lywenn.eu.org

Ohhh, my... this was something, now that I'm back on Earth, it may be time to write something about it.

But before, a little explanation : Evoke is a demoparty taking place in Cologne, in Germany. It was held the first week end of August 2009 at Abenteuerhallen Kalk, an old warehouse transformed into some kind of gym/skate park.

And what a place ! Evoke was the first party I went to, but from everything I have seen through the web, this was really a great place. It has a huge main hall for the party, there was BIG screens everywhere, there was a bbq area, the skate park was the sleeping area ! The organizers really did a good job, everything went fine from beginning to end. Really a great party, I hope to come next year.

And if I come, it will not be without another prod. So yeah, I finally presented the 4K I was talking about a while ago, BitBox. It is really too short, but I'm proud of my work, I did what I wanted to do : a 4K, without classic demo effects seen thousands of times, with a storyline, even if it is really really really simple.

I finished second at the Alternative Platform compo, but something I never expected happened ! While I was on stage, getting my prize, they asked me to stay a little longer. I was all "what ? did I do something wrong ?", then the other winners left while the winning demo was shown, and me, alone... And then the organizer started talking about Digitale Kultur eV, the association promoting the demoscene mainly in Germany. "Did he forgot me ?" I was thinking, almost not hearing what he was saying as astonished as I was, but I finally understood that another prize was going to me ! The Newcomer Award ! An award sponsored every year by Digitale Kultur eV for guys like me that release for the first time and I was chosen because the Nintendo DS hasn't that many demos so far.

I thinked about doing a 4K last year, I started during the summer to read and try D3D9, I had some ideas. And then Sincere was released by TBC. "What the ?!" it wasn't the demo I wanted to do, but almost ! I really enjoyed it but it just killed my motivation. Later, I started trying to do a 4K on Nintendo DS, as I know a bunch of stuff about that hardware now. I did some piece of shit, then started thinking about the music... well PSG is the way to go, but I will not compose music by code or by some kind of script file, it seemed too much boring... So I started working on that tracker you already might read about in my earlier post. Today, I release that tracker it if you want to play with it.

Nurykabe made that great tune, and it was just like in "Back to the future", I saw the intro just like Emmett saw the "Capacitor Drive". There are only two things missing in the final version : the title going down like the boot of a gameboy, but that was from before Nurykabe's tune, and spots inside the flying saucer to make it more funky nightclub. Nothing really important...

I also release the source code of BitBox, I don't really think it will be useful to anyone, but it might be interresting to one or two. I also release the incomplete Win32 port I did in less than two hours at the party place ! Ahah, that was fun : I was having troubles to show the demo, I had some videos of it done with an emulator, but big chunks of frames were missing. I tried to mix the videos into one, but it was too much of a pain, especially for a coder like me... And, on the Saturday, I wake up, "HEY ! Win32 port of course !". After two hours of hacking, it was more or less running, but far from having the same colors than on the DS. I even started working on a damage-fragment shader to make it look like on the DS, but in one day it was impossible to approximate the hardware closely enough, especially with the lack of accurate specifications.

You won't be able to compile a 4K version of it, Hitchhikr wants to keep is packer private for the moment. But about that, and as a reminder for me in the future : you need DevkitARM r25, r26 outputs a slightly bigger binary that makes it 4099 bytes or something, instead of 4093.

Oh, by the way, I didn't tried, but I think that the 4K version should run on every linker if launched with Moonshell, DS Organize or other programs that can launch NDS files. My linker is the Supercard DS One and it can launch almost everything, from what we tried with Hitchhikr. (even an NDS file with the littlest header possible) Its OS is a modified version of an old version of Moonshell.

Tracker, Source and Stuff

Thanks to m0d, for the live footage. He recorded all the demos when shown on the big screen and is uploading them to his youtube account. Most of the prods released at Evoke 2009 are really great, don't miss them !

NEXT STEP !

I think that I will come to MAiN Party, I already have a lot of friends going and that huge screen, man... I have little time to work on a new prod, so, it will not be a demo, but I think it will still be pretty cool.

Oh yes, and by the way ...ZVOKZ!!!