"In the beginning, there was The Cube".
No, it's not another Transformers' incipit.

History of 3d in demoscene probably begins with just one, lo-res, jagged rotating cube at the exact center of the screen, for minutes, hours. Its movement is the familiar one of an object that moves with equal increments on every axis, unavoidably falling in a Gimbal lock after a few hundreds of iterations.

There is a moment, in the scene, when putting a cube on the screen means building an high fence between the other groups and the circle of the ones that "have 3d" in their productions. Once "the cube" is conquered, the only thing left is proposing it in every possible fashion: the bouncing cube, the glenz cube, a cube with and without a scroller, the cube with faces too clearly made of triangles and so on.

This theory of cubes suddenly ends in a day of August 1993, when in the lukewarm Helsinki a group that made history ("are you from the Future Crew or you are just wearing their t-shirt?") brings on the megascreen of Assembly *the* cube. It's big. It pops up from the bottom of the screen, from nowhere, in the magnificency of "surround" sound. The background is black, and the cube's faces are made of plasma.
After 2nd Reality's cube, the life of every scener wouldn't be the same anymore.

Clearly, the use of cubes in demos won't end here, but, for a while, the scene will adopt another more rounded solid as the symbol of its subculture (see "toroid"), just until everybody would wake up from a wet dream, realizing that everyone is using toruses and the demos are a neverending orgy of donuts.

So the hexafaceted beings are forgotten for a long time in the scene, but some reminiscences continue to appear in sporadic apparitions:

- The recursive cube of Astro, the legendary Astroidea's intro. Its apparition is memorable for two aspects: the six-faced solid has on its parietal walls a mystic (for that time) AMD cpu ("intel outside") and every face magically represents the previous iteration of the cube itself, in a recursion that gives dizziness and vertigo to the audience. The cube can't disappear differently than drowning in the magnificence of an anthology checkerboard-tunnel.

- The voxel cube of Reanim8r: the second most overrated demo in history has a section that was common at that time (1995 circa): the "object show". But this time, the proposed shaders are much more complicated than the old "fake-phong" and gouraud lighting: we go from alpha-channel glenz to multi-light bumpmapping. And in the middle of this tech-show, it appears: it's the voxel-cube, the extreme incarnation of the phoenix of the scene; you hardly can recognize it as a cube, maybe the routine isn't perfect, but the cube has again its lapse of glory.

- The magnet-cube of Elektroniks by Doomsday: in a demo that stations on one of the last steps of the stair that brings to hardware acceleration, the honorable placement as last-effect is reserved to the incarnation of a leitmotiv that goes through the whole demo: "where pressure is higher, head explodes". Doomsday are prone to slogan-based demos (you can't be called a scener if you don't know that "it's easy to score in Portugal").

The hardcore coders can easily spot that the magnet-cube of Doomsday has much more than six faces. The others just remain with the doubt of what really nests under the skin of the unstable solid.

But, apart from this rare citations, in the late 2000 the cubes return from the parallel dimension where they have been relegated.

The propitious occasion is Breakpoint 2007. That scene is properly farb-raush-ish: the backyard of any building of a modern city. The atmosphere is surreal and desert as in Kasparov. In the middle of the backyard a shiny cube is floating in his majesty. The faces reflect the sun that is going down. And suddenly, the hundreds, thousands of cubes forgotten by the Scene are coming out: they were there, in front of our eyes, and we just didn't see. They simply compose the volume of the cube that was spinning at the center of the screen seconds before, as in a 1990 Amiga demo, and, before they shatter onto the asphalt, they remind us the real soul of the scene, the matter of which dreams are made.

posted by friol at 3/10/2008 11:50:00 PM - under: cubes,debris,dsd - comments? here (2)

Woops.
It's been a long time since the last update, uh?
Many things in real life kept us away from our beloved Tunnel. But you know, real life (like nature) still sucks.
So The Tunnel has returned with an outstanding scoop from our friend Luffy M. Scramble of Firms In Knees, who interviewed... but we'll leave this to him.
Read on.

"So, that’s my debut as a reporter here. Thanks to friol for the great opportunity I’ve been given to show off all my journalism skills, and for hosting me here.

Today we will deal with newcomers in the Scene and with generational renewal in the Scene line-up. Rumors saying “the Scene is dead” come and go but luckily there’s always someone new, here and then, who comes up out from nowhere, releasing an outstanding piece of work. Lately, as often happens, the attention from the Scene got focused on one of these diamonds in the dust like "Chromosphere" by SQNY, embodied by Kurli (code) and Piezo (music).

