The first time I saw FBY, he was sleeping on the stands of the arena where The Italian Gathering 1997 was taking place. The party was almost finished, and they were announcing the winner of the 4 channel music compo (which was FBY himself). Someone started yelling at him, but he continued sleeping, until they threw him his prize and he awoke.

FBY is a great musician. The parties he won speak for themselves: 1st at The Party 1995, 1st at Saturne 1996, 1st at The Italian Gathering 1997 and 1998, 1st at Outline 2006, and so on. But more than looking at placements, you should experience his mods in first person. If you haven't heard of him, well, lucky you: you have a world to discover today. I suggest (but it's just my personal opinion) to start with Apache, Strange flower and Sambing to have a quick glance of his art, and then dig deeper if you like his style (you will).

So I reached FBY and asked him to talk about his musical origins, tracked music and music in general.


I've read that you started with a guitar and that your sisters carried you (or forced you to go) to music lessons. Is your family a family of musicians? Did you study classical music?

Yes. I began to sing when I was young, and then my sisters and I started to take private guitar lessons with maestro Carlo Mascilli. It was really fun: our teacher gave us pieces to study at home, and then we had to replay them during the lesson. At the end of each lesson, the teacher played for us... he was fantastic. Ivana [his sister, Ed.] quit first, while Sandra continued studying really hard. I was not studying that much, but still managed to keep up with the lessons, and after a while I started to bring to the lesson my own pieces (I was starting to show the traits of a composer, more than a performer). At our first recital, I played music from Leo Brouwer, Dionisio Aguado and three preludes written by me :)

So yes, I had a classical education that influenced my first compositions, like the "Piano Sound" I-V and "FBY Studio" I-IV series. By the way, the first music program I used wasn't a tracker, but a pentagram-based composing software, "Aegis Sonix".

In 1998 you said: "I like travelling a lot, so I don't think I will stay in Florence much more or in a stable way; I'd like to spend quite some time in America, maybe near a big lake with big trouts inside". How did it go then? Did you catch some big trout in America? :)

No, but my father went there :)
I've been in New York and for some time in the flat-ish Florida. I was at Delray Beach and often went to Miami and the beaches near there. I travelled a lot, across Europe in the 90s and then also in Asia. In the last few years, I really dug into Tiziano Terzani's books on the subject. 
Tell us something about the "acid" period of FBY's music, the one that brought pieces like "Acido Puro". Too many hours spent at the disco or just a consequence of the 90s?

Both things, I would say :)
At that time, with my friends Francesco and Demetrio we were listening to "a martello" music [an Italian expression to identify music similar to gabber or with a pumping bass drum, Ed.] every evening. If you like Acido Puro, you should also like Tetriade and Klassica.

Did you ever compose that kind of modules where notes make drawings in the patterns or the pattens go backwards?

No, never. But I appreciate Audiomonster and other musicians that did this kind of stuff. Really ingenious!

Apache. What's the title about? The public release of the .xm dates to 1998, but there are two other versions in different keys. Can you tell us something about the birth of this module?

The title comes from the American Indian tribe... not from the open source web server :) The first version was made in 1988 with Aegis Sonix (4 channels), the second version was made with 2 Amigas playing simultaneously in Soundtracker (8 channels), and the third and final version was made with Fast Tracker and rendered with Deliplayer (with additional stereo sound and reverb).

How did I track one module on 2 Amigas, you may ask... My friend Bernie [Bernardo Innocenti, Ed.] invented an interface that duplicated the mouse movements on the 2 Amigas, when needed, and created a home-made mixer for sound output. He also wrote an Amiga utility called "XModule", that was able to merge two 4ch modules into an 8ch one, and to convert Oktalyzer modules [Oktalyzer is a tracker often used by FBY, Ed.] into .mods.

Another piece I really like is the soundtrack for "Mille e non più mille", a 64k by Spyral that was presented at Mekka/Symposium 1997. Did you have problems staying within the 64k limit (the mod is 20k)?

