Lost in the Triangles » demos

Talks & Demos from Assembly 2009

Aras Pranckevičius — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 07:10:34 +0000

I went to Assembly 2009 demoparty this year.

No demo submissions, but I did a seminar presentation about developing graphics technology for small games (PDF slides). Mostly on hardware statistics, GPU features, testing and stability:

[vimeo clip_id="6128236" width="504" height="284"]

However, the awesome talk was given by ReJ: low level iPhone (pre-3GS) rendering details (PDF slides). Inner workings of iPhone’s GPU, OpenGL ES drivers, command buffers, VFP assembly and so on. Bringing assembly back to the Assembly, yeah!
[vimeo clip_id="6064955" width="504" height="284"]

If you’re going to watch some demos from Assembly 2009, make sure to see:

Frameranger (1st place demo). Rocked the big screen! Seems somewhat unfinished though.
The Golden Path (3rd place demo) – for something fresh. Also, a good way to disprove the saying that “the winners don’t take drugs” :)
Muon Baryon (1st place 4 kilobyte intro) – that’s what kids do with sphere marching on the GPU these days.

s/deity/demoscene/g

Aras Pranckevičius — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 06:00:12 +0000

Awesome sillyness: replace deity with demoscene thread on pouët.net.

I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe
Cubes on fire on the C sixtyfour
I watched glenzvectors on the bigscreen at TP2
All those moments will be lost on the net… like tears in the rain.
Time for DirectX

Amazing! Demoscene news that actually make sense!

Aras Pranckevičius — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:17:04 +0000

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!

Kindernoiser!

Aras Pranckevičius — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 12:39:59 +0000

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!

Demos and politics

Aras Pranckevičius — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 18:25:24 +0000

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.

Hey, 4 kilobyte intros are starting to get interesting!

Aras Pranckevičius — Sat, 19 May 2007 17:56:37 +0000

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.

Wanna see what a camera looks like?

Aras Pranckevičius — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 17:00:00 +0000

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!

A steam of random things

Aras Pranckevičius — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 21:24:00 +0000

Awards: Hey, we‘ve got a “runner up” award in Apple Design Awards 2006, Best Use of Graphics category! Yeah, a runner up is more like “the first of the losers”, but oh well. Got beaten by modo 201, which probably is a fair trade. It’s just that we thought we’d be in Best Developer Tool category, but that is apparently for text editors and scripting languages :)

Demos: In the other news, fellow ReJ with TBL just won Assembly 2006 demo competition with an Amiga demo, putting all PC demos faces’ to dust. Check it out. Art direction over hardware capabilities, one more time.

Drivers: why oh why the graphics drivers must be so bad? The other day I was thinking why can’t they auto-update themselves (with an option to turn it off for corporate users etc.). Now you’ve got a (not so recent!) driver that is able to parse vertex programs wrong, and a user who does not have a clue that he should update it. It’s bad enough to have a bug in the first place, but auto-update at least would fix…

Or you have a driver that says “I’m OpenGL 1.2!” but the 3D texture functions are null. And it’s the most recent driver for a particular graphics card that you can buy today! And it’s not even a hard problem! What the developers are thinking – they go over the required GL 1.2 functionality, see that some is actually missing and decide “ah, screw it, we’ll say it’s 1.2 anyways”?!

I just don’t get it. I could use some enlightenment on this.

Zen bondage!

Aras Pranckevičius — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 08:52:00 +0000

Check out a small game by demogroup Moppi: Zen Bondage.

Zen Bondage is a puzzle game about control. The
motivation was to try to make a puzzle game which
evokes adult emotions.

However, it fails to evoke any “adult emotions” in me. Maybe I’m just not into this bondage thing :)

I like the simplicity/pureness of the idea, and it’s executed very well.

64k coding continued

Aras Pranckevičius — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:58:00 +0000

I’m making a steady, but very slow progress on “my” 64k intro. Over the last week I couldn’t get over 13 kilobytes, so you can see that the progress is really slow. Not because I don’t code anything, but all code increase was cancelled by data size optimizations.

So far coding and data design for small sizes is not that much pain at all. Just, well, code and, well, keep your data small :) We’re only talking about the size of initial data, not the runtime size though.

A few obvious or new notes:

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 :)

The best thing so far is that I’ve got the music track from x_dynamics – it’s already done in V2 synth, takes small amount of space and is really good. Now I “just” have to finish the intro…

A crazy thought: 64k intro

Aras Pranckevičius — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:49:00 +0000

I was planning to do a demo this year; all by myself (except music). However, after playing with Blender a bit it became clear that I am really not a 3D artist (not Blender’s fault, of course) – what a surprise :)

Now a crazy thought: do a 64 kilobyte intro instead?

Yeah, I know, one pretty unsuccessful try already was there 3+ years ago… But still: I need a musician that could use Farbrausch’s V2 synth, some clever ideas/design/code and there it is. There’s a hope that I have actually learned something in these 3 years, you know :)

By the way, this bzhykt intro produces really abstract visuals on my computer right now. Something was messed up in there…

HDR with MSAA demo

Aras Pranckevičius — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 11:52:00 +0000

Released this HDR with MSAA demo I was talking about earlier. Here it is: aras-p.info/projHDR.html. I can also add that this St. Anne’s Church is a pretty complex beast :)

Jumped onto HDR bandwagon

Aras Pranckevičius — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:54:00 +0000

I’m doing a small HDR demo for fun. Nothing fancy – linear gamma, Reinhard’s tone mapping and whatnot – everyone does that. But the thing I made so far does not even look good! :)

I’m trying to support both HDR and FSAA at the same time on ordinary DX9 hardware (no Radeons 1k) by using RGBE8 rendertarget for the main scene. It’s all okay so far.