We contacted the coder of the winner demo of Stream ’07 democompo.
Here's what we come up with...



1) So, the institutional questions, like: how old are you, where do you live, what’s your occupation and what’s the pronunciation of your demogroup name... there have been suggestions on pouet, but nobody found a satisfying proposal for how to say “SQNY”.

Kurli: Hi! Thanks for the interview! I feel like a very important scener! Who would have said this? (lols) Ok, basically my asl profile is: 19 m Finland. I’m an average Computer Science university student at University of Tampere. The groupname “SQNY” is pronounced just like “SONY”. We would have chosen “SONY” if it wasn’t a trademark, already, because I like the sound of that word.

2) And also your nickname, just reminds me of some other famous nickname from our beloved (bedead?) Kewlers... is that some kind of quote? Or Curly (Brace) is the name that you’ve always dreamt of and you had to mess it up for copyright reasons, too?

Kurli: (lols) No, no, that’s a coincidence: as a matter of fact it’s derived from my real name: Karl. There are no mysteries around the nickname.

3) How did you know the Scene?

Kurli: That’s a quite unbelievable story. I was almost a kid, and was surfing the net looking for fetish pr0n. But I stuck into http://mfx.scene.org. I was happy to have finally some fresh freaky free downloads, and downloaded "The Ballet Dancer", cause it sounded fine. Also "Pornonoise", and "Mother, mother my ears bleed". I didn’t find sex and pr0n but the Scene. That’s how MFX saved my life and healed me from incipient sexual perversion.

4) That’s how everybody, I think, got stuck in this Demoscene, isn’t it? (lol)

Kurli: Do you think that mine isn’t an original story?

5) Personally, I’ve seen my very first intro, "fr-08", when I asked a friend of mine to show me “something cool” he got from tha intarweb. I was talking about pr0n of course, but after a few seconds I saw that loading bar running over the screen and got impressed by what came after!

Kurli: (lols)

6) Rumors say that you will be among the next Scene.org Awards nominees as “Breakthrough Performance” or “Most Original Concept”. So, we’ll wait and see if you will have such a worldwide echo. We, at The Tunnel, would be really pleased to promote you in the right places, with the right people, to make it happen: you know, the influence of our lobbying activity is reknown. (I’m kidding of course!)

Kurli: I haven’t heard of any rumors, like those you’ve just mentioned... I don’t think we’ll be among the nominees, you know, Scene.org Awards Nominees are such a predictable stuff and namevoting sux. That’s why we’ll have no chance at all to be nominated. We’ve no connections, no strong reputation, we’re totally newcomers... maybe the “Breakthrough”. But, everybody knows that the so called “new ones” are just the “old ones” with fake names. To name some of them: Limp Ninja and Synesthetics. So, no surprises (fuckings to them, of course).

7) Sad but true... But: how did “Chromosphere” come to light? I mean, does it have a concept, a story, behind? Or it’s just a collection of effects without a linear flow/inspiration?

Kurli: (after some minutes of idling, I don’t know if he was thinking about the answer or doing else) Chromosphere was the top of our “technology” at the time it was assembled. I had a bunch of nice effects and I was sufficiently satisfied of them. Something worth of being released *has* to be released and I though that it was the time to become famous. (lols) After, in deciding the sequence of the show, I got some suggestions from Piezo during the making, and I made my own mental storyboard. But it deals with a dement and totally fucked up “story”, dealing with “signals that should be delivered to the eyes of who watches the demo” or something that I’m too ashamed to reveal... nothing like a real story: just something that could justify (to me) the sequence of scenes, as a glue between them.

8) I see... Tell us more about your partner in crime, Piezo.

Kurli: Actually, I’ve never seen him, personally. I know he is an Interior Designer in Copenhagen: we’ve been hanging around the same soccer newsgroup and we used to flame each other, quite often. But one day he posted an offtopic message saying “hey, luk, tis stuff is tha shit, fuck soccer, i quittt!!!11 you suckers: get a life!”: the url he posted was a demo. After that we kept in contact and we started collaborating. Interior Designers are eclectic and bizarre people: he got also good taste for music and used to compose electro tracks in the spare time, other than watching soccer on tv.

9) Really funny: I barely believe you, but, who cares? Hype and attitude are the columns the Scene is built on! Anybody else in SQNY, other than you and Piezo?