Not really. I was used to write chip music. For example, I produced other small mods, like "Lucky day" (43k), "Amiga monkey shine" (63k), and the more well known "Superjazz" (aka "Oh yes, Jazz!", 86k compressed), that won the chiptune compo at DiHALT 2007 in Russia.


A question on "inspiration". Talking about non-commissioned music, how does inspiration come for you? You just stand in front of the tracker and start composing, or you imagine a melody when you're walking, or you play an instrument or all of the above?

The first option. I regularly opened the tracker, every afternoon, and started composing what came to my mind. As you can see in the page that collects all my mods (FBY ALL MUSIC), I really covered a lot of genres. I liked to experiment and I enjoyed composing music in every style and genre. For example Andalusia, that recalls Spanish/Andalusian music (I've also been there on vacation) and Paco de Lucia's one.

Is there a relationship between your mood when you are tracking and the quality of the music you produce, or this is really randomic? Where does quality, the thing that makes a piece stand as a masterpiece that is remembered, come from, in your opinion?

Yes, there is a relationship. But there is also a random, experimental factor. For me, the quality of a musical piece comes from its originality (that's why I love Pink Floyd, a band that experimented a lot) and then from its tracking and musical technique.

In another interview, you said: "In the future, more than affirming myself, I hope to create a series of skills, working practices, and a commercial system that would put in the spotlight artists, creators and not the usual merchants". Do you think that with Youtube, Soundcloud, and all the platforms to share music we are near to your idea of 20 years ago?

Yes, that's true: the "new" Internet gave to everybody the chance to put their music online, and for sure this is a good thing. At the time of that interview, anyway, I was starting the company "Nayma Software", in 1998, so in my mind there was the idea to establish a more open and free way of working to create software and electronic art. Nowadays, some companies, like Google, are near to that ideal, giving their employees that kind of freedom and flexibility.

Music in the demoscene has always been free, but very good, nonetheless.
Do you think that music should have a price? Or do you think that there can be a system that would give free music to the listener without letting the artist starve [maybe called Patreon or Spotify, Ed.]?

In my opinion, music should be free. In fact, my motto has always been "Fby's music is free music". Musicians have always been starving, little exceptions apart.

Last question: after all these years, you can tell us: F=Fabio, B=Barzagli... and Y=?

Sorry, it's a secret I will take to my grave :)


It has been a pleasure speaking with FBY and discovering his tracking secrets (but not the secret of his nickname, unfortunately). He's also involved in social themes (he mantains a portal on divorced fathers and paternity, www.paternita.info) and he writes thoughts and aphorisms (www.FabioBarzagli.net - in Italian).

We hope to hear more music from him soon!

posted by friol at 8/12/2020 04:53:00 PM - under: demoscene, history, interviews, intro, Italy, nineties, parties, tracking - comments? here (0)

As promised before I am obliged very happy to present you the 2nd part in our decennal review of 4k intros.
(Wow, it seemed more the statement of some retirement club...)

This time I won't reveal you how many 4ks could fit your 1.44Mb disk, but, to make you understand 4ks, I would just use an easy concept: as someone said, "4k intros are like 4096 1-byte intros glued together".

Anyway. I have mixed thoughts about this second span of 4k history. I'm quite confident we exited from the "wobbly raymarched thingie" or "infinite fractal" trend we've seen starting around 2010, but the general feeling is that the way to find a new direction is still long and painful, and that new ideas are just starting to emerge.

Also, looking over this new decade, some black spots, or "black years" like 2014 come up, years that seem to show a general emptiness in terms of ideas and new releases. In general, we also saw a massive increment of 4ks that use the same synth (4klang), unfortunately often with the same presets, flattening the soundscape variety.
But, regardless of that, and confident that the scene is NOT dead, let's dive in.

