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MindCandy Volume 3 - demo playlist feedback

category: general [glöplog]
after much contemplation, i've decided to drop all demos and replace them with kolonija on loop. with bits of rob is jarig mixed in between.

beyond the walls of eryx: i had this on the list in the early stages, but trixter convinced me to replace it with size antimatters, and later rupture. our asd-quota is full at the moment. :)

added on the 2009-07-08 13:40:54 by phoenix phoenix
yay for kolonija loop! \o/
added on the 2009-07-08 13:51:51 by nosfe nosfe
Quote:
after much contemplation, i've decided to drop all demos and replace them with kolonija on loop. with bits of rob is jarig mixed in between.

pahh, i wont buy it unless you put rob is jarig on loop with kolonija inbetween
added on the 2009-07-08 14:22:20 by havoc havoc
Sorry I've been away, had a family thing.

@Deus: Audio commentary will definitely be on the DVD. Only the special features won't, due to obvious size restrictions.

@xernobyl: Didn't want to search an entire 2MB .exe looking for the right values :-) but maybe someone is willing to help? Iconoclast is the big one that I would really like to have in a higher res. The others look ok.

@Salinga: The original source material is 60p so the DVD will be 30i. PAL has higher res and color but slower framerate and flicker...

@Chaos: Debris gave us *no* trouble at all. It looks brilliant. And of course you'll be getting one (contact Phoenix because we need your commentary!)

@uncle-x: Many times it didn't capture right. But on one try, it captured perfectly! My WinXP captures of aether were boned but the Vista 64-bit capture worked -- go figure.

@kb_: Yeah, no need to worry about ringing with a 64-tap sinc :-)
added on the 2009-07-09 02:34:21 by trixter trixter
@Dominator: You do have a great point, but for our first blu-ray volume we have to be realistic about what might appeal to people outside the scene. I agree that more experimental stuff should go on the disc, but at the same time if we want to make enough money to keep doing volumes we have to compromise sometimes. For example, vol1 mainstream (ish), vol2 for sceners (amiga). vol3 mainstream, vol4 will probably be for sceners, and so on. Otherwise we run out of money and no more volumes :-(

@Adok: see @Dominator. We would love to have the disc in a retail store (more money for more volumes!!) but that's not up to us, that's up to distributors. Hopefully, since the blu-ray market is still somewhat small, we might have a chance...
added on the 2009-07-09 02:40:45 by trixter trixter
What type of people are the mainstream audience that could be interested in watching a selection? Is it certainly so that including only typical partywinner-material is what will get people not familiar with the scene interested as opposed to more experimental material?
added on the 2009-07-10 00:58:34 by slux slux
slux, excellent point there. i personally think that what non-sceners see as interesting demos can be greatly different what is the mainstream demosceners view.

added on the 2009-07-10 01:18:28 by nosfe nosfe
Indeed, two years ago, when I showed my boss lifeforce, he said that it must have been a lot of work but "the art direction is all over the place". He said he preferred sokuseki instead (and not because I did it).
added on the 2009-07-10 01:23:47 by mrdoob mrdoob
I think there's something in that too - my experience has been that (non-scene) people are much more interested in the experimental stuff than the 'block busters'.
added on the 2009-07-10 01:34:36 by psonice psonice
added on the 2009-07-10 02:35:28 by wullon wullon
@uncle-x: "the kahvi video release of aether is a good reference. In that one everything looks as it's supposed to look." The dancing starfish thingy in the last third of that video is not glowing; it is gray.

Okay, can you confirm once and for all if it is supposed to be gray or if it is supposed to be glowing white hot? Because we get different captures different times we run it.
added on the 2009-07-10 03:30:48 by trixter trixter
BTW, if anyone wants to try to hack iconoclast, it would really help out. I tried by running upx -d foo.exe to unpack it, then using IDA Pro to poke around, and discovered that it uses opengl and passes all of the init args on the stack, so I changed all of the "push 320h" (800) and "push 258h" (600) with doubled values to try to get 1600x1200. The exe runs, but the only thing I can see in both the fullscreen and windowed version are the 2d bitmap effects (ie. the title screen animation and the "video noise")... all 3d does not display :-(

I guess it's not that simple because I can see a lot of code like:

.text:004021FA call ds:glBindTexture
.text:00402200 mov eax, [esp+width]
.text:00402204 cmp eax, 320h

...which means I am going to have to check for other width/height values too, I guess? I'm an old dos hacker, I don't know how opengl works :-(

The .exe disassembles very nicely and with a lot of labels and symbol names, maybe someone can give it a try?
added on the 2009-07-10 06:45:27 by trixter trixter
Quote:
What type of people are the mainstream audience that could be interested in watching a selection? Is it certainly so that including only typical partywinner-material is what will get people not familiar with the scene interested as opposed to more experimental material?


