There’s a news item on next-gen.biz on Plastic’s Linger in Shadows PS3 demo.

What is totally amazing, is that the news item does actually make sense. It does not treat the demo as a game, or as some “what the f?” thing. Kudos.

About the demo itself - I totally dig the insane amount of work put in there; but I was quite confused with “story” or “meaning”. The visuals are good, the tech is good, it is impressive, but the message of the demo I just did not get. But still great work, go Plastic!

I said so - 4 kilobyte intros are really getting interesting.

Meet kindernoiser - 4 kilobytes, quaternion Julia fractal on the GPU, screen space ambient occlusion and so on. iq has a nice article on the tech behind SSAO.

Keep ‘em coming!

A demo with a political statement: Ultimatum to the World: First Days of the Last War by mfx.

This is good because it has a statement; and we need works that say things that matter. To quote Naomi Klein’s speech:

Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?

So respect to mfx for making a demo with a statement. We need more of those. I don’t have enough passion to say things that matter to me; maybe someday I will.

That said, the demo itself is not that good. Whereas in The Ballet Dancer the final “now that everything is lost…” was a culmination of the whole demo, here in Ultimatum to the World the famous Einstein quote does not work at all. Maybe the quote is just too well known.

Is it just me, or 4k intros really evolved by leaps and bounds in the last few years? I remember the time when 4k stuff was like “ok, that’s cool for a 4k” - but if it weren’t four kilobytes, nobody would watch it. Then in around 2004 came Yellow Rose of Texas, San Angeles Observation and Micropolis - and they were beautiful and interesting by themselves already. In case of Micropolis, it has a city and a big robot - who can resist that? The fact that they are in 4 kilobytes makes that even more interesting.

Fast forward to 2007. Of course every decent 4k intro has music now. Some do have separate scenes, with greets and stuff like “the real demos” (sprite-o-mat). Others have ambient occlusion and interesting lighting (Galiwm, kinderplomber). Some have raytracing in the pixel shaders (4kmdr). And so on.

Woo-hoo! I expect the 4k scene to bring some real jewels in the next couple of years.

After a long period of silence nesnausk! releases another demo - Zenit. Check it out. This is actually almost a one-man show: the concept, modeling, animations and code was done by Paulius. I did see how the real camera looks like when fully disassembled into almost 500 parts - it’s scary!

Ah… makes me want to do some demo again. Maybe someday!

• Code to construct a cylinder is more complex than the one to construct a sphere. That’s what I expected. However, code to construct a box with multiple segments per side is the most complex of all!
• Dropping last byte from floats is usually okay. And instant 25% save! For some of the numbers, I plan to switch to half-style float (2 bytes) if space becomes a concern.
• Storing quaternions in 4 bytes (byte per component) is good. Actually, now that I think of it, it makes more sense to store three components at 10 bits each, and just store the sign of 4th component - better precision for the same size.
• This intro literally has the most complex and most automated “art pipeline” of any demo/game I (directly) worked on! I’ve got maxscripts generating C++ sources, custom commandline tools preprocessing C++ sources (mostly floats packing - due to lack of maxscript functionality), lua scripts for batch-compiling HLSL shaders, “development code” generating .obj models for import back into max, etc. It’s wacky, weird and cool!
• Compiling HLSL in two steps (HLSL->asm and asm->bytecode) instead of direct (HLSL->bytecode) gets rid of the constant table, some copyright strings and hence is good. (thanks blackpawn!)
• Getting FFD code to behave remotely similar to how 3dsmax does FFD is hard :)