Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
GENERAL => General chat => Topic started by: Shockwave on February 18, 2012
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Awesome :)
Sundown is on again this year!
http://www.facebook.com/events/297285583659951/
I hope to see some of you there!
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I don't think to come (since I am in France ...)
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Cool! I plan on going and releasing something, no idea what as yet though...
I seem to recall the previous venue being a hotel. Is this still the case? Trying to work out where to stay.
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Looks like a great time!
:)
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Cool! I plan on going and releasing something, no idea what as yet though...
Forgive my ignorance (I've never been to a demo party) but when people 'release something' at one of these parties, is it coded from scratch during the event or do you bring something finished along with you?
If they're coded from scratch...
Can you bring pre-made code?
Can you use your full range of home made content generation tools?
I've always been interested in these parties but I've never been aware of any close by so I haven't looked into the details :)
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Things are normally coded in advance. A lot of people seem to leave it late and end up fixing last minute bugs parties though. There are sometimes 'live coding' competitions that involve coding things at parties, not sure if they're ever from scratch though. I'd imagine that would be a nightmare! :)
Some parties let you submit entries remotely too, so you can enter the competitions without actually attending the party. I think that was how Sundown worked last year.
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Hmmm... I might make an appearance :D
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Raizor, there was a uk party called Sunrise last year and that was held in a hotel. Sundown is held in the town hall of Budleigh Salterton in Exeter - I usually sleep in the hall when I go but I'll get a B&B this year I think.
StaticGerbil, remote entries are allowed at Sundown :)
Ferris, I'd be really pleased to meet you there mate!
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Ah yeah, I'm getting the two confused.
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All booked. Yeehaa!
Now to decide what to make :P
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Excellent!
Look forward to seeing you there mate.
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Ditto :D
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Been meaning to post in here about my party experience at Sundown the weekend before last. It was the first demo party I've been to in about 20 years. The last one was the Destiny party in Southport back in 92 or 93 (the good old Amiga days).
I'd planned to release a demo or intro at the party, but (stupidly in hindsight) waited until the competitions were announced before starting. This meant I had less than a week to get something ready. I ended up using my Menger's Mice DBF compo entry as a base and worked on extending that. I didn't have a tune for it and didn't want to use one from someone else's demo if possible. I posted a message on Pouet a couple of days before the party, asking if anyone had a tune (ideally made with 4KLang) that I could use. After lots of responses along the lines of "Oooh, you've left it a bit late!", Punqtured of Fnuque responded and offered to make me a tune. This was awesome news! I emailed him some screenshots and some rough timings for the intro. Less than 24 hours later, I had an email with a rough version of the tune. After staying up late on Thursday night and getting a few hours of coding done on Friday morning, I was out of time and it was time to head off for the party. I copied to the code to my laptop, so I could take that with me and continue working. Quick test on the laptop to make sure it worked - it didn't! Panic!! "Oh well, I'll have to sort that out later", I thought...
It was a fair drive from Dover where I live to Budleigh Salterton in Devon (the party place) and took me about 6 hours. I managed to book a room in a Bed & Breakfast place, which turned out to be lovely. I was greeted on arrival by the lady who ran it, bearing a pot of tea and a massive slice of homemade cake :D There were some more sceners staying there too, so I got to chat with them every morning over breakfast. I can't remember all their names, but one of them was Havok, who organises the Outline party in Holland - really great guy and very friendly. Thankfully, the place I was staying had WiFi, so I could work on the intro and talk to Punqtured on IRC at the same time. By about 10pm, I figured I should head down the road to the party, instead of sitting alone in my room, coding like a hermit :)
Upon arrival at the party hall, I snagged a place, set up my laptop and carried on coding until about 3am. After a few short hours of sleep, a nice breakfast and morning chat, it was back to the hall to try and finish things. Due to me having so much work left to do, I didn't get to socialise quite as much as I would have liked on the Saturday. Managed a lunch, beer and big laughs with some crazy guys from Mad Wizards though before desperately finishing up the intro and making sure it worked on the compo machine. I can't express just how impressed I was with the party in general and especially the organisation and equipment. There was an intranet running Party-Meister, which is a system used for running parties and allows people to vote for compos, sumbit entries and other things. The big screen and sound system was also really impressive. I think the screen was the same size as the one in the local cinema in my town and the sound system really did boom! Everyone there was really cool and I got to meet some great people and made some new friends - which is always nice :) There were lots of nice gestures, with people walking around handing out pizza and vodka jellies to people. The atmosphere was really great, everyone getting along and no bitching or ego stuff at all.
