demoscene stories, and old-school code tricks presented at fmx2015

DEMOSCENE STORIES, AND OLD SCHOOL CODE

TRICKSRafal Koffer Ice-k (Incuvo) & Tomasz Bednarz Warlock (QUT, ACM

SIGGRAPH IRC )

7th May 2015 @ FMX 2015

DEMOSCENE

demoscene was born in the computer

underground, and demos are the product of

extreme programming and self-expression

DEMOSCENE VS VFX

• Demoscene is all about all computations done in real-time

• Demoscene productions run as standalone executables (not pre-rendered

animations)

• Demoscene executable has total size not over 4kb, 64kb, etc…

• Demoscene needs to use many procedural generators to overcome size

limitations (generate music, textures, meshes in fly) - rather than load and

operate on “big” source files

OUR STORY

EVERYTHING STARTED

WITH A

HOW WE HAVE STARTED

Early computer exchange/market

COMPUTER MARKET AND VIRUS

STORY

BEGINNINGS WERE

CHALLENGING

MATH KNOWLEDGE ON LEVEL OF

ALU

NO FPU BUILD

IN

BEGINNINGS WERE

CHALLENGING

NO GPU

BEGINNINGS WERE

CHALLENGING

NO INTERNET !!!

BEGINNINGS WERE

CHALLENGING

SWAPPING ONLY!

& NO REFERENCES AVAILABLE, JUST

EXPERIMENTS

BEGINNINGS WERE

CHALLENGING

BUT...

IN EUROPE EVERYBODY C++

AND ASSEMBLY AND...

WE HAD A DREAM TO CREATE

IMPOSSIBLE

WE TRAVEL TO THE PARTY

PLACE

DEMOSCENE PARTIESAND HOW WE WENT TO THE GENERAL PROBE II PARTY

• Demoscene = Cult of DArt.

WORKFLOW (CREATING

DEMOS)

DEMO

• real-time procedural visualisations (not pre-

rendered animations!)

• executable

• limited in size

• 256b, 512b, 1k, 4k, 64k, floppy+

• platforms

• atari, c64, amiga, pc, web

• design process

• group gathering

• music before demo

• demo before music

• code tricks to achieve impossible

Revolt by Amnesty, 1996

PARTY PLACE

COMPETITION

AMIGA AMIGA AMIGA

• released in 1993

• motorola 68EC020 CPU 14.3Mhz

• ROM 512 kB, RAM 2MB

• AmigaDOS 3.1

TRAVEL BACK HOME

AND START WITH ANOTHER…

DREAM

WHY?

emotionspush hardware to the limits

competition

TRICKS

• pmode

• rotations to avoid multiplications

• nop assembly instruction

• env mapping

• self-modified code (loading to registers)

DO YOU REMEMBER HERCULES?

SOME OLD-SCHOOL TOOLS (PC)

• Fasttracker2

• Autodesk Animator

• Autodesk 3D Studio

• Lightwave

• Turbo Assembler

• Watcom C/C++

• Volcov Commander

• Pov-Ray

• Turbo/Borland Pascal

• Photoshop

ENVIRONMENTAL MAPPING

3D OBJECTS

VOODKA BY ABSENCE 1996• team work: 2 coders, musician, 2 pixel

artists

• music done in Fastracker2

• graphics done in Autodesk Animator in

mode 13h (320x200x256)

• 3D models in Autodesk 3D Studio, and

Volkov Commander

• code done in pure assembler, protected

mode EOS v3.02

• energy drink used: carrot juice

• linking and design took ~1 week

• total executable size ~800kbhttps://github.com/tomaszbednarz/demoscene-absence-voodka

DEMOSCENE AND SCIENCE

DEMOSCENE AND SCIENCE

IMMERSIVE EBOOK

MICE BONE CANCER VISUALISATION

DEMOSCENE = FOUR HATS

art science

design engineering

interactive breathing

with June Kim - Colab, AUT University, NZ

FLASHBACK 2015, SYDNEY

join us at #Demoscene BIRDS OF A FEATHER

THANK YOU