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Electric Lifeforms by Ghostown
[nfo]
screenshot added by Spook on 2023-04-10 02:12:05
platform :
type :
release date : april 2023
release party : Revision 2023
compo : amiga 64k
ranked : 1st
  • 106
  • 7
  • 0
popularity : 69%
 69%
  • 0.94
  • 1
alltime top: #823
added on the 2023-04-10 02:12:05 by Spook Spook

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Excellent stuff!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 02:28:27 by ham ham
Great
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 02:59:14 by bitl bitl
Very well done, congrats to all of you!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 04:07:58 by hfr hfr
Awesome to see new coders making great demos!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 04:08:25 by Jobbo Jobbo
My favorite Amiga release of this year's Revision, perfectly executed accompanied by an awesome soundtrack to raise the level of this intro.
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 04:26:27 by teo teo
strong prod ! I really liked the credits part.
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 05:41:00 by Fab Fab
Super fine!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 05:53:33 by Corial Corial
Fantastic intro! Loved it! :-) Listening to the music in the background now.. ;-)
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 08:43:15 by puni^void puni^void
Very nice one!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 09:30:01 by Serpent Serpent
Great prod!!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 10:34:04 by Sir_Lucas Sir_Lucas
Great work!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 10:45:18 by Raven^NCE Raven^NCE
Awesome!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 11:01:46 by decruncher decruncher
This was ace.
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 11:25:15 by Charlie Charlie
Nice
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 11:34:50 by Queen_Luna Queen_Luna
norm
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 11:38:59 by fyrex fyrex
Well-rounded, superb visuals and music presented with lots of attention to detail and flow, great code too!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 12:15:51 by bifat bifat
Fresh!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 12:16:56 by Depeche Depeche
Good stuff
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 12:25:44 by grip grip
Slick, polished and sounds great! =)
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 13:06:14 by mayday mayday
What a 64K! A definite highlight from 2023.
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 13:54:44 by Flux Flux
Solid and enjoyable intro with good music, sync and effects
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 13:59:38 by Optimus Optimus
I was expecting the colourful bars that appears mid-way to become twisters :')
Really strong 64k. Unique and consistent art style, fresh fx, and killer music.
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 14:02:22 by exocet exocet
Wow!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 14:14:16 by norecess norecess
super nicely executed and awesome design, especially loved the flowers
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 14:15:23 by wrighter wrighter
A worthy winner, you shall have my thumb
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 14:20:05 by Nosferatu Nosferatu
Great Amiga 64k this. Loved the feedback, playfield priorioty and the chunky tunnel effects. Would love to see a OCS demo next at this quality!
added on the 2023-04-10 14:24:02 by Toffeeman Toffeeman
Rulez of course!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 14:24:45 by Toffeeman Toffeeman
that was entertaining
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 14:40:49 by MuffinHop MuffinHop
Very nice, very polished!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 15:11:15 by PRiDE PRiDE
Interesting effects in well polished design styles. I love it!
The soundtrack is also very good, it's too amigaklangy sounding though.
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 17:48:27 by 0b5vr 0b5vr
Swept the floor and left no thing or person standing. simply awesome!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 18:34:23 by spiryt spiryt
Cool demo :) Welcome Spook and Kris!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 18:43:44 by Hyde Hyde
strong
style
Fantastic prod, well deserved 1st position!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 19:19:36 by flynn_nrg flynn_nrg
Ghostown Rulez!!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 20:18:40 by waldiamiga waldiamiga
Kicks the ass, the whole ass, and nothing but the ass, so help me God.
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 20:35:17 by Mibri Mibri
Great!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 21:08:41 by BulletToothTony BulletToothTony
Awesome!!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 21:12:13 by rloaderro rloaderro
a lot of cool ideas!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 22:09:56 by siko siko
Nice tune. :)
added on the 2023-04-10 22:45:21 by AntDude AntDude
Superb direction and execution! Pixel perfect audio madness!
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 23:12:14 by Bobic Bobic
nice
rulez added on the 2023-04-10 23:59:49 by Blast! Blast!
The best intro won. Great design, music and effects.
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 00:20:04 by nikosidis nikosidis
Very nice, especially for only 64K.
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 00:29:24 by AW87 AW87
Superb.
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 00:33:06 by gaspode gaspode
So good!
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 00:42:32 by Soundy Soundy
Good work !
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 02:39:48 by jok jok
Excellent 64k! Lovely, both visually and musically!
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 14:27:19 by Mystra Mystra
Quite cool, quality work and a lot of stuff for Amiga 64k. Worthy winner.
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 14:29:57 by break break
Ghostown style!
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 15:52:07 by toms toms
Lots of content for a 64k intro, the tube in tunnel parts looks especially great!
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 16:32:56 by malmix malmix
Wow ! A well deserved 1st place, congrats !!!