Kurli: No. We’re actually looking for skilled people to join us. But we’re becoming biased bastards so it will be difficult to join us. “Sudden glory makes you vulnerable”? Bullshit! Sudden glory makes you sexy and biased!

10) A-ah... Ok. Thanks for the interview, Kurli. Hope to see you soon at one of the next parties around, to share a beer and shit (lol).

Kurli: Thank you for having egostimulated me! I’ll be pleased to share a beer with you (and your girlfriend) (lols). See you, maybe at Breakpoint 2008!"

posted by friol at 1/13/2008 04:11:00 PM - under: kurli,SQNY - comments? here (2)

Art is usually about beauty, and the demos pretend to be art. But this time we'll talk about those demos that, for a reason or another, can't manage to surpass the thin line that divides "nice looking" from ugly.

We can generally subdivide those productions in three main categories:

1) demos that are enclosed in the concept of kitsch, that is the reproposal of well-known themes without any artistical or innovative content
2) demos that push the latest technology or algorithm, but end with forgetting the artistical side of a demoscenic production
3) demos that voluntarily use an ugly or childish language, or even the category of "disturbing" demos

Let's see some of them.

1. 90% of demos

An unsuspectably high number of demos probably falls into the first category.

If we think of it, the beginning of the scene is full of this type of productions.
The scene built initially a language made of stereotypes: the sine scrollers, the shadebobs, the vectorballs or particle effects, the flat-shaded spinning cubes and so on. Hundreds if not thousands of demos reproposed this kind of effects ad nauseam, sometimes justifying themselves with the will to break another "record" by one more unit.
But we can "forgive" this first wave of demos, maybe because initially the scene itself was born as something very far from pure art.
What we can't forgive is the demoscenic production that comes after 1995, era in which demos start to become a real artistic expression.

A demo like "Wizards" (The Party 2002, the last "The Party", indeed) is an example of this category. The demo is really short. We can see a little flyby that proposes the classic stereotypes of demoscene: the fight between two monsters or supernatural creatures, the particle effects, the Cornell Box alike illumination of the last scene. What is "wrong" is realization: the floor shows a classic checkerboard tile, there are candelabra on the table and the texture of a classic painting on the wall (probably directly from Google Images).

Another example of stereotyped demo is "Sleepless" by Smash Designs (or any other Smash Designs' demo, by the way 8-): even here we have the humanoid scene in a plastic environment, but "Sleepless", for other reasons (mainly the advanced "software rendering" engine) manages to surpass this category, and become a bridge to the second one.

2. we have bump mapping

Sometimes sceners follow so hardly the usage of the latest technology that, when they are about to produce the demo, they forget about artistical content.

After fr-08, there was a rush towards the creation of the definitive tool for demos. Sometimes this brought to excellent results that maybe surpass the original (see Conspiracy's tools), sometimes brought to disasters.

And it's of a disaster that we're talking about if we look at productions like "Krinoefl-3d" of Da Breaker Crew: it's the example of a demo built without the help of a graphician. The textures fight each other, there is no design or coherence or omogeneity between the scenes of the intro.

The same thing happens, if we go back over when the tools didn't exist yet (or they had another name), in the "State of Hate" demo by Dubius. Technically, the demo is pretty advanced for the era it was created (around 1995). We can find in it, in fact, high resolution, dynamic shadows, environmental mapping. Unfortunately, the choose of colours and objects penalizes the demo: the objects are simple solids or cliches of computer graphics, the colours are plain green or reds, or the anonymous black background.

Surely Dubius will get better in their next productions.

3. CGA (for your eyes only)

And we are at demos that *want* to play ugly.

Search for ugliness is not less painful than search for beauty.
"Deutsche Telekom" was one of the first accelerated intros that didn't look like all the other accelerated stuff. Only four colors are used: the Color Graphics Adapter ones.

One more time the scene limits itself in order to surpass its limits.
The mosaic effect reduces even more the resolution of the images that scroll on the screen. If this would have been the demo of an unknown group we would have pressed 'esc' after less than ten seconds. But this is a kewlers demo, the same group that will delight us with jewels like "1995".

