pouët.net

p01: spatial ASN with table-encoded state machine, but I don't know what I'm talking about. soundy: faster pace can be achieved perhaps once we investigate some untrodden paths. come on people: counterthumbs!

gaspode: Maybe it doesn't look like AI to you because your senses aren't numbed from techno stomps and virtue signalling, your head is at the right place, and you're looking at it from the right perspective :)

frost, this demo has an anim player at its core running all the time in its own thread...

frost, you are seriously spot-on with that question, and we need to think really hard to find an answer.
for kunsten maa vi evig vike!

fizzer: interesting question! probably because only one or two sivut of that size would fit into 64k. but the story has nine plus title.

Not enough downvotes yet.

You people are making us very happy. You would not believe the amount of work and effort we have spent in this. I almost had a breakdown in the middle - never had that before! Such minor details as recognising Jay Miner in the imagery (straight away, I hope), so important. And it's probably not by accident that it worked - first attempts failed... but we always spotted openings to get back to surfing on our luck plane.

Toxic Modulo #1 the origin story, for anyone interested. =)

The need for custom efficient image compression arose after the concept and material. It was not a hammer looking for a nail, or a novelty looking for a showcase vehicle.

Thank you all for sharing these beautiful moments of some cincere and thoughtful feedback!


Dear reader,



we encourage you to send us more fan mail to our regular address:

t (a) sm41 doet de

All fan mail and art is gladly accepted! Nowadays, your submit may be even a computer assisted art! Also conventional hand drawn pictures are very welcome. And in both cases, please hide your name and age into the page, if just possible.

If you need help for "digitizing" your paper back drawing, please ask a friend with a scanner or digital camera to help you.

Yours sincerely,

Director of TM Art Department,
Master Greippi

Porocyon: I fail to see the relevance of the link you have provided. If you want to suggest a relation between sexual abuse in Kenyan sweat shops and Toxic Modulo 2, then please be specific about it. Consider the possibility of opening a new thread.

Once again: The compression was an afterthought ushered in when it became necessary, not the reason why this production exists. It was 2 dudes hailing from C-64 world helping out 2 dudes on Amiga OCS.

isocosa: In which configuration you had no music? Music is supposed to be there.

Hiding AI usage? Pretty sure the usual give-aways were deliberately left in.

Hey all.

My involvement with this production basically came down some discussions on IRC, receiving a couple of raw dumps of test data, and sending a Python prototype codec. First I saw of the full production was watching the stream 6am Perth time on Monday :)


Heavily paraphrased IRC logs, starting from back in early February:


<krill> Is the stuff you wrote for bitpickler* adaptable for amiga? I've got some files that are too big.
<me> Send me a .bin, I'll have a play..

(* bitpickler is a cruncher I wrote for c64 4k demos, using a magic multiply-free tANS implementation and mixed context models)


(Some time later - 4 bit values, ok. ...attempt to get a feel for the data characteristics by shaping it into a rectangle with an arbitrary stride and displaying it with matplotlib.. "ooh, this looks like it's a 640x480 image. I don't have the right palette, but it's probably.. some kind of comic, in a city?? Ok, I'll try and use context from last pixel or two, and maybe a pixel from the previous line. Oh, and a symbol to help with those big blank areas")

<me> Ok, I can get it down to X bytes, about 50% of original - *much* smaller than you'd get from gzip or PNG. But the decruncher is pretty slow. Here are a couple of prototypes in Python, one's a slightly better ratio for 3x the work (context mixing), so the other's probably a better fit.

<krill> Size (from faster one) is great! Imma port the decruncher to C.
....
<krill> Ok, it's fast to decrunch on big computer.. but takes about 2m20s on A500.
<krill> Seems like I'll need to port C to asm now and optimise the shit out of that
...
(Insert some back and forth like Krill asking me if I can cut down the required shifts, because they're hella expensive on 68000, and me doing what little I could manage on that count, me trying some codec changes that didn't end up making the cut, etc. But mostly Krill optimising like hell while I buried myself in $dayjob)
...
<krill> Alright, it's down to 13.75 seconds now.
<me> Holy shit, nice work!
...
<krill> Hi! For credits and such, how to bill you?
(me, thinking - sweet! first amiga credit!)


