[Amiga 30th Anniversary] Flare Mixer

[noname]

Hello everyone,

an Amiga compo at DBF sounded like the perfect opportunity to get involved! So here is my contribution: an Amiga effect that I started many years ago, but which was not used in a demo since then.

It is an 18 bit flare effect that I started on Amiga in 2009. As a first for myself back then, it was made using a mix of C and ASM code. This allowed me to quickly play around with different "magic formulas" for the movement in C, while maintaining access to the hardware hitting support routines that I have used ever since. Out of curiosity, I actually started a discussion about 18 bit saturation tricks on ADA back then (http://ada.untergrund.net/?p=boardthread&id=469) in which several well known Amiga demo coders participated and where Blueberry eventually revealed the trick that he would later use for his seminal Ikadalawampu (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54561) Amiga 4k intro.

But back to my contribution to this competition! The effect renders up to 512 flares at 160x90 pixel resolution in Amiga true colour HAM8 chunky which is well known at least since Tint by TBL. It calculates two different motion paths using simple trigonometric functions. Those two paths are then constantly mixed back and forth using another cosine, which makes for some hopefully interesting variations over time.

The drawing code is still totally unoptimized. But as the rules said that WinUAE emulation is fine, I thought that this wouldn't matter today

Tools were vbcc,vasm,genam, and vlink. My code uses the 18 bit C2P by Touchstone and The Player by Guru. Music by Virgill.

Binaries for AGA Amigas with 68040/68060 or WinUAE (please enable JIT for pleasure) here: http://www.dig-id.de/amiga/dbf/flaremixer.lha
YouTube video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZkP1p7hinc

Hope you like it!

[KrazyK]

That's a really nice effect, never seen that before and nice choice of music too.  I must have watched it for 15 minutes until I realized my pizza was burning in the oven.   

[Kirl]

Awesome effect and interesting variation indeed! Nice to read a bit about it's history as well. 

[hellfire]

Great one, Noname!
And two thumbs up for submitting an actual Amiga production to the Amiga compo!
At first I thought it's missing some kind of overlay (a logo, scroller, ...) but it would just distract from the effect and somehow degrade it to a "background effect". So everything is perfect.
Also great choice of music - one simply can't get more "Amiga" than Virgill

[combatking0]

Cool effect! It reminds me of a time-lapse of galaxy clusters moving towards and away from each other.

[Optimus]

Wow, that's really cool! And in Amiga!

[Rbz]

Really great effect, it's very hypnotic 

Thank you for participating on this compo and good luck!

[noname]

Thanks everyone for the kind feedback. It has been a lot of fun preparing the code for this..

[padman]

The technical details don't mean anything to me tbh, but it sure looks awesome! And nice music, too. K++ for using the original platform. 

[noname]

  Just noticed that K++ was actually some kind of gift. Thank you!

[Raizor]

Very nice and mesmerizing to watch It brings to mind the creation of the universe or something cosmic like that. Great to see something made on an Amiga too! Great stuff!

[Moroboshisan]

intriguing effect, some special respect for using the real hardware! maybe, as noted by hellfire, a little scroller or a side logo seems like "missing"...

[noname]

 Thanks for the votes. It was quite exciting to participate in another compo.

 

[hellfire]

An Amiga effect that I started many years ago, but which was not used in a demo since then.
It is an 18 bit flare effect that I started on Amiga in 2009.

And after only another two years this effect finally made its way into this demo