(BTW, crashes after a few effects when started from my A1230)
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 17:02:07 by mahenou mahenou
We hope that with this short technical write-up you’ll find the title of this intro to be well justified. Many of the effects in the intro were inspired by well known phenomena in the world of living organisms.

  1. LogoIn: Uses 3 bitplanes, mostly palette transitions.
  2. TileMoverA: A cousin of the well known fractal zoomer classic effect. The novelty here is that there’s no single vector field. With the help of external tools we’ve chosen a handful of functions that generate desired vector fields and we switch them on demand. Uses 4 bitplanes. We draw custom shapes onto a single bitplane and use the rest of bitplanes for cheap motion blur approximation.
  3. WireWorldA: See GameOfLifeA and WireWorldB. This is the first instance of that effect that we decided to expose better later throughout the intro.
  4. Vitruvian: Same as LogoIn, we added a little bit of sync.
  5. GameOfLifeA: Probably so called world-first. Watching Rule30 by Andromeda we asked ourselves if we can do better than one dimensional cellular automata on A500. Our two-dimensional cellular automata are calculated using solely Blitter. We translated several automata rules thanks to the method provided by Piotr Polesiuk, who used a SAT solver to determine the settings for a reasonable number of blits that will perform the computations. Uses 4 bitplanes but renders to a single one. As with TileMover other bitplanes are used to leave a trace of previous frames. The CPU is used only to drive Blitter and for horizontal pixel doubling, vertical pixel doubling is done with Copper. We forgot to write the names of game-of-life variants… so there is classic “game-of-life” but also “day and night”, “diamoeba”, “three-four”, “maze” and “stains”.
  6. SeaAnemone: Uses 4 bitplanes. Some Copper based gradient applied to the background. The effect draws paths of many semi-random walks. With each new step a shape is drawn onto the screen and shape’s size is decremented.
  7. Weave: Uses 4 bitplanes, single playfield + sprites. This is a very technical effect, not sure if we saw that being explored before. Copper is used to switch between sprite / playfield priority mid-screen, to change sprite horizontal position each-line, and reposition sprites 1 & 2 to reappear on the right. Yeah… there are 10 sprites rendered on each line!
  8. UVMapA: Uses 4 bitplanes and Copper to apply a nice gradient and perform line doubling. Chunky buffer is heavily scrambled to save on blitter passes in Blitter-based chunky-to-planar. Code that renders the uv-map uses two sets of textures and is completely unrolled for speed. Textures are drawn into respective texture buffers to change them in-flight. UVMap was prototyped using ShaderToy. The shaders were rewritten into a C program to generate uv-maps offline. An extra delta-encoding scheme was applied to each uv-map to make them compress better.
  9. GrowingTree: The idea is similar to SeaAnemone. With each step there’s a probability that a new path will be created – this simulates branching off. At the end of the path we copy a flower to the screen to finish off the path. After all branches are finished we draw onto the screen hand drawn group names that were converted from SVG format.
  10. WireWorldB: This is another type of cellular automaton. In contrast to GameOfLife automata this one has more state bits per cell, as it can either be an electron head, electron tail, circuit board (no electron) or empty space. We made the graphics appear nicely on the screen and then enabled 16-color sprites in the mid-screen. The sprite is animated using color-cycling that we extracted from the DRNG chunk of IFF-ILBM format. Some nice sync was added at the end of the effect.
  11. UVMapB: Same code, different uv-map. Extra sprite is displayed for a while when the vocoder sounds.
  12. GameOfLifeB: More of the same goodness, but this time only on 3 bitplanes. With the ELECTRIC mask in the fourth bitplane we were able to apply various opaqueness / transparency effects to the background.
  13. TileMoverB: More of the same goodness.
  14. Turmites: 2-dimensional Turing machines. These are basically automata that work a little bit like ants. They can leave and sense traces on the ground and make their decision based on the rules stored in their internal small brain. You can read more about them on Wikipedia.
  15. ScrollingText: Memory optimized text scroller that draws a single line of text every 8 frames or so. That was finished off with a Copper-based foreground color gradient applied at the top and bottom of the screen.
  16. LogoOut: Same as LogoIn but in the reverse direction.
added on the 2023-04-11 21:25:02 by cahir cahir
brilliant
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 22:11:34 by SiR SiR
amazing prod! I loooove it.
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 22:47:05 by estrayk estrayk
This is OCS in ya face, awesomeness!!!
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 23:33:52 by decca decca
So much awesomeness crammed inside such tiny space <3
rulez added on the 2023-04-11 23:50:44 by jammer jammer
Highly enjoyable and nicely executed :)
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 01:05:38 by lug00ber lug00ber
btw, thanks for the source code
added on the 2023-04-12 12:22:00 by Blast! Blast!
This is very very nice stuff.
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 12:27:11 by Korvkiosken Korvkiosken
From start till the end, every bit seems polished so much! Thanks for this masterpiece!
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 19:04:17 by Virgill Virgill
Wow
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 20:13:09 by xeron xeron
One of those prods where you can spot the winner on the first viewing.
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 21:21:49 by CiH CiH
Perhaps the most advanced 64k intro for the Amiga 500.
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 21:27:32 by tjahzi(aka Jimi) tjahzi(aka Jimi)
Everything said already and personally at the bonfire :)
But what I didn't get at first, due to the endcrawler being a little fast, is that this entire thing spawned from a university project. And it ended up winning a prime competition AND brought not one but TWO coders into your ranks.
THAT is downright awesome!
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 21:36:33 by d0DgE d0DgE
Rulez! :)
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 22:46:45 by KK KK
Congratulations to the whole team, but Kris and Spook deserve a special round of applause! Soooo gooood!
rulez added on the 2023-04-12 22:57:37 by argasek argasek
Fantastic Intro! I was really surprised to see that almost all the code was in C, but even more to see the gcc version.
Nice designed intro! And.. new young polish coders to the scene!
Greetz to Slayer & Jazzcat.. Nice meeting you again!