The research for art travels even through the streets of what most of us find disturbing.
Now, did this post manage not to be ugly?

posted by friol at 10/25/2007 11:16:00 PM - under: bump mapping,demotools,ugliness - comments? here (2)

zoom { 'züm }
1: Movies, Television: to bring a subject, scene, etc., into closeup or cause it to recede into a long shot using a zoom lens and while maintaining focus
2: Graphics: to show a smaller area of an image at a higher magnification ("zoom in") or a larger area at a lower magnification ("zoom out"), as though using a zoom lens on a camera



Along with lateral (scrollers) or parallactical movements, the expressive power of zoom has been immediately taken and adopted by the demoscene. "Classic" examples could be the Second Reality rotozoomer (or World of Commodore's one, to calm down immediately the Amiga-lovers).
But probably even the tunnel effect is something that comes close to the "zoomer" concept.

One of the best tunnels the scene remembers is the one in Lasse Reinbøng by Cubic Team.
Initially it's not a tunnel, it's just a drop of water on the Cubic Team and $een logo. Then the scene rotates, distorts and gest transformed in the proper tunnel, that is deformed, radially multiplied and at the end, fades out.

With "Lasse Reinbøng", probably, a category of 2d effects like the tunnel effect reached their climax and disappeared.

Or better, they evolved into more complicated effects.



The "real" zoomer appears in the scene, in fact, around 1997, when The Black Lotus produce a demo, Captured Dreams, that, even if with a certain lack of unity on the design side, has a bunch of effects that remain impressed in the minds and remembrances of the audience.

After the initial sequences, the demo title is shown. The scene is composed by an hand in the centre, that carries a pill and a rounded shape (a "captured dream", maybe). But suddenly, the camera makes a zoom towards this shape and dives in the scene that it encloses, showing an astral gizmo, a flower, the TBL logo, an eye; at the end, the camera gets into the eye itself, and the scene fades in a tunnel (in a "free directional tunnel", to be precise).

The tunnel effect stays on the screen for some seconds, and then, in the same way we entered, we exit the tunnel and we make our way backwards through the inverted sequence of images, at two or three times the speed. Probably it's one of the most surprising zoomers of history for the freshness of the effect.



TBL themselves, masters in this genre of graphical presentations, will repropose the effect some years later and on another platform in their last PC production, Contour. The demo is hardware accelerated, and maybe it shows the ingenuities of the first accelerated demos, with too low-poly 3d shapes and splattered textures because of the hardware filtering.

But if there's an effect for which the demo is remembered from 1999, year when it won it came second at Takeover, that is the ending zoomer. This time the zoomer doesn't simply enlarge the images, but some other complexity is added: rotation.

"Contour"'s zoomer is nature-themed: we can spot, among the elements that compose it, a few plant's leafs, a coleopter, some flowers, a lizard. The lizard is the penultimate element of the zoomer, and its faceted eyes reflect the insect of the beginning. Everything ends ina fantastic Louie picture: a little girl that hugs a soldier, probably returning from the war. The image closes the demo.



A technical note: the magic of the zoomer is vaguely cracked to the expert eye for the artifacts that you can notice while the images are zooming. If you look closely, in fact, you'll notice the borders of every quad that makes each image.

Another demo that will remain for the initial zoomer is Spot by Exceed, the same group that made the more known Heaven 7.

"Spot"'s zoomer reminds for its presentation "Captured Dreams" itself: a lamp lights the "Spot" logo, and projects on the background some realtime shadows. The "O" of the logo is really the object we'll zoom into: the camera gets through it and starts to spin in a series of galaxies, planets, lens flares and clouds, to arrive floating at the house where the proper demo will take place.
Proper demo that is a boring flyby with animated objects, but the initial zoomer saves it all.



To close, another, last type of zoomer is in the scene from the beginning: the Mandelbrot, or fractal zoomer.
We could write pages on fractal theory; the argument is summarized well in this Wikipedia article. Indeed, a fractal image is a graphical representation that you can enlarge indefinitely, discovering always new and different particulars.
The demoscene has always tried to reproduce in realtime the computationally-intensive zooming into a fractal, using more or less different tricks.

One of the most smooth fractal zoomers is in an Italian production: the Shale intro, by Chalice. When the intro is reaching the end, while the distorted names of groups and sceners are greeted on the screen, the zooming fractal is shown, with a psychedelic palette cycle. What hits is the speed and seamlessness of rotation and zoom.

Where does a zooming fractal end? Has it an end?
Has demoscene an end, or, is it "dead", as someone is saying from time to time?
It doesn't matter, as long as you continue zooming.

posted by friol at 10/04/2007 08:37:00 AM - under: fractals,rotozoomer,zoom - comments? here (10)