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Hmmm... Yes, it's tesselation but basically there was this nifty algorithm to actually use tesselation with some additional magic to increase the so called approximation of a sphere to actually make it look better. Currently just can't get my head around the name, I'll pop the name here if I ran into it. Since it's bother me like there's no tomorrow.

I have to dig through the DBF resources if I can find something cool to use since it seems to contain loads of interesting libs/addons to use.

Two silly questions arised when I was thinking stuff over again with my friend.

We are mainly going to be using spheres and Cubes in our first demo. We are thinking of morphing cubes to spheres at some point of the demo but what I was wondering, does anyone know the name of the algorithm or what is it called when you basically just build REALLY rough sphere of triangles (almost like a cube) and start dividing the triangles into smaller triangles to produce a "high quality" lookking sphere? Or is there some sort of fancy name for this idea we are after already?

And for the music, well, more like how to go about using it. Should we actually go as far as start doing beat detection algorithms or just use a simple wave editor and get the general timing of the wanted beat going on and hard code it in? Seems a bit hardcore for a demo to start analyzing the signals

All though I guess that could be an option in a proper big demo but when it comes to really "low level" stuff like 64k to 1k demos I'm guessing there's absolutely no room for beat detection? Nothing that causes brain meltdown but just general stuff I'd like to get answers to. 

We are going to try and push out some sort of small demo even though we got our work loaded currently on us with the games we are working on. Also, any recommendations for a first demo, in way, how long / what kind of should be? Since it's like.. no matter what I do I instantly pull of the coolest lookking demo I can from youtube and don't really feel like showing the crappy demo we made to anyone since it cannot be even compaired to the coolness you find off the scene.

Cool, thanks again for answers. Mighty helpful just to clear up general confusion and to actually give some direction to where to start from.

Thanks for correction on the terms and for the reply. Naturally this atleast gave us some sort of insight on how things might and/or should be done. Everything was as we thought it might be so we were not that much far off... Now it's mainly just creating some sort of keyframing system that allows us to traverse through the "events" and have stuff going nuts on the screen.


Anyone else have any input on the general how to start creating demos matter?

[The general yada yada and background:]

Hi everybody.

The general yada yada and background:
Me and my mate already have experience in 3D/2D graphics programming and been making games for roughly two years now with languages like C, C++ and C# using API's like Allegro, OpenGL, DirectX, XNA and shading in TRM (cheap adaption from Pixar's Renderman, made by our tutor). Before we were making games we both got roughly three two years of general programming under our belt. I'd say it's four to five years programming experience in total for both of us.

..uhm.. Why the h£ll would YOU care?
we've had a burning interest to jump into the demo scene for some time now and start building our own compos but the problem is that we just simply don't know where to start. There doesn't seem to be that much information available on "how to build a compo".

We don't feel like inventing the wheel AGAIN ( ), since we've done that numerous times already when programming games. Any help concerning the general structure of demo, what it should contain (like what components programming wise) etc. As far as We've understood, the compos are pretty much hard coded from start to the end, for the sole purpose of the demo. So I'm guessing we should stop thinking of trying to build as reusable code as possible and just start chunking stuff together..?

We do have a rough idea what we want to see on the screen. But.. eh.. How? It's so hard to even describe what's the problem, I guess the biggest problem for us is the fact that the task of building a proper components for the demo feels a bit strange and how things should advance. Some sort of "animation" keyframing, or? Should we think of it like a game but instead of reading input from the user we just .. make it do something without the user input?

Does this even make any sense?

Any tutorials, helping topics, helping posts or insight into making demos is appreciated... hell, ANYTHING is appreciated. 


Thanks !

- SkyWhy