing usual Ephidrena's amount of graphics, but still impressive. Defo my cup of tea. Good to see you guys back!

classy af

Nice consistent color scheme and lovely dithered deformations. A bit dull though. I don't mind slow at all, quite the opposite actually, but this hardly brought any emotions up which is a shame.

Nice :)

I very much enjoyed watching this.

Masterpiece ! *5*

holy crap it looked nice. superb design and effects.

so

Solid quality, love that chilly trancy track

Fresh design & effects, the best i have seen from EPH since Software Make The Dance Foam Oil.

fantastic from beginning to the end. very smooth + fitting tune.

I really liked this just until before the end, where somehow the consistent design and colors broke a bit.

really nice & polished

I wrote some details about this demo over at Amiga Demoscene Archive Linky

Enjoyed this a lot! <3

Very nice and coherent demo with a great music.

Great to see EPH back :D

Nice!

Yeah !

Love to see a new Ephidrena prod!

Well, watched it on my miggy with B1260/50 MHz now and I'd really like to invert my upthumb. Slow as hell and with major visual glitches. Also it takes forever to load. Man, the Amiga scene makes me more and more disappointed. Is it all just about the compos these days?

It worked on Frequent’s 1260/50 Mhz, the 1260/70mhz compomachine, fsuae and winuae. However both you and Slummy are getting glitches (ironically Slummy is running it on my own machine). I’m working on a final so I’ll look into these issues.

Looking forward to it! My grumpiness is an airing of accumulated grievances from trying to run some good Amiga stuff from the last few years, with medium to poor results.

As for Hexel, I'm very happy about the combination of classic Amiga techniques and C2P, the particle effect looks especially Amiga-ish and lovely. If you manage superhires for the color cycling/reduction I think that might be an Amiga first? Can't remember ever seeing an shires effect.

I have run some of these effects in super hires 1280x256 (blue/orange light tunnel and the hexatables). The problem with this is the high chip mem usage.

if run by themselves there is usually no problem, but I’m encountering memory fragmentation issues when run as part of the full demo and then the demo quits because there is no block large enough to hold the planes available. So a different allocation scheme could do it.

Extra thumb up for the extremely interesting write-up!

Sweet, liked it a lot.

wow so so nice! EPH one of my favourite Amiga groups drops a beauty like this, that illuminated voxel object, hexatable tunnel <3 And what a lovely poised and delicate track from Frequent, one of my favs for sure!

ein hexel buntes!
lovely stuff :)

Hexagonal awesomeness.

Some tech info for loady:
Tried to run it from a MediatorPCI-ZIV/Picasso/VoodooIV and it wouldn't properly switch to PAL output on the CRT. Music was running but nothing happening visually.
Later ran it from a standard Hi-Res resolution and it ran.
Had a couple of those colour glitches here and there. Some of them actually oddly added to the atmosphere because they appeared in-sync [insert Timberlake parody] ;)

Can't get it to run here :(
A1200 w/ Blizzard 1260, 64mb RAM.

From WB, spends a while loading and starts, but is just all glitches - nothing recognizable on screen.
From clean no startup sequence boot, goes straight to guru meditation without the loading progress.

@dnlb : That's really weird. A1200 with 060 and 64MB should be enough.

@dodge : I don't have cybergraphics support anymore after I stopped using system friendly startup. I had a lot of issues trying to be system friendly on Neonsky and decided to throw out all system friendly code and just bang hardware (getting a new set of problems in the process).

I just do LoadView(NULL) at some point to tell the system the demo is using all customized screens. Do you know how I can "properly switch to PAL output on the CRT?"

Anyway keep the bug reports coming. I may come jumping at you for testing purposes before releasing the final.

LoadView(0 ) followed by 2 WaitTOF's is usually enough. If you want to be 10000% sure a PAL screen will be opened, you can open a small "fake" system screen (1 Bitplane) as well, then it should be 100% guaranteed that system switches to PAL.

The demo doesn't correctly switch to PAL when started from a Euro72 screen. Need to switch to regular PAL hires in WB first and it's fine.
Otherwise I don't think I had any major issues on real hw. The frame rate was sometimes a bit inconsistent and the precalc is quite long though.
Great demo. Some of the voxel parts looked maybe slightly too similar to older demos.

