Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design
edge of disgrace -------------- released at x-2008 credits: -------- code, design and additional graphics by hcl. music, graphics and trailblazer code by dane. graphics and design by jailbird. here follows some more or less detailed info about each effect in the demo. hcl on the keys.. intro: (2008) the intro was the last thing coded, and based on a lot of wonderful graphics from jailbird. dane also made one of the pictures, his own face?! you may say it shows some lack of respect to the graphicians since the gfx flashes away all to quickly, but we wanted to keep a high pace from start. sb-chesszoom: (2002.12) i made this one short after the charzoom effect, it was more like a test to see if a full sideborder width zoomer was possible to do with my (at that time) new zooming routine. zooming and accuracy down to 1x1-pixels, which i really missed from all prior chess- zoomers. chesszoom + sptzoom: (2002.12) a second version of the chess zoomer with a sprite zoomer above it :). because one effect at a time isn't enough in the 21:th century. and the sprite shit goes a tiny bit *outside* the chessboard :). fpp-plasma + sptzoom: (2004.8) this effect was one of the ideas that came up during my half year trip around the globe together with my wife. it does a full-screen fpp-plasma in notime, so ihad to add something above it again.. sb-fpp-plasma: (2004.8) the same effect again, but in the side-border. easily beats graham with 50% more plasma ;). x-vector: (2002.2) after going nuts on all those x-vectors running in every 2:nd, 3:rd etc. frame, i felt like i just had to come up with something faster. it's kind'a limited on the graphical side though, but still looks quite nice with the gouraud-styledtexture. of course i made two versions of it.. x-vector-plasma: (2002.2) you may believe it or not, but this routine was made long before krill released a similar one in panta rhei. dane was quite astonished when i showed him this routine short after he joined booze design in 2003, because he had a sneak preview if krill's part lying around. knowing this, i could have thrown it one out just to be first, but i didn't. this one has teh colors though. oh, and background picture by jailbird. 8x4-plasma: (2002.10) the first effect in the *world of half chars*. d800+char plasma in half char mode. this requires splitting d800-colors of course. futuristic gfx by jailbird, and hand-dithered font ;). 4x4-plasma: (2002.10) inspiration: the hidden part in deus ex machina. both the plasma movement and the trick to do the tweaked gfx mode are similar. this one consists of a 4x4- screen with two dithered colors in each 4x4-pixel. the picture by jailbird was ruthlessly destoyed to fit in to the weird fli-like screen. hcb-pic: (2005.4) i thought about a gfx format for pics using d800-splits for a long time, but i didn't make it until now (3 years ago that is). one year later i also made an editor for the format, and 1.5 years later we saw the first hcb-pictures made by dane. trailblazer: (2007) dane's idea from the beginning, and hcl did the perspective calculations but never found the time to do the code. finally dane decided to do all the code himself. inspiration: boogief actor/flt of course :). zoomscroll: (2002.10) the new standard of zoom scrolls. we want no more 5-pixel font shit, it's 16 pixels or more if you do it in multi- color. i actually made a single color version of the scroller before this one,then with an 8-pixel font. logo by jailbird and font by hcl. rotzoom: (2002.12) inspiration: insomnia. i just can't stand it when people seem to think a routine is fast when it's running every 3:rd frame or so. so i made this rot-zoomer running in almost every 2:nd frame. it uses a 16x15 char-screen, the last char row is used for the outlines, so it really wasn't removed of performance reasons. the pictures are 64x32 pixels big and were made by dane. ditheredvector: (2007.2) inspired by oswald's dithered vectors, isaw the possibility to use this technique to make flat-shaded 3d-objects. some people probably saw some of the bigger objects that i was working on at the st:lars meeting 2007, even though i was trying to hide away :). a few weeks later oxyron released 'natural wonders', and the magic of my vectors was gone. the part was lying around for a year before i decided to work on it again, adding the transformers, clipper-effect and finally the gouraud-shader. some technical info.. all the vectors are calculated in 8-bits only, and perspective is not used except for the gouraud-shaded cube. why no perspective?well, among these objects, the only one that really looks bad without perspective is the cube. some objects almost look better without perspective (!), i never thought i would say that:). there really isn't much calculations here, so 8-bit maths was considered enough for a gfx-screen represented by 6-7 bits. the gouraud-shader has better accuracy though, using 16-bit calculations and perspective. this gouraud-shader is not using a filler- routine, but a tracing-line routine. since there are only 4 colors to play with, and 13 dithered color-levels, the amount of lines is still possible to handle. please compare this one to otherfilled ones, and you'll find it both faster and more accurate. the line routine is optimized for thin lines. when objects become more complex considering the amount of faces, many lines will just be the difference of onedithered color-step. in such a line three out of four iterations will just be plotting a zero, and may thus be avoided. this method heavily increase the speed of the gouraud- shader as well. ab-zoom: (2003.9) from the beginning this zoomer was supposed to be in the demo which later became royal arte. the part would consist of three cooperating zoomers, one