Demo time again.

psonice's picture

Yep, been a while since I did one of these demoscene posts, but revision (the breakpoint/main easter party replacement) and the gathering parties have passed, and there's plenty of new + interesting stuff released. Downloads (mostly PC/windows) available from the pouet links.

Here's a small selection:

numb res by Carillon & Cyberiad & Fairlight

Yep, new fairlight demo, with smash's crazy coding skills in full effect here. Doing fluids at this quality, in realtime, is insane. The demo is great too. And it's rendered in 3D. I'll put the anaglyph version up as most of you guys will have the shades, if not watch the 2d version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPdYfn9_dIM http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56900

We Crave Sustenance by PlayPsyCo

I liked the tune + style of this one. Nothing all that incredible compared to the fairlight demo (this one won at the gathering, fairlight came 2nd!) but still cool. http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56901

Shake Off The Dust by Elude

Low res, but some really creative effects and nice design. This was made on an amiga, and it puts a lot of the stuff we do in QC to shame - anyone want to try matching it on equivalent hardware? That would be a 68k mac! :O

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56884

Monstra Kosa by Satori

Software rendered. Not everyone's cup of tea - satori have a strange, hard but psychadelic eastern european style. And I'm not going to bother linking to youtube, the compression just can't cope with this - watch it realtime on a fast PC if you can, if not download the video from here: http://zd3n.com/files/str_monstra_kosa.mp4 http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56881

Code Is My Pron by Nuance

This one's 4k. The audio is.. different. But the visuals are great. Somewhere in the pouet comments somebody linked the shader too, plenty to learn in there I think (if you can decipher it). From a very quick look, I think it's possibly simple feedback effects, but performed on a 3d texture. The texture is then raymarched. (this is an educated guess, might be wrong :) http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56866

psonice's picture
Re: Demo time again.

Forgot to mention, anyone interested in how the hell smash managed to do fluids like that (it normally takes hours of rendering, and I would have said it was impossible in realtime - especially without openCL/cuda etc.) will want to read his blog post here: http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/ There's also some videos of his fluid effects in a non-demo setting so they can be seen a lot better, and they are seriously amazing!

photonal's picture
Re: Demo time again.

anyone know the backstory to the numbers in the numb res demo?

psonice's picture
Re: Demo time again.

A lot of people have asked that, I've not seen any answers yet. No mention in smash's blog. The original tune was from Stereo Wildlife, who changed the song to fit the demo, but the numbers were there in the original so it's not something specific to the demo I think. Perhaps it's just random, who knows :)

The track is available here btw, with preview (but no information on the numbers):http://stereowildlife.co.uk/

photonal's picture
Re: Demo time again.

Thnx for the Stereo Wildlife link - nice album they got!

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Demo time again.

screw this smash guy and the horse he rode in on ;) :P

damn it...

It's cool that he did it w/ anaglyph so people can see the 3d quality of it.

re: amiga omega...what's w/ the "we", do you have a mouse in your pocket psonice? ;P In all seriousness though, the aliasing looks funky and the fluid sim isn't too impressive at all, imo. The fog look was tasteful... I'm not saying it's bad or anything.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Demo time again.

I like that "code is my pron". Really attractive... hmm. I think that look can be done in QC with some care.

psonice's picture
Re: Demo time again.

Yeah, we just need 3d texture support (or a nice slow stack of 2d textures, might still be possible if you're only doing feedback from the next texture in the stack?)

psonice's picture
Re: Demo time again.

Smash's stuff is always half jawdropping, and half depressing because just as you think you're getting somewhere he goes and moves the the goalposts. And not just to the next big hill, but somewhere way over the horizon.

gtoledo3 wrote:
re: amiga omega...what's w/ the "we", do you have a mouse in your pocket psonice? ;P In all seriousness though, the aliasing looks funky and the fluid sim isn't too impressive at all, imo. The fog look was tasteful... I'm not saying it's bad or anything.

Yeah, the fluid wasn't amazing. Especially after seeing smash's version. But hey, we're talking about a 68k processor, and NO GPU. On a machine that doesn't even support standard graphics modes that are efficient for any kind of graphics other than 2d and scrolling (converting the image format before sending it to screen actually takes a large portion of the CPU time).

The fog though, that impressed me. Not because it looks amazing, but just because it's very clever - it's very simple 2d fog (probably just 2 alpha blended cloud textures) but they made it look 3d, by blending depending on the Z value. Very simple, very cheap, but it looks surprisingly good. This is classic demoscene thinking really, doing an effect that's "impossible", and finding a clever way to do (or fake :) it.

