2011 started up nicely regarding releases but the second half of the year was pretty quiet. For a first time in years we weren’t really working on a demo for the Assembly. We did however had something running at the party.
I wrote one of the applications for the eight LED screens that were positioned above the staircases. It featured a single effect - a rotating tunnel - and a scroller. It had a cool little feature though, the colors of the tunnel and scroller could be remotely tweaked by the AV team! It communicated with the ArtNET protocol, DMX over IP.
Also TMDC 2011 came and went. We were working on a demo but due to lack of inspiration and motivation it wasn’t finished. We aim to get it done this year but it will most likely be our last TMDC entry as I’d like to focus on other platforms and the textmode has been pretty much seen and conquered already.
Running Derelict on various Android devices I’ve discovered some bugs. On some devices the framerate seemed to be very poor. This was actually a timing bug and not a performance issue. The demo uses Android’s MediaPlayer for music playback and synced the demo with information from it. On some devices the playback position information resolution was very poor, only about 0.3 seconds! This caused the demo to run at 3 FPS.
Additionally there was an issue that caused the 2D images to disappear or distort on some devices. This was just a brainfart in the draw code and unfortunately the issue only appeared randomly.
The demo has now been fixed and the package has been updated.
We participated in TMDC 2010 with a demo, Carbon Trioxide. Now waiting for the results. In addition to the standard console rendering the demo features an OpenGL renderer. The output is exactly the same but the advantage is in compatibility and portability. It is also available for Android devices.
A bit late update.. We participated in two compos at the Assembly 2010. Our first hardware accelerated mobile demo, Derelict, for the Nokia N900 placed second in the real wild competition. We also made our first 64k intro, Pier, this year. It ended only being 19k in size and placed fourth in the 64k intro competition. Today I finished the Android port of Derelict.
We released our first accelerated PC demo on the Assembly 2009 demo competition and placed 5th! Next time we might even use some textures.. We were also working on a Windows Mobile demo but it was unfortunately not released because it was so badly unfinished. Download Times Square for Windows or the soundtrack made by Leaphion!
HD captures of our two text mode demos have been added to YouTube. The sync is not perfect so it is recommended to download and run the binaries instead.
We got our TMDC demo in a releasable state and decided to submit it to the PC demo competition at Breakpoint. Download executable version.
After a bunch of software rendering mobile demos and text mode demos we feel it is time to move on. There will be some more modern stuff coming out later this year..
it has been a while.. We finally managed to get the new theme online. So far we’ve just had the default WordPress theme in use. Plokk designed the logo and colors and I did the layout and the theme.
We were supposed to make a demo for TMDC but again didn’t get it finished in time. I really hope I can get it done soon. In the mean time I’m planning writing some stuff about my text mode rasterizer and also something about 16bit dithering we used in Daydream. It is a very simple method but makes a big difference in visual quality.