Some days later
(me on discord, watching the live stream):
[6:02 AM] ChristopherJam: ahahaha this is what i get for not vetting the content before agreeing to a colab…

In hindsight I'd have probably requested we explicitly acknowledge the use of generative AI? Personally I'm mostly not a huge fan because most of them source their training data unethically. Beyond that it's just a tool - and it's not like I credit Vim, VICE, Photoshop, Python, Rust, ca65, etc when I do c64 demos.

But like, mostly I release standalone crunchers, and what people use them for is their business really.

and, MAD PROPS TO KRILL for getting a 10x speedup over the C version of the decruncher :D

-cjam

- We did not try to troll
- We did it for the art (really)
- I found Toxic Modulo #1 such a good idea that I wanted to see this in proper form
- We found out that previous tech did not cut it because it was optimized for photo material.
- Asked Krill, Krill asked CJam. Hi CJam!
- Part of the idea is to demonstrate how AI can be put to good use artistically
- AI is somewhere in the middle of the process, and just a tool. It could have been left out entirely, resulting in a comic of black & white outlines. But the idea here is to have a colorful comic.
- We were wondering what should be credited: AKlang, Wave Manuel, Gimp, Lua, Python, vasm, ...
- I said: If we credit Gimp and Lua, we can also credit Richard Stallman and next the Dalai Lama
- Revision was the next party
- I feared nobody would notice and it would go under in total indifference
- We said, let's try this. It's artistic and technical enough to pass as a demo
- Huge success! \o/ Collected innumerous of the thumbs that are so hard to get :D

Hi bifat, nice to meet you!

Thanks Depeche 💜

To give away more of the process details, I'm glad to announce that:


- For Toxic Modulo 1 & 2, about 300-400 prompts were done.

- I never used full resolution downloads, because they're way too expensive
(money-wisely and perhaps environment wisely).

- All was build by using previews of size about 700x700 pixels.

- I used screen capture and had to cut all images loose. Usually I ended up
combining several images of same or similar type.

- There is a full hand drawn (pencil) sketch of all pages. The physical tools were part if this production!

- On average, the prompt produces totally irrelevant pieces. This is dangerous in the sense, that you might end up fixing the image with GIMP for more than 2 hours. You need to clear up a lot of things. This is also a little addition for the packing algorithm. By removing noise and "conceptual noise" the images could compress even better.

- In worst case scenario I fixed one single image manually for over 4 hours. It really sucks, when you know that the feedback from the scene might get rather "negative".

- I have about 500 files in the TM2 folder. There are about 10 steps for each page (TM2 has 10 pages, about 36 images).

- One image source is actually taken from Stellar's intro Bananamen.

- I am Master of Arts (graduated 19 years ago). I know a lot about art and being an artist. Often, it really sucks. You basically always work without any pay ;) It is a life-style, not a profession.

- All in All some 100h of GFX work was required. In about the same time ... with color crayons or such... I would have achieved the same story in different way. Possibly better!

- So, largely, it was a successful experiment.

Greippi, Master of (F)Arts!



Ps. This is huge! Keep fan art coming!

Pps. Those who didn't like the story itself... Relax. More is coming! You can't get it all yet.

Oh! One more thing:

Using crayons I could have kept and sold the originals after 20 years...

That is an idea!

So maybe the critic was not entirely lost here.

@mop:
I'm afraid bifat prefer the Schizoid Master. He could foresee a lot of things during the process ;) ... If he's really concentrated on something, you can just see the clocks ticking all around.

@DanLemon: Yeah. What the heck. It's just Amiga, all right! (ps. we forgot to exchange emails)

@britelite: Ok. Fair enough. Actually, my hunch is that keeping you bored is not terribly hard. The last picture was supposed to wake you up. But as always, on a demo or a intro, you need to play with the customized average flow.