2008 - Texas by keyboarders

The best 4k of 2008 couldn't be anything different from 'the best 4k intro so far', by definition.
I've seen people on Youtube asking if this intro really plays that music.
Yes, it does. On Windows Vista, at least. Understanding how (even if everybody in the scene knows that) is left as an exercise to the reader in the long, winter days.


By the way, I personally like the visuals more than the music in this one.

2009 - Elevated by Rgba

And, by definition, the best 4k intro of 2009 couldn't be different from Elevated.


2010 - Cdak by Quite & Orange

The music and the atmosphere in this one is spacey.
If you read the comments on Pouet, people even like this 4k's music more than the one in "Texas".


Historically, this intro places itself at the dawn of the "infinite fractal" trend that plagued pervaded the demoscene in the early 2010s. But come on, this is *the* infinite fractal demo.

2011 - D-Four by Ctrl-Alt-Test

The best 4k of 2011, according to pouet's "top of the trumpets" is "Code is my pron", but I consider that one, as the title says, just coder's porn. Even if I'm I've been a coder too.


Instead, Ctrl-Alt-Test manages to create something really unique/rare in the scene with this one: an intro based on a flow of words, with a solid and catchy tune. By the way, it's funny reading the source code and the names of the background colours in French (Fondu noir de début, Nuit, Jour, etc.).

2012 - Reionization by mfx

The best 4k from 2012 is this one. Not this one. Not even this one.
Why? Because it's from mfx, because muzik rules and because Youtube can't compress it and you have to run it on real hardware.
(Youtube screenshot follows)


2013 - HBC-00013: Highway 4k by HBC and Tekotuotanto

The clear winner for 2013 is "Highway".


I bet anyone likes camera-distorted tron-esque motorbikes with pumping music in the background.
Interestingly enough, this 4k is written in javascript and then compressed. It's one of the few 4ks using this approach (maybe the only one? there are 55 according to pouet.net, there was even a dedicated party, called DemoJS, seems everybody forgot about this).

2014 - Dismantlement by BluFlame

As said, 2014 was a pretty poor year.
BluFlame, experts in 4k, come to us and save the princess with their "dental mirrors".


In general, the techniques used in this intro are not so new, but the "torus factory" scene is enjoyable, at least.
Nobody knows, still, why some toruses are missing.

2015 - hydrokinetics by Prismbeings

Prismbeings debut at an already very high level with their first 4k.


Some nice touches make this intro stand from the other "normal" raymarched productions: the moody music, that has nice and trippy echoes, the camera distorsions, the dust effect, the *hexagonal* *lens* *flares*.
Wait a sec, they don't have hexagonal lens flares...

2016 - 2nd stage boss by 0x4015 and YET11

What Gargaj said. Really.
If you sum up a size limited intro, a story, spaceships, lasers and explosions, you won't find a demoscener unpleased by this.
Since Lithium by Vista.


2017 - Unprogress by Fairlight

And we end this walkthrough with one of my favourite (to say the less) groups, that seem to have passed through all the ages of demoscene and still being able to be great, even if now they have probably 389 years each one.


This 4k could easily be mismatched for a movie trailer. And it's the first 4k with "statues", I think, or the first 4k with scene titles. But I may be wrong. Disprove me in the comments.

P.S.: by definition, this list should include "the best intro ever" by Razor 1911, but it doesn't. Sorry about that.

posted by friol at 9/07/2018 10:29:00 PM - under: 4k, flares, hexagonal, history, lens - comments? here (0)

Page 109 of "Freax", the only book* (I'm aware of) on the demoscene, reads:

"There was some C64 scene in Italy but it was the weakest of all European countries. The only group worth mentioning was F4CG's Italian section but they were mainly importers, rarely releasing a few cracks".

That's all the book has to say about Italian scene (C64 and Amiga**).

