Where's it all come from?

[da_fatstuff]

Hi all,

I've been watching/admiring demos since I can remember - and the effects routines have seemed to be largely unavailable until this site - this really is a goldmine of fascinating stuff for me to learn from, with the stuff I've always wanted to know but am too thick to work out for myself

I've often wondered if you regular posters actually (re)invented the code yourselves to reproduce an effect, or if you have libraries of previous demo-sources from different groups that you reference in the same way as I am trying to do from here? 

If you have libraries of demo-sources, where'd you get those from originally - outside of DBF people don't want to share what they've spent months working on, which I can understand when it's been for "competition"...so did you sneak round Breakpoint while they were drunk asleep or something 

Anyway - it's a top site, keep up the good work everyone, and if I ever do anything that isn't just a rip-off of your stuff I'll be sure to post it...more likely to post a question asking how I've broken it though 

[benny!]

@da_fatstuff:

First,  to the community. Hope you enjoy your stay here.


@topic:

Guess nowadays, most of us have a solid collection of all wellknown techniques / sources on the hd.
So, new fx are in most cases just variations of old ones.

This circumstance is really being pushed with the various open sources of demoscene/fx codes available
through the internet. In the old days - you rarely found source codes on the bbs. So, a lot of ppl tried
to work out the routines by themselves after they saw them in another production ...

[da_fatstuff]

Thanks - I'm sure I will.

I (sometimes) used to be able to reproduce an effect but rarely as well as, or even close to, the original - I'd have a sinus scroller running at what felt like 5FPS on my Amiga when the originals had it smooth with bobs flying round, glenz, and who knows what!

It's still kind of like that now when I try to recreate some of the modern effects in C++/FreeBasic - I can find a way to do some of it, but it's nothing like as smoothly/glossy as the originals manage.

For example, I was tinkering with this scroller where it took a Shockwave font, but instead of pixels it rendered technicolour OGL cubes/pyramids and I just panned in/out the Z axis and rotated the OGL objects...worked okay...then I watched 8bit Wonderland (KakiArts - http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=31657) esp their Tetris scroller - man their's is soooooooooooo much better!  Still, that's why they were first at Evoke and I'm going back to the drawing board  to improve mine

[taj]

Guess nowadays, most of us have a solid collection of all wellknown techniques / sources on the hd.
So, new fx are in most cases just variations of old ones.

This just so not true in my case. Almost everything I do, I do from scratch (with varying degrees of success I will admit but its all from scratch), with almost always no reference material. Simply put if you try and squeeze something into 1k, its unlikely you can find code anywhere that does it.

Indeed I specifically avoid known effects if I can in the hope of finding something new and cool. It doesnt always work out though.

Chris

[Shockwave]

There are so many possibilities of coding style now too.

Chris for instance has written some really nice things using pixel shaders, as well as lots of notable tiny productions, also there are the larger demos that use GL and Directx and there are also those of us who code for obscure platforms with sometimes obscure languages.

As you've seen, there is a massive blend of skills here and what sets this place apart from other forums is that we try and share our knowledge in a friendly way.

As for having a library of routines, and speaking only for myself I use other peoples libraries in my programs, things like Ufmod for playing music, a new framework that mimics Tinyptc but with more compatibility, features and steady refresh rate was developed mainly by Rbraz and Jim, those two things I would not do without, but then there are other things that you need to factor in..

Little things like your routine to open screens for instance, yoiu might write it once and then adapt it to suit everything else you work on, rarely re-coding it all.

As other people have said too, once you know how the effect is made, as long as you have a good grasp of the language you use, it's always possible to reproduce effects and hopefully adapt them into new ideas too.

If there are any particular things that you'd need to know how to do, even if it's something simple like a sinescroller or something difficult like raytracing you will find people here will take the time to explain it all and encourage you.

The goal is to get more and more people releasing things

[da_fatstuff]

Very true...and as you mentioned releasing...

...just in case it's of any interest to anyone, here's the scroller I mentioned before in this Thread that I'm working on - it's currently hacked together based on an FB scroller you (Shockwave) released a while back, and basically it uses OpenGL shapes instead of pixels, and applies the sin wav to all axis, and that's about it at the moment!

It's VS2005 C++ , very much WIP and clumsy code, but I figured it runs ok and might inspire someone to try similar (but hopefully better) effects in whatever language...if I get it cleaned-up I'll put it in the proper forum, for now it's just an effect idea in progress really.

[Edit] Modified the source to include a KillTimer at the end of the run - hopefully to stop any crashes.

[Jim]

Wecome to the forum da_fatstuff, and thanks for introducing yourself!

A lot of my code starts from scratch, and a lot of it builds on a foundation of the demo escherdbf code you've just downloaded - it seems to me that if you're not specifically targetting something then a generic engine you can use for a lot of different things is something nice to have.  I've written loads of those over the years as the technology changes.

Cheers for the demo and source.  It's a nice effect.

It crashed my machine dead at the end - there's no reason I can see from the source it should have done that though - perhaps stopping the SetTimer event might help?  I'm presently blaming nVidia.  Your code's not all that scrappy, I've seen FAR worse!

Jim

[benny!]

@da_fatstuff:
Looks cool - really nice scrolly. Keep it up!

[taj]

Yeah nice scroller and karma++ for posting the source !

[Shockwave]

Nice scroller, have some karma from me too for including the complete proect

[da_fatstuff]

Thanks for the +ve feedback, I've put a KillTimer in there & edited the post to hopefully stop crashes at the run-end for any future downloaders of it

[slippy]

Hey,

and  aboard ... first of all some karma for sharing your stuff here ...

I just picked your project and made a tiny version of it (2316 bytes) ...
hope you like it ... thanks to rbraz/auld for the OGL framework (just changed some things to fit current settings)
Anyway ... I'm pretty sure there are some more size tweaks I didn't find by now

The only thing you need to do by yourself is copying the current "crinkler.exe" to the project directory and rename it to "link.exe" ... (didn't include it here)

Also re-ordered some segments within the code

Have fun ...

Cheers,
  SLiPPY

[da_fatstuff]

Many thanks for that, wonderful stuff!

In my version I'd used a timer to get it firing updates to the scrolly @ 50FPS and you've removed this, yet it still runs at a consistent speed across my PC's (my laptop normally goes nuts while my desktop is relatively crawling) with just a Sleep(1) between cycles - how's that working so well?

Thanks again!