In this AI-worsens-our-lives-for-good frenzy there was some fresh ideas. One would be to put much more images into just 64K ... Not bad..

Ps. Everybody! Keep the fan mail coming. And, not too many at a time! We don't want to kill mailman, do we?

Here's our solid address:

( t (a) sm41 doet de )

Thank you 4gentE for unloading your feelings here where it hurts and where it's not so quickly forgotten. It may seem as if we were playing on triggerpoints like on a claviature, but I can assure you there is no evil intent.

“Look at me! Look at me!”

I'm writing a making of article where I reveal more of my thoughts. The process had several surprises on the way. I understand that this flame war interests everyone who wants some attention easily.

Hereby, I quit writing here.

Fan mail still accepted.

"It's artistic and technical enough to pass as a demo". Really, the machine is quite maxed out and there are a few technical innovations in there. It's certainly not just a slideshow (if only because of on-the-fly bubble and text rendering), and nothing in its style contradicts it being demo-ish (nor the party's compo rules). Except maybe people's expectations of the default demo style, which may be challenged now and again.

https://demozoo.org/productions/342438/info/24378/

Here is the making of. Also hand drawn sketch was added to the previews.

"I wish you could see what I have seen with your eyes"

Photon trolling 7/10, hurts good! kb 4/10

Imho, it's quite perfectly paced for what it is: a demo - so no user interaction (by default).

Imagine it'd have hurried through the panels like mad, giving the watcher no time to read and take it all in.

Animated panels (or proper lettering) would have been nice, but there was no time for that. We ran into the dreaded party-coding scenario even. =)

Nonsense.

Krill, thank you, oh thank you, thank you.

Could you please elaborate - for me and the assembled crowd of barbarians here - on what you deem improper about the text setting?

Lack of kerning? Subpixel? Not enough midtones?

We are not blitting bobs around here like a vectorball routine.

I said in the middle of the process that I think it would be nice to have character variants,
with the case in point: the case of capital and small I.
This is where this matters, elsewhere not so much.

And because this idea didn't make it into the product, now this is somehow not proper?

@bifat I merely meant different variants of the same letter (not only the "I" crossbar vs pipe). Sorry for using the wrong word, didn't want to imply it's "improper" as it is now. 'Tis just fine! =)

IT was just some first-aid. The real cure is up-to you.

"YOU DE-HUMANISED THE PHONE SYSTEM in 60's!!"

@ noby, sensenstahl

you both know, you can't blame us for bad feelings if you had some. TM2 is just a production. And it was better to have 12 demos instead of 11.

You guys are trying to put us down, why is that?

@cce ... the follow up won't be in demo compo. I also think TM2 is slow paced. It's a sort of a comic album simulation.

Downthumbs in themselves are all fine and dandy. It's the butthurt that came rather unexpectedly. :)

I was just wondering in how far an Amiga slideshow keeps you from making stuff on the platforms of your choice.
Noby doesn't want to go to parties and participate in demoscene anymore - because of said production. Sensenstahl agrees. Weird, but glad if we could help with your problems.
Maybe AI was so obvious to us that we lost track of how obvious it was to some. Of course some didn't notice it, because it was so well made! But that would be fun also, so thumb it down for cheating or whatever reasons, or up, or not, or whatever. But quitting? Is this the maximum penalty? :-)
IIRC there was moderate applause at the party and even the ranking was in line with our expectations. So what happened after that, in some internet circles? Just a theory: I think a better recommendation than quitting demoscene would be to quit self-reinforcing circles of groupthink. :-)
Demoscene is so much fun if you look at it in the right way. :-)

See? :)

4gentE, it poses the question of why someone would be quitting the scene because of some production on some (other) platform.
Is it because it's so bad? I doubt it. Because in demoscene the answer to this has always been to make a better production. Yes I think it's well made, good craftmanship. You said it was "objectively" bad. So we have objectively a disagreement here. Of course it's a logical possibility that most people see that it's bad, and we the makers are so deeply buried in predispositions, bad taste or bad craftmanship that we cannot acknowledge this. Help us!