I don't know, or better, I didn't know C64 Italian demoscene before (my activity in the scene starts around 1997), but that sentence triggered some serious doubts in my mind. Italians are usually full of ideas and a resourceful kind of population, so it seemed strange to me that all that remains of C64 Italian scene is a group that was made mainly of "importers". So I started to delve into that years (somewhere between 1984 and 1992), speaking with Italian sceners that lived that era in first person, watching all the material that is on CSDb, staring at hypnotic scrolls on black backgrounds that last for ages.
The result isn't so far from Tomcat's sentence, but this post may be seen as an "addendum" to what isn't written in "Freax".
And, trust me: 8 years of C64 scene deserve more than 2 rows in a 300-pages book.

Maybe what I'll write may not be 100% accurate (since almost 30 years have passed from that days, and traces are fragmented and unclear sometimes). Maybe some works (intros) could be just reuse of international material (I'm no C64 expert, after all). Also, 1985s were the years when it was not unusual to pick a .sid from some game and put it straight into a cracktro. Copyright laws were fuzzy at that time, and pouet threads on "ripped commercial music in demos" were still years to come.

Italian C64 scene shows mainly two phases (that merge into each other):

1) A "cracking/swapping/trading" phase, from around 1984 to 1989

2) A "maturity" phase, from 1989 to 1992, when we start to see typical products of the demoscene: demos, intros, music disks, diskmags and so on - and, consequently, the demoscene becomes also self-aware (yep, as Skynet does in Terminator)

"Happy" nature of the Italian people and fuzzy laws on copyright of digital material were fertile ground for a bunch of crack groups born around 1984-1985. Memories of that period speak of coders with "incredible skills", like the people behind 2703, NIWA, PM and so on. Mystery and funny anecdotes remind of mythical figures, like Piersoft "the hairdresser" that (legend says) had a swapping/trading-base in the back of his barber shop. Or Wildcat, the "cracker" of ICS that is flagged as a lamer, a "re-cracker" and a ripper by almost every group of that period.

Those were the days of "the Wizard", a copy-protection mechanism for floppies that, if forced, made your 1541 vibrate so badly that, after five or six unsuccessful tentatives, you had to buy another disk drive.

Cracker groups spread in the whole "boot" (Italy is a big boot, did you know?). Crackers were so fearless that put shamelessly their private phone numbers in their crack-intros, sometimes asking to "call them call them call them" to get the latest and freshest software. Naples was the homeland of "software collections", big compilations of 10-15 commercial games on a single cassette, each game often dubbed with strange Italian names. Importing games and cracking them became a real business, with people organizing trips to London or other european cities to catch the latest warez. Yep, we would see a "serious" law (as an Italian law can be) for copyright only in 1993, but for that date crackers were already far away.

With the decline of C64 in favour of Amiga and other computers, the C64 cracking scene went disappearing (even if there are trainer/cracker "nostalgia" groups even at the time I'm writing this, in 2013!); what remained was the beginning of the "real" C64 Italian demoscene. This scene was, indeed, a prologue to the Amiga Italian demoscene.

Some interesting groups started to walk the scene, like Gax777, Demons, ARM, The Force (an italian-hungaro-israelian-australian collaboration) and Air Design. As said, groups started to produce more serious demos, not only one-screen intros, but charts, original music compilations, graphic packs and disk magazines. One for all: the funny-named (funny just for the few among us that understand Italian) "Coolface" (a beautiful joke on a word that sounds like "cool" in Italian). This C64 diskmag reached even 5 editions, mainly composed of flames towards (yep, again) Wildcat/ICS and reviews of Italian cars.

Relevant coders and graphicians emerge, like gi 909 of the Force and Zagor and Zoris of Gax777. Graphicians are now capable of drawing nice logos and pictures, and coders can open the borders of a C64 like a child opens his presents at Christmas time. At the same time, some (unfortunately not long-lived) game companies were starting to produce software, and some demosceners worked there as coders or artists.

And then, the Italian C64 scene starts to fade away.