Live compo recording here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaZW-RedARs
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 10:28:31 by magic magic
they flash these colors in a professional way
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 12:57:18 by Bodzio Bodzio
Nice
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 14:41:55 by Frequent Frequent
great !!!
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 17:49:45 by MarvinSkarla MarvinSkarla
Watched it 4x in a row. I think that says it all :-) What a beauty! Thanks
a lot for the entertainment and the technical background information.
The great music reminds me of the French electro artist RONE (e.g. Vif
and Tempelhof).
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 17:59:53 by ROG_VF ROG_VF
Very nice, cool ideas, well done!
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 19:24:46 by Asato Asato
Very nice prod, welcome Kris and Spook!
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 19:48:08 by sachy sachy
Quote:
I was really surprised to see that almost all the code was in C, but even more to see the gcc version.

Let me try to explain it :)

IMHO that's a common misconception that C language is not good enough for Amiga 500 coding. We put a lot of effort into understanding gcc 2.95.3 idioms, i.e. how given C statements will translate into 68000 assembly, so we can quickly estimate if the generated code has a chance to be close to optimal. Of course performance critical code is not left unchecked. We have a primitive yet efficient profiler. We verify the output from the compiler to see if it did not do something stupid or unexpected (e.g. allocated variables on the stack). We have a tool that shows how each line of C source code translates into assembly. It also annotates each instruction with the number of cycles it takes. In other words we developed tools to make sure we invest our time only where it brings the most benefit wrt. performance.

Why such an old gcc version? Well... we tried to switch to gcc 6.5.0 from bebbo and to our surprise the generated code was 30% slower on average. There are two possible explanations here. Either our code uses idioms that the more recent gcc is unable to recognize and fails to optimize them or the default set of high-to-mid level optimizations in more recent gcc compilers are tailored towards x86-64 processors (e.g. lack of postincrement and predecrement, cheap array indexing, etc.). That could in turn result in RTL representation that cannot be translated into an efficient 68000 code. That’s why we are stuck with old gcc. Though we may reconsider the new gcc at some point, since bebbo has been actively improving its quality.
added on the 2023-04-13 20:45:29 by cahir cahir
Great OCS intro!
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 20:54:16 by TMA TMA
Quote:
(BTW, crashes after a few effects when started from my A1230)


We're aware of the fact that the intro misbehaves or crashes on more powerful Amigas. It's difficult to test a production on all possible configurations, especially in the face of a rapidly approaching deadline. We’re actively working to resolve all issues we know of.
added on the 2023-04-13 21:07:00 by cahir cahir
Nice one!! Loved the mapping scenes most of all :)
rulez added on the 2023-04-13 22:04:54 by DanLemon DanLemon
Thank you Cahir for the explanations, it is much appreciated! We have opposite experiences, I used old gcc 3.4 for two productions, in cpp, the generated code was so bad that I converted everything runtime to assembler. The version of bebbo was much better but the latest version of Bartman (12.2) is magical.
Great effects!
rulez added on the 2023-04-14 12:04:08 by ok3anos ok3anos
A BIG dentro in 64ko, 2023 > 1997 ;)