The most difficult task right now is making it look good. Once I have that I’ll post the results.

Dingus redux at Pilgrimage’05

Aras Pranckevičius — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 06:11:00 +0000

Richard “legalize” Thomson (the organizer of Pilgrimage demoparty and DirectX MVP) just told me: he has done a 2-minute analysis of our demo engine dingus as a “wild demo”. It took 3rd place in wild demo competition at Pilgrimage’05!

That is pretty funny. I never knew it has so much sourcecode inside! :)

Doing something

Aras Pranckevičius — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:09:00 +0000

After taking a break, I already want to do something programming-related in my free time. What should I?

The standard thing: do a demo. I have some ideas for that, but for various reasons I’m not in the mood right now to start a big/long project.
Read some books. I’m doing this a bit.
Learn something. Do something with wxWidgets or some Lua-only programming, but didn’t start anything yet.
I already should do something related to the next version of Project Hoshimi for Imagine Cup 2006. I’m trying to!

On the unrelated note, I’m doing a Oracle and XSLT related project at work. While Oracle stuff I’m dealing with really sucks, XSLT isn’t bad at all. Sure, it’s not “programming” that I’d love very much, but the whole concept is very powerful.

Maybe XML isn’t such a bad thing afterall, especially once you start doing funky things with XSLT and XPath. I still love the quote “XML is a giant step in no direction at all” though :)

What’s in the engine?

Aras Pranckevičius — Tue, 09 Aug 2005 12:53:00 +0000

As always, here’s a thought that’s more about demo-engines than about game-engines; and mostly dealing with graphics stuff.

Some folks add whatever gfx effects/techniques they use to “the engine”. Quote from Plastic:

We’ve also added a couple of new features like <...> wireframe/particle shader.

Now, I don’t have a problem with that, but what strikes me is that for whatever reason our engine doesn’t have any effect/technique in it. Zero shaders, no shadowmaps/PRT/refractions/whatever.

The obvious disadvantage of our approach is that for each demo I basically write the shaders and “effects” from scratch (ok, copying them is also fine). There’s no central place where, for example, a Gaussian blur postprocessing filter or shadowmaps rendering code is stored.

On the other hand, that means (nearly) complete freedom for each demo. In each prod I can tweak whatever I want and implement completely different rendering techniques. For example, in.out.side demo is quite different from Visual Gaming viewer or Xplodar FEM demo, yet they all share the same underlying “engine” (read: bunch of code).

Still, what I’d like to do is have “somewhat stable” stuff gathered in one place. I don’t tweak my basic lighting functions, standard postprocessing effects or shadowmap sampling patterns that often :)

Back!

Aras Pranckevičius — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 19:27:00 +0000

I’m back from Turkey. That’s me somewhere in the Mediterranean sea, practically showing that refraction really works – note the double hand and the mermaid-like legs :)

Right now – finishing my ShaderX4 article and preparing for Japan.

One totally insane 64 kilobyte intro: 195/95/256 by rgba. Of course, first you have to see the original 195/95 demo by Plastic. The 64k intro copies the (party version) of the demo almost perfectly, while squeezing everything in less than 64 kilobytes. Ok, the music sucks, the loading time is nearly infinite and it has lots of bugs/glitches, but I must say that rgba guys are insane anyway.

Mesh seamless texturing tool released

Aras Pranckevičius — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 17:11:00 +0000

Finally I’ve put the MeshTexer tool online, with some documentation, the tool itself and some sample data. Basically, it takes a mesh with unique UV mapping, a normalmap and a tileable texture, and “wraps” the texture (nearly) seamlessly onto the given model. Well, the truth is that it just projects the texture onto the model from several sides, weighting by normal.

However, it worked like a charm during in.out.side demo production. Paulius has written whole texturing workflow here – the tool was used to generate base material textures, material blend maps, gloss maps etc. Later these were hand-painted in “strategic” places and combined into final textures.

Enjoy!

On some demos

Aras Pranckevičius — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 12:59:00 +0000

Watched some new&old demos in the last couple of days. Here (when there’s a link to Lithuanian page, the ‘download’ looks like ‘parsisiųsti’):

Rapid Eye Movement by Matt Current. Now that’s unreal; technically simple but excellent composition and creates a very strong feeling. The similar feeling I only remember from The Planet by mfx. Also, I think the concept of “rapid eye movement” (i.e. the phase of the sleep) is done very well. I want to (be able to) do this!

Aether by mfx. The first time it didn’t leave me very impressed. However, I recommend watching it for the second time. Fascinating, though I can’t say what exactly.

Old ones with a very strong music: A Significant Deformation Near the Cranium by kewlers and Coma (on the dance floor) by Cocoon. I want that music :)

White stuff

Aras Pranckevičius — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 06:55:00 +0000

There’s one conceptual problem that Paulius told me the other day: imagine that you have a white sheet of paper and a black pencil. How would you draw an object that emits light?It’s puzzling at first, but surely it can be done :)

I’m facing with the same problem in our next demo: we have a white character in a white, brightly lit room. Even more, there will be some light emitting “stuff” in there. Now, how to render all this so that it’s not “washed out”, too bright and with no contrast?

I’m not happy with the way it looks right now, but we’re heading there.

Scene.org awards

Aras Pranckevičius — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 14:37:00 +0000

Woohoo! My demogroup is nominated to scene.org awards 2004, in ‘breakthrough performance’! Pretty cool, considering that Syntonic Dentiforms, which we got nominated for, is my first ‘real’ attempt at making a demo… Well, there were other attempts before, but they were really lame and childish :)

I was pretty happy with my demo-related performance last year. Three demos in half a year (ok, one of them was crappy). Now it’s already half a year with no demos, and I already want to make one. Well, I’m already trying to make one, but so far there’s lots of higher priority stuff surrounding me.