The first "real" Italian party, in 1994, and some early "crackdowns" by the police mark the end of an era. F4CG and a few other groups still produce intros and scene-related material, but after 1993 the main targets of Italian scene will be PCs and Amigas.

(The Italian Amiga&PC scene produced, in particular, world-class demos and sceners, winning international parties and writing pages of demoscene history)


Italo-sceners on C64 gave us hundreds of cracks/trainer intros, kilometers of cassette tape and tons of insults towards Wildcat/ICS. And still, survivors of that strange and obscure period are proud of what your imagination and will could produce in a world that still had no Internet, wi-fi or broadband, where the only way to swap software ("swap", a term that lost its significance, today) was sending a real paper mail into the void and waiting for an answer.

* People pointed out that there is at least another printed book (in English) on the demoscene: Demoscene: the art of real-time. I haven't read it, but since it has only 72 pages, I hardly think it talks about Italian demoscene.

** At page 327 "Freax" dedicates 9 lines (yes, nine) to the Italian Amiga scene of the 90s. That's all.

posted by friol at 6/05/2013 10:46:00 PM - under: C64, history, Italy - comments? here (4)

"balls are the new bobs" - Insectecutor

"When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning.
When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine." - Pablo Picasso

Did you think we were dead? Yes, we were, indeed. And then your scientists invented electricity.
Merry Christmas.




We've left raytracing extinguishing just after the release of Heaven seven. Demoscene of the years '00 gets oriented towards an orgy of 3d scenes, more and more crowded and detailed as the graphic cards give away more raw power for free. Or maybe, demoscene is simply dazzled by the German Rise of the group Farbrausch, that leads the way with robots, discoball-alike dancing men and supermarket carts.

But everything has an end, even the insatiable thirst for power. And at the millionth polygon, the scene searchs for new directions.

And how do you innovate, if not going back to the roots of old and dear raytracing?

The ones that first recognize in the new graphic cards not only polygon crunching powers are the almost unknown Castrum Doloris, who incidentally name the new scene's manifesto "ps_2_0" (as the code directive that says to the graphic card to use pixel shaders 2.0), and propose again the undead classic of the shadowcasting spheres in a hollow cylinder. But somehow, a little bit for the (coder) colours, a little bit because the scenes' resolution makes it look like a mid-nineties intro, the tentative of pioneers Castrum Doloris doesn't gain any followers.

The scene goes ahead wandering between hundreds of polygons, with brief stops in the accelerated raytracing's field, as in the Tron-esque and beautiful "Fair play to the queen" by Candela, where the running robot escaping from something passes behind three metaballs with specular bumps (yes, that's made with pixel shaders).

And then, suddenly the scene has a revelation. The "revelation" is not so different from the innovative Castrum Doloris' intro (of two years before), but:

1) it doesn't have coder colours
2) it shows much much higher resolution
3) it's 4k in size (OMG, 4k)

Its name is "kinderpainter", and the author is noone but iq of rgba.

A new era is born. Everybody realizes that raytracing, and fast raytracing is possible on the GPU, and suddenly everyone starts making 4k intros with raytracing. But why is raytracing so fast on modern GPUs? We asked that to the author of kinderpainter himself:

"Well, it fact depends a bit. Raytracing is also damn fast in CPUs today. With multithreading, SSE coding and cache friendly design you can get several million rays per second in a regular CPU, which allows realtime raytracing of huge 3d models with millions of polygons. You can find here a few screenshots of my own CPU realtime raytracing.

Now, democoders are not in general interested in real raytracing - we are quite behind the raytracing community. We are still tracing rudimentary spheres and planes like in the 80s which is completely unimpressive for those who are really doing raytracing today. If you speak about raytracing as understood in the "demoscene" (spheres and planes), then yes, GPU is very fast, faster than the CPU.