@JamieSkarla : maybe a new massive production in view ? Skarla > ALL
rulez added on the 2023-04-14 12:27:29 by mikev mikev
Great!
rulez added on the 2023-04-14 12:41:48 by Daddy Freddy Daddy Freddy
Cool. Nice music. OCS. Whats not to like?
rulez added on the 2023-04-14 15:28:03 by leGend leGend
It's cute and has an idea.
rulez added on the 2023-04-15 11:33:46 by aGGreSSor aGGreSSor
incredible demo, more when you know it's a 64ko demo .
rulez added on the 2023-04-15 18:55:44 by TOUKO TOUKO
I'm impressed. Great that Ghostown is back.
rulez added on the 2023-04-15 21:54:58 by Emufr3ak Emufr3ak
You Cunts!! How was the asc.... tual 2x2 scene done? Y0yr story was sucky, but brilliance in the af.... act? Whow me your ppeeerrers? Loved this. poeasea of hit. Obn ...


ANIGW


AMIGA
added on the 2023-04-16 02:15:01 by Greippi Greippi
Quite moving.
rulez added on the 2023-04-16 05:03:58 by flexi flexi
very nice!
rulez added on the 2023-04-16 09:24:16 by sensenstahl sensenstahl
Quote:

You Cunts!! How was the asc.... tual 2x2 scene done? Y0yr story was sucky, but brilliance in the af.... act? Whow me your ppeeerrers? Loved this. poeasea of hit. Obn ...


ANIGW


AMIGA


Bames Nond's having a stronk! Call a bondulance!
added on the 2023-04-16 18:44:13 by xeron xeron
Great intro with a lot of scenes and a catchy music
rulez added on the 2023-04-16 20:02:27 by Aghnar Aghnar
nice one
rulez added on the 2023-04-17 11:49:19 by ferris ferris
Great OCS 64kb!
Love that you explain the effects, and released the source too!
rulez added on the 2023-04-17 17:27:16 by p01 p01
Quote:
Cool demo :) Welcome Spook and Kris!

Quote:
Congratulations to the whole team, but Kris and Spook deserve a special round of applause! Soooo gooood!

Hello :) Thank you everyone for the very warm welcome, both here and during the party, it was an amazing experience. I hope we will see each other again soon!

Quote:
Everything said already and personally at the bonfire :)
But what I didn't get at first, due to the endcrawler being a little fast, is that this entire thing spawned from a university project. And it ended up winning a prime competition AND brought not one but TWO coders into your ranks.
THAT is downright awesome!

To add a little more context - yes, back in 2021 Cahir gave a course called "Demoscene production" at the University of Wrocław. We've tackled bitplanes, Copper, Blitter and other good stuff through a series of lectures and exercises, some of which actually evolved into full-fledged effects and ended up in this production!

As for me personally - I am not technically a student there, but I've learned about the course from Kris and Cahir was kind enough to let me in as a guest. One thing led to another and after the semester ended, we decided to stick around and work on Electric Lifeforms with the rest of the group.
In all seriousness, it was one of the best decisions in my life - I got to learn a ton of stuff about low-level programming, made new friends and fulfilled my little childhood dream.

I also must admit that seeing our work on a big screen for the first time was a very emotional experience, I've shed a tear or two. :) It was a labor of love for all of us and I am very happy and honored I've got to work with such talented and passion-driven people.

All in all, not bad for the first time, eh? And it surely won't be the last!
/(> x <)\
added on the 2023-04-18 19:32:55 by Spook Spook
Wooooah! I may run it in the loop on my Amiga!
rulez added on the 2023-04-18 19:33:43 by Super_Noise Super_Noise
kewl
rulez added on the 2023-04-18 19:38:17 by frog frog
Hi, Kris here!