in hires using chars and two layers of sprites, one in multicolor sprites (like the zoomer in comajob/oxyroncrest), and finally this one for 8x8-pixel zoom and up. and somehow it ended up here!? i wish i would have succeded in making the accuracy a bit higher, but i just had to leave it. it was first when we inserted a proper gfx by dane that wereally saw the potential of this effect, and included in in the demo. theeye: (2008) this turn disk part should have been made more interesting, but in the end there was no time. skilled hires bitmap picture by jailbird. infinitezoom: (2007.6) this one took quite a while to code. eventhough the zoom routine is quite basic nowadays, it took a lot of effort to make it run smooth in all aspects. in 128 frames a new picture is loaded and expanded into memory, while the other zooming picture is shown. the pictures are not crunched in this effect, since the decrunching had an impact on the performance (a different kind of compression algorithm may have worked better though). with 12 pictures this effect easily eats up half a disk side. the screen size of it is also quite optimized. two pictures have to roam in each gfx bank at the same time, but still each picture uses more than half of the gfx area. endless pixeling here by dane. fbp-plasma: (2004.8) hmm, trying to do something interesting of this ever so over used effect. it's based on the same technique as the firstfpp-plasma, but has a line-buffer delay of up to 32 buffers. a new buffer is chosen from a sinus every 2:nd plasma line. finezoom: (2004.8) inspiration: grahams zoomer, repeated a number of times by himself and others, but noone really took it any further. this zoomer has a slightly smaller picture (124x100 pixels) but better zooming accuracy and can zoom a bit more. it also uses double the amount of graphics in order to keep the dithered graphics from being distroyed while zooming. logo by dane. 3-screener-pic: (2004.10) this screen had a picture painted ages ago by jailbird (2003.01), and the part was coded far later but still long time ago. finally in 2008 some sideborder stuff was removed due to design- decicions, and some pixels were changed to make the picture fit better to the demo. in the final act of the making of this demo, everyone except me (hcl) agreed on replacing the old picture witha new one by dane. but i guess they were right, so here you get the fabulous picture by dane :). charzoom: (2002.11) this full screen, full frame rate, in your face zoomer was one of the first effects i finished for this demo. the trick was used in royal arte already, but only as an x-stretcher. the same kind of idea was later applied on many other effects, like most zoomers and the fpp-plasmas. and yeah, it wasn't hard enough, so i put some sprite shit above it of course. fli-zoom: (2002.3) inspiration: soiled legacy, with its very poor fli-zoomer ;) this one is bigger, has dynamic zooming (no pre-calced shit), and plays ordinary music. and.. it has a god damned sprite shit routine running *above* it all. first picture by dane, second picture by jailbird. xy-slime: (2001.12) one of the oldest effects. i made this one short after royal arte, inspired by the idea to improve the slime-pic in that demo. this effect is done by copying out a piece of graphics pixel- step by step x-wise and y-wise, which makes it possible to do a slime-like effect by picking the char indexed by anx-sinus and y-sinus. sadly the effect is limited to the size of a char-bank, which only allows quite small pictures. i didn't really intend to include this effect in the demo, but it became a filler sort of :). twisterfadein: (2002.9) after getting the logo from jailbird for this plotter, the fade-in effect was quite obvious to me. too bad it's reallyhard to design a twister routine that ends up looking exactly like the logo you've got, but i hope it looks ok anyways :). vectorplotter: (2001.12) inspiration: oneder, +2k. now check this out. i claim that this is the *first* vector plotter with 256 individual plotts at full frame rate! in oneder we saw (only) 246 plotts. in +2k, there was 256 individual plotts, but just barely at full frame rate! if you analyze that part, the plotter runs at '110% of one frame, making every 10:th frame or so beshown for two frames time! that's what icall cheating, so it doesn't count!! then we had the glance demo "living" showing 320 vector plotts in full frame rate. that was nice, but it was not 320 individually independent plotts. the plotter was mirrored, and also optimized for the single object it was showing, not making it a multi purpose plotter. and let's not mention the accuracy :). here we give you the first object with 256 plotts no shit. ok, i did some smallobject dependent optimizations, but thatis mostly to compensate for the sprites that i use in the upper/lower borders for *design*, stealing 4-500 cycles!. yepp, you don't only get 256 world-first plotts, you get design also. next up you get a doughnut with 320 mirrored plotts just like living/glance, but better accuracy and less recycling of coordinates. for you who are still in doubt, we give you the double ball with 364 plotts, where each coordinate is mirrored and thus used twice for each ball. not to mention that zooming is of course available in all directions. endpart: (2008.09) reused the intro stuff with a logo by jailbird. well, that's basically it for the effectinfo. of course alot of time was spent on the transition effects also. roughly a whole year was spent on linking and coding transitions. next follows the live note from x-2008 by dane.. ok, so here we are live at x-2008, and it's about four hours to go until the fake deadline for all entries. as usual there are a number of tiny details that i would like to change, but with a mindset like that this demo wouldn't