Real raytracers are usually memory bandwidth bound, and not compute bound, because huge kdtree/bih structures have to be traversed and few polygons accessed per ray. That's why the fastest raytracers out there are CPU and not GPU.
However, in simple scenes like in the demoscene without kdtree/bih or complex data structure and geometry, brute force rendering the GPU really shines indeed. That´s because no memory accesses means the ALUs of the shader units can work without stalling. Of course all these ALUs work in parallel because every pixel of the screen is independent of the other pixels in a raytracer. So, for demoscener kind of raytracing the GPU is really a good option. Also, as the setup needed is minimum so it's perfect for 4k productions. Lastly, as GPUs get more powerful by means of adding more shader units (arithmetical power) these sort of simple raytracers will benefit more and more, just like rendering of fractals which are pure computation problem.

However, the CPU is still probably the best/fastest option for real raytracing with not ten, or a hundred of "stupid" spheres but millions of polygons. However NVidia is trying to have real raytracing running fast in the GPU too, although it's only for a limited amount of polygons (say, a million)."

After this "breakthrough", it becomes possible to reproduce in realtime the first chapter's patinated covers of early '80s magazines. It's a cycle that completes inside the scene. "Photon race"'s still image now moves, between translucency and refractions, in "Photon race 2". Every surface that seemed made of plastic now reflects everything around or diverts the rays of light, reaching a realism never seen before at this detail and at those resolutions. The 3d scenes are not penalized anymore by triangles' jizziness, but gather new and unexplored roundness.

The possibilities offered by pixel shaders motivate the scene to go behind the classic spheres and planes (on the contrary of what iq says).

In "Yes we can", the Obama-sponsored 4k, Quite use raytracing to create kaleidoscopic plasmas, curved and distorted surfaces that alternate with rainbows of flexuos lines, billions of dust particles that generate infinite geometries.

In "Nevada", Loonies recreate cavernous moon passages, undergound wet and barely lighted tunnels, but more than anything, creased tentacles that mix their roots in a substance that reminds of lava, and stretch out towards a distant and incandescent star.

In "dollop", SQNY uses isosurfaces to build an enviroment that reminds of the underwater abyss, passing with a seamless cut to the soft clouds of a sunny day, only disturbed in an imperceptible way by an electric and psychedelic shell that surrounds the observer.

Raytracing is born again.
Someone calls it "raymarching", but the line between the two techniques is thin.

4k intros, genre that was drying up as the use of 3d raised the bar further and further, come back, and in democompos the number of those little gems exceeds the one of other productions. The "still images in 4k" genre, newly born, can move towards a robust youth, leading to masterpieces like "organix" or "slisesix".

A spark generates an explosion, if you have explosive.

posted by friol at 12/24/2009 09:41:00 PM - under: history, raytracing - comments? here (6)

(let me be proud of being Italian, just for one second, please)

The "optimizing" phase (mid 1997 - mid 2001) is the second era of demoscenic raytracing. Up to here, we've seen blocky slow spheres, really more similar to blurry squares, going nowhere on infinite parallel planes. Casting shadows. And all of this at fps-es you can count on the fingers of a hand.
Then, an intro came, out of nowhere, an intro that changed the state of things. Its name was obscure and ermetic: "Gamma" (no, not this one).

Let me make a SoLo-stylee description of "Gamma":

black screen
synth demo music
gamma logo
vertical and horizontal pipes with flares between
flashy metaballs
more flashes
psychedelic palette cycling
morphing and reflecting cube
end credits

(memo: write a Polygen grammar to generate automatic SoLo demoreviews)

"Gamma" has a unique trance-ish feeling. Differently from before, you can't say at the first glance that this production is raytracing. Fps-es are too high (it runs flawlessly on a 233mhz pentium), and, more then any other thing, there are no reflecting spheres and checkerboarded planes. Finally, mfx abandoned the mode-x scanlines and that blobby blurring we've seen in the "Transgression" series, and let pure raytracing powa flow outside of our screens.