I have to agree here as well. When we showed demos at Assembly Scenebooth two years ago, showing demos from groups like mfx and kosmoplovci and peon got us a lot more attention from the passersby than showing the more "mainstream" stuff.
added on the 2009-07-10 07:06:10 by Preacher Preacher
That said, I think that the playlist looks quite fine. Perhaps out of my own demos I'd rather see Fairytale than Onwards there, but I understand why it's that way around.
added on the 2009-07-10 07:16:56 by Preacher Preacher
Quote:
that what non-sceners see as interesting demos can be greatly different what is the mainstream demosceners view


maybe thats because when you ignore the "realtime" aspect many of those demo blockbusters pale in comparison with similar things done in proper cgi, whereas for the experimental pieces it doesnt matter. (or there is no equivalent for comparison)
added on the 2009-07-10 09:50:01 by smash smash
trixter: yeah, the thing that the "just change a few values with a hex editor" guys tend to overlook is that there are also things such as rendertargets which also need to be changed - and then there's sometimes texture coordinate offsets relative to the rendertarget size that need to change too - and some rendertargets need to be power-of-2 sizes because they are addressed with wrapping or need mipmaps - and some effects really really need fixed-size rendertargets while others would need to change rendertarget resolution with target resolution. and so on.

of course, as long as you're only rendering spinning cubes, patching it in a hexeditor is no problem at all. but when the demo has a resolution selector with a handcoded restricted selection of video modes, that usually has a reason, at least with our demos.
added on the 2009-07-10 10:50:17 by ryg ryg
There's also the issue that some demos start to look seriously horrible beyond a certain res (with high-res objects on super-blurry backgrounds, stuff like that).

But re. iconoclast, why not just ask navis? I'm sure he could say "it's a fairly trivial change, look for.." or "forget it, it's a complete nightmare".
added on the 2009-07-10 11:06:18 by psonice psonice
trixter: Why don't you just talk to Navis?
added on the 2009-07-10 11:09:27 by gloom gloom
Yeah, ask Navis, godverdomme!
added on the 2009-07-10 11:48:47 by kb_ kb_
ryg: it works fine on older demos without that, which are the ones where you can't change resolution, generally speaking.
added on the 2009-07-10 11:59:31 by xernobyl xernobyl
xernobyl: you have to go back a long way to pre-date render to texture.
added on the 2009-07-10 12:25:24 by smash smash
You have to be selective :P
added on the 2009-07-10 13:24:44 by xernobyl xernobyl
Quote:
@Dominator: You do have a great point, but for our first blu-ray volume we have to be realistic about what might appeal to people outside the scene.


to my admittedly rather limited experience i showing demos to outsiders, the more art-involved people typically like kolonija a lot better than f.ex most more "mainstream" demos. compare: video art that would do fine in any music of contemporary art vs a pet shop boys video.

i see your point, but it really depends on the audience, too, so be sure to take it into consideration. if you want to show that demos can be interesting as pieces of art, and not just as pieces of code, include some demos that are interesting pieces of art.
added on the 2009-07-10 13:57:05 by skrebbel skrebbel
oh wait, people already said that. never mind!
added on the 2009-07-10 13:58:33 by skrebbel skrebbel
Quote:
@uncle-x: "the kahvi video release of aether is a good reference. In that one everything looks as it's supposed to look." The dancing starfish thingy in the last third of that video is not glowing; it is gray.

Okay, can you confirm once and for all if it is supposed to be gray or if it is supposed to be glowing white hot? Because we get different captures different times we run it.


It's supposed to be grey with occasional glowing outline, just like in kahvi video.
added on the 2009-07-10 14:44:40 by pommak pommak

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