breakpoint

...or the winners of the demo competition at the breakpoint demoscene party, as it's sometimes known :)

Just thought I'd share some of these, as a lot of people here are into realtime 3d and fx, and the skills on show this year are pretty incredible. If you've not come across 'demoscene' stuff before, this is basically a competition for realtime graphics/effects, similar to what we do with QC but with a few differences: - A demo is (normally) fixed length, non-interactive, and comes as an executable. - It's programmed by a coder, usually with graphics from 1+ 2d/3d artists, and a sound track by a musician. - You're not allowed to use other people's work.. i.e. everything has to be written exclusively for the demo, including the music. It has to be a new demo too - you can't show the same demo at multiple parties (at least in the competitions). - There's a bunch of rules on file size (depending on the competition, this time it's 128mb for a full demo down to 4kb (total!) for the 4k competition), platform (pc, amiga and c64 are common competition platforms, mac is under represented), time limit (8 minutes) etc.

So, the demos. All of these are PC/windows unless I state otherwise, but there's a video of each. First, the demo competition winner, Agenda Circling Forth by Fairlight & CNCD. It's made entirely from particles.

http://capped.tv/fairlight_cncd-agenda_circling_forth (link to the binary at the bottom.. but be warned, it's going to need a VERY high end PC to run it..)

Next, 2nd place. Rove by Farbrausch. Landscapes, flocking, procedural animation.. stuff we've seen plenty of here. I've done effects like these myself using QC even.. but on such a tiny scale by comparison that I think I'll just delete those particular experiments now :(

http://capped.tv/farbrausch-rove

4th place was 'Wir sind einstein' (we are einstein) by United Force & Digital Dynamite. Comparatively low tech (and lo-fi too), but in a very cool way.

http://capped.tv/united_force_digital_dynamite-wir_sind_einstein

Vokawardoai by Satori only managed 5th, but they're not exactly 'mainstream'. They're a group some love and some hate, but they push my buttons. This is also a very "possible in QC" type demo - it's pure 2D effects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZAA4MYeB7g (or http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=54590 for a link to the binary)

Some 4KB demos next. They're 4KB total file size, including all audio and visuals.. the screenshot is usually 10x bigger than the demo ;)

'Nasa' by Still first. Good atmosphere and sound in this one I think.

http://capped.tv/still-nasa

Next, 'Darwinism' by Archee. Not really all that pretty, and the sound is pretty bad. But the code is really interesting. It's physics-based animation, and the 'creature' learns to walk/crawl/faceplant/eventually catch the butterfly using a genetic algorithm. According to the info file, it runs 720 simulations of different possible versions of each sequence in parallel in the background, but only shows the best one.

http://capped.tv/archee-darwinism

'Ergon' by Frequency. This is 'raymarching', a popular technique at the moment. The whole thing is raytraced on the GPU using only a few fragment shaders. The maths involved is VERY scary ;)

http://capped.tv/frequency-ergon

Lastly, 'IKA-20' by Loonies. Simple effects but great design + sync. I think this one is actually possible in QC. It's actually running on an Amiga computer though.. with 32MB of memory and a CPU roughly equivalent to a pentium 60mhz. This seems to be the best video available unfortunately, but it's cool to catch a bit of the party atmosphere (it looks small in the video, but there was probably 1000+ people attending over 4 days..)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF3m2soiSdY

I'll add more if there's interest (and when the video captures become available...) I was too busy to go unfortunately, as it's the last ever breakpoint (I'm sure there'll be something new to replace it next year). Anyone else here manage to visit?