The other groups will be astonished for a long period, and continue making raytraced planes and spheres for some time more... but! Let me open here the Italian parenthesis in raytracing's history!




Italian groups have made mainly "mainstream" and "one 'human' character show" type of demos.
But two groups were making raytracing instead: Spinning Kids and Bug2Fix.

Bug2Fix reached the aphex of their career in the first phase of raytracing history, when they brought "Just like Antani" at Assembly 1997 (making out an honorable 5th place in the intro compo - just behind mfx, by the way). "Just like Antani" is quite a good intro, but it belongs, as said, to the "inception" phase or raytracing history, with black/white floors and so on.

Spinning Kids hit the scene in 1997, with two contributions: one totally raytraced intro ("I feel like I could"), and one "not-so-realtime-but-beautiful" raytraced scene in their "Back to the mansion" prod (otherwise almost forgettable). The IFLIC engine is still phase-1 raytracing, but shows some nice innovations, like the dynamic resolution switcher (from 80x50 up) and the (forgettable) dithered mode.

Then, things evolve into "Sviluppo insostenibile" ('unsustainable development', but it sounds better in Italian). It was september 1998.
Dixan, Spinning Kids' musician, says something about the technical features of this one: "'Sviluppo Insostenibile' was coded at Pan's place, in Venice, and on the train, while we were going to Abort98. The most relevant feature is Pan's texture generator, clever coding exercise that had its own virtual machine, technologically advanced 2d filters and a highly optimized memory management scheme, so optimized that, at the end, we managed to put only *one* texture in the intro".

Their raytracing engine really evolved, anyway, and lead to "Taint", presented at "The Trip '99", the (*last*) real Italian party (yeah, you've heard well, 1999; that's where I stop being proud of living in Italy :). "Taint" remains probably the higher expression of that technology, with its volumetric lights (maybe a primer in a demo) and atmosphere. I remember that the Spinning Kids guys had filled the Trip '99 party hall with black and white photocopies of one scene of "Taint", and everybody was asking what that blurry thing was.

Yeah, Italian history of raytracing, sadly, ends here (but with pride).


And then, on the 24th of April 2000, raytracing disappears from the scene.

Yes, that's the date when "Heaven seven" by Exceed was shown at Mekka & Symposium 2000.
"Heaven seven" was the fastest raytracing seen up to there. This intro became in people's imaginary like an icon of design and demo-crafting. Even many years after M&S, people have taken the binary of "Heaven seven", like a fetish, and expanded it, upgraded it. We can see now "Heaven seven" in 1080p HD. And it still runs as fast as a polygon rasterizer.
"Heaven seven" is still number 3 in the "pouet's top ten" of all time, and it's almost a decade old. Many young people have got in touch with the scene seeing that intro for the first time. We can't really explain why "Heaven seven" exploded like that. The only suggestion we can give is "watch it".
Blocky jagged spheres were forgotten forever after the 24th of April 2000.

As said, after that date, raytracing disappears from the scene.
We still have some other examples of good raytracing intros or demos around 2000.
Suburban was perfectioning their rtrt engine (*then* "Heaven seven" came).
Kolor produced the "Fresnel" series, FAN brought us "Nature still suxx".
But "Nature still suxx" is already something different from a demo, something that pushes its bounds more towards a benchmark (and "Nature still suxx" will really become a benchmark).


The daemon of ray tracing will sleep from here after under the demoscenic beds. 

posted by friol at 8/22/2009 10:22:00 PM - under: history, raytracing - comments? here (2)

"As we all know, the audience voted for best productions at Juhla Pi. And, as always - audience was stupid." -- Jmagic, on why the world's first realtime raytracing demo didn't win 1st place at Juhla Pi (from: "(Illogical) PC Demoscene Quotes List" or "how the 'first' realtime raytracing demo cannot be called 'Transgression 2'")

Realtime raytracing, the wet dream of demoscene, deepens its roots on patinated PC magazines with still images of platonic solids that had unreal crystal reflections. Lifecycle of raytracing in the demoscene crosses at least three phases, the first one of which (the "inception" phase, that spans from the mid-90s to 1997's end) we'll analyze in this post.