Many thanks to all the warm comments and welcomes coming our way. As Spook already explained this started as an experimental project by Cahir at university. Me being the retro computer enthusiast that I am, I couldn't pass up this opportunity and attended the course ;) I've only ever coded a little bit for the C64 before (in terms of retro platforms anyway), so I had some preliminary knowledge which comes with low-level coding, but all of the machine-specific details were new to me. Suffice to say, Cahir did incredible job explaining all the Amiga intricacies to us, so the demoscene can thank him specifically for raising two new coders. I’ve stuck around after the course since it was fun coding for another platform where I have full control over the hardware and now we’re here ;)

I was mostly responsible for the game of life and wireworld (flowing electrons) effects in this prod. The idea for the former sprung up after watching Rule 30 by Andromeda way back in fall 2021. Piotr Polesiuk (another professor at the same university) came up with the idea of using a sat-solver to find a sequence of blits that would compute the next step of any 2D CA (cellular automata) by leveraging the blitter's function generator. He kindly provided us with a script for that and I coded and expanded the effect. What you can see in the intro are CA with different rules switched dynamically, sprinkled with some synchro. Wireworld takes from these ideas but has an additional (perceived) difficulty that the CA states are now 2-bit, but due to some simplifications they can be reduced to 1-bit + some tiny bit of extra logic, so it was possible to reuse almost all of the code used in game of life.

There's a little more going on behind the scenes but we're hoping to release a technical writeup on how these effects work in detail so stay tuned. In the meantime you can browse the effects' source since there are more technical explanations there.
added on the 2023-04-18 21:50:43 by Kris Kris
Well deserved first place!

Anyone else is getting a 103 error with 512k+512k? On both a real A1000 and WinUAE.
rulez added on the 2023-04-18 23:45:41 by KONEY KONEY
Obvious killer, like the style.
rulez added on the 2023-04-19 00:08:09 by superplek superplek
Quote:
(BTW, crashes after a few effects when started from my A1230)


On my A1240 i disabled cache in boot menu, then no s-s start, nofastmem and killaga exe. Intro plays well to the end now.
added on the 2023-04-20 00:11:51 by kempy kempy
Hey! i didnt... say i love ut
rulez added on the 2023-04-20 03:59:27 by Greippi Greippi
I will hunt you donw! you shits" you will relv... ve ...reveal your AMIGA secrecstss!!!
added on the 2023-04-20 04:16:10 by Greippi Greippi
That was awesome!
rulez added on the 2023-04-20 18:31:22 by stefa stefa
Nice one indeed
rulez added on the 2023-04-22 23:33:23 by keops keops
so cool & stylish
rulez added on the 2023-04-22 23:56:34 by wullon wullon
yes
really nice A500 64kib prod! I love the game of life fx, and I love it even better now I know it's done with blitter!
rulez added on the 2023-04-24 13:14:37 by leonard leonard
> On my A1240 i disabled cache in boot menu, then no s-s start,
> nofastmem and killaga exe. Intro plays well to the end now.

Ahah, thank you ! Works now on my A1230. The NoFastMem made the difference. (Caches and killaga were not enough)

Coooool ! Love it.
added on the 2023-04-25 17:44:14 by mahenou mahenou
badass! particularly for 64k!
rulez added on the 2023-04-26 17:47:50 by post malone post malone
big deal!
rulez added on the 2023-04-26 19:26:27 by gentleman gentleman
very well executed!
rulez added on the 2023-04-29 18:51:00 by blala blala
Yes - so much good stuff. Also the generational aspect is super touching. Amazing - and all in 64k. Supereme.
rulez added on the 2023-05-02 23:26:20 by size size
A short and wild mix of super slow generative plotbuffer (short, can be long as you like), a couple anims(short), and a few quite good blitter effects(?)(short).

Releasing in Demo is a choice now, you can fit a lot in Intro. Still, why not demo?
added on the 2023-05-13 03:39:55 by Photon Photon
Tightly crafted.
rulez added on the 2023-06-03 17:55:02 by hitchhikr hitchhikr
Awesome!
rulez added on the 2023-06-04 13:14:44 by Triace Triace
Nice!
rulez added on the 2023-06-10 11:18:13 by drzeissler drzeissler
Nice low use of bitplanes and scanline color switches to make effects use full and reuse the effects you got to make a wholesome and tightly presented and consistent demo. Loved this, very stylish!
rulez added on the 2023-07-30 23:31:44 by spkr spkr
A killer intro in my book, great work!
rulez added on the 2024-01-05 21:33:27 by evil evil
One of the best 64k demos I ever seen! Love the tune!
rulez added on the 2024-02-26 21:37:49 by SoDa7 SoDa7
So cool!!
rulez added on the 2024-05-18 01:45:55 by drakonic drakonic
Nice
rulez added on the 2024-05-22 19:01:25 by venex venex

sneaky cdcs

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