Screen resolution is 640x480. Display and conversion tech is basically as described here. The converter knows some new tricks compared to the 2016 version, and we use a new image codec and decompressor.
The main program is basically an anim player - panels are constantly loaded and (in-place) decompressed into a ring buffer, from where the main program yanks them into the visible area, enriching things with a bubble and text engine.
The CPU almost grinds to a halt in lines where the full picture is visible, so the display window is constantly reconfigured to save DMA. We start as quickly as possible with the full 640x480 title pic, after that the timing is adjusted for just barely enough image material coming in. Finally, Krill's decompressor is so fast that it "runs away" from the show, but only towards the end - you'll notice that the disk motor stops when the load/decrunch thread ends, while the remaining material is still pulled from the buffer.

noby, sensenstahl: Scene quitting? Really? Why not just run with the time honoured "vote high for prods you like, low for prods you don't" and let the scene decide what to encourage people to produce next time?

photon: you couldn't just slap this together with off the shelf components - the image codec is far crunchier than you'd get from png or gzip, and the only way we managed to get the art onto one disk. As mentioned before, I was recruited long after the art was underway, purely to assist with demo size. The purpose was never "show off cjam's codec, and krill's streaming and decrunch" but in the end that's part of what's on show here. And I gather the display tech is quite novel too. You may as well say "this demo could have easily been an .mp4 on a bigger computer" - which is true of every demo ever produced.

4gentE: a newly created account isn't evidence of a sock puppet. It's pretty common for someone to not bother creating an account until they actually have something to say. (I remember being accused of being a sock puppet the first time I left a comment as Ars Tecnnica 🙄 - new account, siding with a woman against some misogynistic comments). And, I only created my account here so I could post in this thread too. (quick, someone PM christopherjam on csdb, tell him there's an imposter around :P)

vurpo: no interest in controversy here - I just saw a fun technical challenge to bring across some ideas from my c64 4k cruncher.

Master 4gentE, I did as you told and watched again. I really tried to hate it this time, but what can I say, I've already thumbed it up and cannot do this again. It still rocks and is super consistent on all levels, the pacing is just perfect, and I find the music especially supportive and fitting.
In experiments with a tester I've heard it was too fast and you couldn't immerse enough and the texts were hard to read. Greippi on the other hand: Faster, faster, comics are pulp, you're not watching them more closely than absolutely needed. So this is somewhere in the middle.
So this stuff here seems to be according to my taste and possibilities. Ask me again in ~five years when the maker bias has worn off...

As stated before, no, it wasn't. But regardless of any actual or perceived intention, what's the lesson about it getting people mad? (We genuinely don't know.)

@chavez: The codec is specialised for 4 bpp pictures, which are somewhat uncommon on Amiga. Also the images are compressed in chunky mode (for better compression ratio), so 4 bpp C2P is required prior to display. The 68000 assembly decompressor is handcrafted to leverage 2-pixels-per-byte optimisation opportunities as well, and there are a few caveats like 64K of 64K-aligned work state and highly unrolled loops.

It's all not tidied up and was barely ready in time, let alone having any documentation.

So... not sure how useful it'd all be, really.

I guess it's up to CJam to write an article about the codec itself or post the Python code somewhere, but it'd require quite some work to make it useful for more common Amiga bitmap usecases.

For the naysayers who seem to think it was as low-effort as "type in prompt, receive final panel": here's Greippi's making-of again, and some "workstages" plus a bit of storyboard.

As for the image codec + 68K decoder: should be fairly quick'n'easy to adapt for 8bpp images on AGA machines. Won't be typed in until actual demand, though, so anybody in urgent need drop us a note when their next killer 40K/64K is imminent. =)