The word on which the first realtime raytracing experiments bump is "fake" (or even "precalculated"). In order to build a convincing raytracing, in fact, one that you can really define "realtime", a minimum quantity of processing power is required, quantity that personal computers of old ages didn't have.
Not the widely used Commodore 64 or Amiga, but not even the first generations of PCs (i386 included).

For that reason, sceners had to reproduce visual-loops of pre-rendered images on those less powered platforms. For that reason, the intro quoted as "the first one with realtime raytracing" is an animation. The second intro of that series, instead, rushfully separates precalculated (duh) raytracing from the realtime one, but unfortunately the "realtime" version looks more like a slideshow of the magazine's images of above.

In the first creative phase, we can't count many productions using realtime raytracing. It seems that in order to show a sphere reflecting the surrounding landscape you need higher technical skills than the ones used to code (or rip) a 3d rotating cube. Or maybe the problem is that the closed circle of demoscene lacks information on this subject, and for those reasons realtime raytracing remains confined (and marked as "fake") to the black magic realms.

To make things more complicated, the raytracing-intro authors themselves mix cards, stating that the engine used in their productions is nothing else than "the slowest polygon engine in the world".

From the "Gamma 2" infofilu:

"It was in the beginning of 1995 when 216 had this pretty wild idea of a realtime raytracer. But soon it was discovered that the project was not only impossible but his programming skills weren't at that level. So he decided to do it the other way around.
Transgression 1 was created.

It wasn't anything but a regular polygon engine with a clever trick used. After filling the scene it just took samples from here and there and painted big blobs on those points and thus the outlook was so crappy that no-one was to tell whether it was traced or not."

The first few realtime raytracing demoscenic productions are all alike for using some cliches: reflecting spheres, shadow-caster spheres in all different sizes and colours (with fog, without fog, with lights, with more lights), perfectly perpendicular cylinders, checkerboard-textured planes and so on. By the way, those are the easiest primitives to trace.

Anyway, the limits of machines where those productions run are still there, and, for how great a coder could have been, tracing more than a textured plane at full framerate was impossible. For that reason, the around-'97 raytracing intros are rendered at resolutions that are fractions of real screen resolution (for most of them the fraction is fixed, but there are exceptions that we'll see next), and then interpolated to cover its entire surface. Raytracing is then rapidly associated in people's imaginary to the jagginess of any oblique surface.

For each intro of that period, also, the object's movement, seen on more powerful PCs, makes them look as they're submerged in highly viscous liquid. Coding a raytracing intro on a low-end i486 must have been hard (but that's demoscene: pushing the limits): probably it was like seeing a bunch of polaroids in sequence.

This phase of history of raytracing in demoscene ends symbolically with the highest evolution of polaroid-technology: "Sink" by Pulse (Pulse is the group that gave us presents like "Famous Cyber People", "73 Million Seconds" and "Square"), highly unknown and underrated intro that tries to go ahead of the "textured-plane/reflecting sphere with shadow" concept, and proposes more consistent scenes, like an underwater and futuristic landscape, or a Paper-esque cartoonish grass foreshortening with (bumped) trees and sun.

After "Sink" we won't see any raytracing from Technomancer again, but someone may be working on Pulse's nextgen engine:

"soon unreal's granny will join with her texture+phong+bump+zbuffer+shadows+ hexalinear heptapentametaoctamapping+fog+rain+particles+depth focus+hair modeller+volume rendering+ radiosity+ raytracing+ perspectivecorrect 3d system that she is coding since world war II
at the moment she's workin on the speed, now she's said to have 50spf (seconds per frame)"

posted by friol at 8/17/2009 08:47:00 PM - under: history, raytracing - comments? here (0)

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