Working on the intro on the laptop was quite a painful experience. I used my MacBook Pro with Windows installed on it and had all sorts of GPU driver issues to contend with. I finally managed to get things in a usable state but was forced to work with my intro in a window about 300x200 pixels in size while developing - ouch!
I finally submitted my entry at about 6pm (1 hour after the deadline!). There were still some pieces missing and a few bugs I didn't have time to fix, but it kinda worked and looked OK enough :) I'd planned to have a greets part in the intro and a particle effect (thanks for the tips Ferris!), but neither of those got anywhere near finished in time. A lot of the sync effects were done right at the last minute too, so some aren't delta timed and were done with some rough guessing of target FPS, which causes some issues on certain machines :P The intro is also a little boring and overly long as the two main effects are looped/ping-ponged due to not having the other parts finished. But hey, it got released and I've learned some valuable lessons about ample preperation time - hehe.
Due to some hardware issues, the competitions were delayed quite a bit and the new-school demo compo ended up happening at 2.30am! This wasn't too bad as they brought the DJ set forward to fill the space and everyone got to enjoy some great tunes by Hoffman and Savanah. I've never seen anything I've made on something bigger than a monitor, so seeing it on a massive cinema screen with a booming sound system was just bloody awesome!! I was actually talking to Punqtured on IRC right up until the compo, and he really helped calm my nerves as the night went on. Was quite strange with him sitting in Denmark drinking beers and listening to the live radio stream, while I was at the party having beers too :D
My intro ended up coming 3rd in the compo with 132 votes and the winning intro (a 4k by Rift) getting 135 votes. So very close and very nice to place so well. I've been totally bitten by the party bug and can't wait to go to more. Planning on going to Revision in Easter and maybe some more. I really want to experience the adrenaline rush of seeing something I've made on a big screen again with people whooping and cheering. Hard to describe, but equally hard to forget...
I'm currently working on a final of my release, with some missing bits added and bugs fixed, which will hopefully be ready in a few days. I've been very surprised with the positive reaction to my intro so far, which really keeps the motivation up for the future. I was also invited to join Fnuque, which I gladly accepted after getting to know the members, who are all very cool and talented. So hopefully, some nice (and more finished/polished) 64k and 4k intros with them in future :)
That's about it for now. Hope I haven't bored you too much with all this. Just wanted to share my experience. Demo parties rock! Here's to the next one!! :D
Here's the Pouet link (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=59965) for the intro if anyone wants to see it. It is very similar to Menger's Mice though ;)
p.s. Shame you didn't make the party Shockwave. Look forward to the belated beers at next years party!
Cheers,
Raizor
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Cool to read about your party experience, sounds like a great time. Congrats on 3rd and on joining Fnuque!
Loved the demo too! :clap:
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Awesome writeup, k++ :) Congrats on 3rd place and joining Fnuque too!! Those guys are fantastic. Looking forward to more stuff from you in the future, and hope to see you at some party sometime soon :D
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Many Congratulations Raizor Dude!
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Thanks and K++ for the writeup. Was cool to read it. Hopefully I will make it to Sundown too some day.
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I missed it, damn!
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yes, once again congrats to your win! It's very intersting to read your party report :) k++
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Thanks for the nice feedback :)
I made a final (http://www.0xdeadface.com/raizor_sundowner_final.zip) version of the intro. It fixes a few bugs and includes the greets part that didn't make it into the party version.
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Bloody awesome mate! :clap:
A flowfield for the particles at the start would've been cool, I'm having some good fun playing with flowfields atm. :)
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Awesome Raizor!!!
Congrats on 3rd place...
I like your stuff , it rockzzz so much...
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Bloody awesome mate! :clap:
A flowfield for the particles at the start would've been cool, I'm having some good fun playing with flowfields atm. :)
@Kirl, hehe. That would have been good. I didn't get my head around flow-fields in time though :( I plan on abusing the hell out of them in my next intro though :D Would love to see what you've done with them at some point. They really do make things feel organic and alive.
@C3ltic, thank you :)