I have checked the code, here are your tasks for the final:

1. Add a config check so demo won't crash on systems without FPU.
2. Fix your "InitView" code! Remove the call to RemakeDisplay() after WaitTOF() and the demo will happily start from non-native screen modes! And while you are at it, there are much easier ways to store the current view than calling ViewAddress(). :)

For 1) do I need to ask it a difficult math question to see if the fpu is there? ;)

For 2) How do you know this stuff? Grarr

I still owe you 1 crate of beer (can be converted to equivalent alcohol currency such as cognac if you like that) and now maybe 2

I am stunned. And thank you for not going for yet another crowd-pleaser soundtrack!

That actually might be worth a try. :D



In this case: Decide to check why the demo doesn't work from RTG screens during a very boring meeting at work, load ReSource, look if WaitTOF() is called, find code which "probably will cause the problem as it isn't needed at all", disable said code with a $6004 opcode, test demo, write about it in the comments on Pouet. :D



Yay. \:D/ My only motivation for fixing your code. :)

Superb voxel-like & particles!

Well done. Dunno why the scroller was backwards/upside down though. :)

I’d be happy to test a ”beta” final on my glitchy 1260. @amigagrip on twitter.

Dunno how to judge this one, if this was pure AGA it would have rocked.

Zplex: What do you mean? This demo runs fine just with AGA (no GFX card).

I believe a lot of these effects could run fine on lower spec a1200 with some work. As 060s are becoming really rare it is a bit sad that these 060 demos almost never run on real hardware (only in emulator and youtube)

Nicely done

@grip : Thanks! I'll finish debugging on Frequent's amiga first and then I'll send you something for test.

Good stuff, good music, good Ephidrena :)))

Very good demo !

Some very nice renderings here.

Sweet stuff - very nice and moody music!

Cool

Final version is out Link

- Some "faster" routines
- Triple buffering
- Used 100% asm here and there
- Benchmark against partyversion using --fps commandline option
- Fixed flickering artefacts
- Fancy screen mode switch to pal
- Cpu/Fpu detection (even added 68080 detection for when the Vampire AGA gets out :) )
- Overlay disable option (to avoid seeing the effect explanations)
- Copper gradient on the scroller part
- Ease in ease out motion for the logos
- Misc small timing changes
- Reduced memory usage (but still needs > 32 MB Fast)
... perhaps even more!

Thanks to Frequent, Teo and Grip for the testing. I didn't dare to contact Dnlb as he got some scary bugs which might delay the final to next year :) If you are reading this I hope this final works for you by sheer luck.

Nice final version! Noticeable better. (Tested on A1200 060/50MHz)

hexellent!

Final ver works on my machine now, thanks :D
Buttery smooth too, with the exception of the voxel flyby.

Demo itself is nice, I really like the vibe from the colours and just general laid back design :)

I really enjoy watching this one! Not only has it nice design and effects, but the music is brilliant. :)

Nice voxels and tunnels and calm music

Yes. Supernice music and atmosphere

The Winner for me ! Greatest Amiga Aga production which look pro.

nice one!

moaw... awesome piece of style! visuals and music generate some great mood. stunning...

This is my favourite Amiga demo of 2018. Calm, balanced, atmospheric one with nice ambient music and well-chosen colors, and the "hexagonal bottom of the sea" is simply delicious.

Truly beautiful!

Hello again ;)
Looks great :) And work's quite good with 030/68882/50.
https://youtu.be/lWyIywoszis

Cios: Why would you publish a youtube capture with obvious bugs done on a platform config that the creators themselves explicitly state the demo was not made for?

I did't publish it to show obvious bugs but to show that it is possible to run the demo on a real Amiga with 030 and exept some parts it runs smooth.

The best Amiga demo in 2018!!!

very nice.

neat

Great

Wow! I mean WOW! Stylish, great design, neat choice of colors, nifty code, perfectly matching music! It's just ALL GOOD!

Always liked the soothing underwater athmosphere in this one (I just forgot to thumb it up, as usual).

A beauty.

Real killer.

Cool design, but the music felt like it wasn't there yet. There could be some interesting percussions, drum rhythms or ambient sounds added to finish it off.
Also the scenes could go by faster or have more things in them as well.

Forgotten thumb. This is really brilliant.

Soothing and smooth, accompanied with some nice visuals. Super music.

Very stylish!

stylish indeed, typical eph vibe :)