be released until 2011... and believe me, it is about time to get this monster project out of our diskbox! some effects were first coded back in 2001, which says quite a lot about how unbelievably slow we are at putting stuff together. anyway, edge of disgrace is dedicated to everyone who is still active on the c-64 scene. let's keep this baby going for a few more years, until we're so old that demo parties take place in hospitals! i guess this is the point where i start ranting about the lengthy soundtrack, since it's been invading my life for the last year and a half.. the first work on the demo music started sometime in 2006, when all we had were acouple of small effect previews. nothing was linked yet and the demo was merely a weird idea. at that time we were thinking about experimenting with multispeed music yet again, and develop some of the technical ideas from the music player in cycle. eventually i put together a doublespeed player that had a few nifty tricks but didn't use up a lot of rastertime. everything looked swell until i packed the first serious worktune... hcl cried in his sleep when the tune landed at $1700 bytes! this wouldn't work! so, i went back to the drawing board, this time finishing an old idea called the flex-player. it would simply switch between singlespeed and multispeed depending on what kind of effect we were displaying. all well in theory, but the final resultturned out to be quite messy, and it would definitely exacerbate the linking process for hcl, who was already pullinghis hair to get everything to gel. the visions of multispeed were abandoned in favor of plain singlespeed music, but i just couldn't leave it be and so i ended up coding yet another custom musicroutine, to get the most out of the sid for the least amount of rastertime. by christmas 2007 we had begun to get a few ideas of what effects would be in the demo, and so i made a lot of drafts. a surprising amount of the music for this demo has been composed in public areas like libraries and coffee shops. i guess there is something creatively inspiring from changing setting and not just sit at home in your chair late at night. i would also like to name some sources of inspiration. while you won't find any downright covers, there are some acts and albums which have proved to be very inspiring to get in the mood. in 2007, while i was doing random draft tunes, i was listening a lot to justice and alive 2007 from daft punk. there is a roboto-segment a few minutes in on side 1 where this should be quite apparent. i also had this idea to think more along the lines of a movie soundtrack and not get stuck in pop formulas of verse`and chorus. having said that, there still is a verse and a chorus or theme that keeps coming back in different mutations. ok that's quite enough of that. it's also been a challenge to work on graphics and maintain the high standard that jailbird set with his art. hcl gave me the entertaining duty of pixeling for the u-zoomer, for which i will be eternally grateful. 150x168 in a 7 colour palette...x 15 frames. i alsomanaged to make it even more fun by making some mistakes the first time around, which meant i had to repixel theentire thing. good times! somehow i also ended up with the pixel duty for the hcb-pictures. i had this idea of images of man merged with machine, and so it felt natural to pay tribute to the terminator mythos. but trust me, that hcb-editor isn't exactly userfriendly... no offense, hcl! ok, it's time to start wrapping this up, and i'd like to do that by thanking hcl and jailbird for being such a great team to both make demos and party with. without you guys this just wouldn't be as much fun. ok, let's hope the compo atmosphere tonight is out of this world, and that some people will like what we have brought with us to the country of cows! ...and now we are a few hours after the party has closed, sitting at weeze airport outside dusseldorf. what a great party! as usual everything has been really well organized, and eventhough we arrived quite late on friday we were lucky enough to get a bed (by a dutch coder who wants to remain anonymous, of course). but what was most amazing from the entire experience was the mindblowing quality of the compos. we send out endless amounts of booze to everyone who took part in the compos, especially to pernod, who missed the entire party while recuperating from some mysterious food poisoning. we only saw him during the compos when he came out on the small balcony looking exactly like a scene version of the pope! for a more graphic description of how edge of disgrace was received by the x crowd, you could ask hollowman, by the way. personally, i just feel very pleased that the undertaking has come to an end, and of course incredibly happy for hcl who has been living with these effects (and transitions!) for a very long time. now i think we're both looking forward to going home to check out the feedback from sceners who weren't able to attend x-2008, and maybe some more detailed comments on stuff that people didn't pick up on while seeing it on the big screen. we have purposely broken one of the few rules at x by waiting some days before releasing the final version, and there's a reason for that. some days before the party jailbird made a few changes and improvements to some of the graphics, and there wasn't enough time to put in into the demo. we also detected some small glitches while seeing it on the compomachine. hopefully it has been worth the wait, even if it means you have to wait a few days extra. a big thank you to the x organizers for understanding our wish to release a finished product. we hope this demo inspires you to stay productive, since there's so much more that can be done. -booze design- 2001-2008
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