You totally lost me with the 'what's w/ the "we"' remark though. Maybe it's too early in the morning :)

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Demo time again.

You made some kind of comment about "we try to do ___ in QC"... just poking fun / not including myself in the group that tries yet fails I guess, at least in comparison to that specific clip :) So, the mouse in your pocket would be the extra "person" needed to make your "we" plural statement valid basically. I think maybe this is an old u.s southern phrase, come to think of it (?).

I sorta want to ignore smash's work though, because it's always nice :)

Good point about what the amiga omega was actually made on...

The fog was tasteful. Coincidentally, earlier in the week I saw a video guy setup a look almost exactly the same by manipulating a perlin texture and some kind of whispy flamey thing, and shifting colors, etc. I agree that being clever about what cues the eye perceives to be very important vs. not so important is key to realtime effects.

Shifting back to smash; I'm not sure that I think that this is a super big step over his other particle stuff, but I haven't read the breakdown... it's not obvious to my eye though that the impact is greater. I like the one from last year, and blunderbuss a bit better, from a sheer impact/look perspective. Duder needs to get off the particle systems and onto new stuff I think. Not that there's anything wrong with what he does, it's great, I just don't want to see him turn one trick pony.

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Demo time again.

There's a bunch of kind of unfinished looking 3D texture stuff knocking around in QC CL. It kind of bums me out actually, because the mesh creator clearly has a setting that is supposed to handle this... it's not like it's private api or anything, but it still doesn't work. Oh well!

psonice's picture
Re: Demo time again.

Ah right. I'm with you now. And no, never heard of that phrase :)

I just think that some of the effects in that demo (especially some of the strange (voxel based maybe?) 3d scenes) are so well done that it really is better than most of the stuff I've seen here (including everything by me :)

The new flt demo - maybe you need to read through his blog a bit. This is a MAJOR step up from what he's done before - particularly the fluids. From what I remember, he's moving 250 - 500k particles. They're all interacting, colliding with each other and 3d scenery, with viscosity, gravity and the rest. He's doing that entirely on the GPU, with dx9 (no opencl/cuda/computer shaders) in realtime.

That's seriously hardcore already. But he's also handling them like metaballs, and generating a high quality mesh in realtime. And he's got enough time left to light it nicely, apply DOF, and even add bokeh (have you seen anyone pull off a realtime bokeh effect around here? I've tried before, it's bloody hard - and his looks better than mine!) Then he's using the latest cutting edge post-process technique for antialias - and he's improved it for better quality.

Any of those features is hugely impressive, doing them all at once is almost magic. He makes an interesting comment on his blog, that he seems himself as a graphics researcher who uses demos to show his work. I guess that's how his stuff needs to be watched to really appreciate it - a ton of high end (and usually totally new, like here) graphics techniques, shown with cool style in realtime.

psonice's picture
Re: Demo time again.

Actually, you have a point there. Is it possible to hook a 3d structure of some sort from openCL into a glsl shader as a 3d texture?

A mesh won't work I think - you can'd draw a mesh with transparency like this easily when the camera angle changes, the polygons are too obvious. If you can import a 3d texture though, you can raycast through it quite easily (alx did a bunch of stuff like this before).

gtoledo3's picture
Re: Demo time again.

On the bokeh note, yes. There was a really good example posted here that I use quite a bit, and Vade has made one that's even speedier since, which is available in the NI stuff.

I think the sheer counts aren't as impressive to me anymore. There are some parts on the Cycling Forth (I think that's what it was called?) that had a higher level of realism, at least on my initial impression. Maybe some of that was because of color choice and transitions.

To be clear, I do think it's amazing, I guess it just felt like the old gag regardless of performance improvements or other engine differences. There was nothing that made me almost poop myself like his last one did... Like the buffalo that spontaneously combusts inside of the Where The Wild Things Are type scenery, or the running people that morph into a skull, or when all of those particles get blown away on that one synth note. Maybe I liked the music choice better too last time and also with Blunderbuss. Maybe I've set my standard of what I expect too see to high?

psonice's picture
Re: Demo time again.

They don't always spend months working on the design + graphics ;) This one was probably more of a code-oriented release.

I much prefer some of their other demos visually too in places, but this has a kind of laid-back style that I really like. It's not all in-your-face, it's just a collection of cool scenes. But when you look at what's going on in those scenes, it's quite amazing. Like comparing a fine wine with a bottle of salmiakki I guess :)

If you really want to get it, go pick up some 3d package with specialist fluids rendering. Set up a scene like this, with some basic rendering (convert to mesh, texture + light, nothing heavy). Hit the render button, watch how long it takes. Then watch the flt demo again ;)