It is interesting what two men with excessive amounts of beef, pork, beer and caffeine can achieve in three days. We now have an almost finalized design and also got a good start on many 3D scenes.

Not much coding was done during the weekend, only some prototyping and 3D scene tests. The actual coding will happen later on.

The demo will basically be a 3D fly-by which means the content consists mostly of 3D scenes with a story. However, there will be a bunch of interesting effects so it will not be “just a .3DS player”. There should be something for everyone to enjoy.

–fragment

So, it is time for my first post. My name is plokk and I am one of the founding members of Hedelmae. My role is to create graphics. I have been working my ass off in my day job this summer and I have no vacation what so ever so I am trying to spend every bit of a free time I have on this project. This is the second day of our two man democrunch weekend and we actually have got some stuff done already. I have been drawing some concept art and fragment is creating 3d models based on them. I am already surprised of how much stuff we have managed to put together. Now it is time to open an ice cold beer and spend some time sitting in the sauna, so we will see how the rest of the evening goes :)

-plokk

Yess,

plokk and I are spending the midsummer weekend inside! We gathered at my place and are really going to get the project going. We are going to concentrate on the 2D and 3D side for now. When we have enough content we can start coding and putting stuff together. We will report our progress and might even show some teasers later on..

plokk and fragment working hard

 –fragment

I’m sure there are lots of people who have no idea what demoscene or demos are therefore I recommend reading a bunch of Wikipedia articles:

• Demoscene demo - the program that is run on a computer (or a console or basically any programmable hardware with some kind of video and/or audio output capabilities)
• Demogroup - a group of people who make demos
• Demoparty - a happening where people gather to meet, watch demos and take part in the competitions.
• Demo competition - a contest held at a party (or online)
• Assembly -demo party - the biggest party in Finland (and has been the biggest on the planet some years ago)

Go to pouet.net and download some :)

–fragment

Yay,

Portal Process and Excess are together doing something for the XBOX360. Be sure to read their blog also. I have to agree to all the stuff mentioned in their first post about the current XNA version.

It is interesting to see if more groups pop up.

–fragment

Okay,

as of now the blog is officially public. Please register and send comments, criticism etc. And be sure to read Synesthetics’ blog also. The first post in our blog should explain what this is all about so you should start the reading from there ;)

–fragment

Here is the list of people whose names should be found in the credits when the demo is finished.

I (fragment) will be doing the most of the coding and the 3D modelling. Cyrus is the musician and plokk will do graphics. Zef might give some support in the coding process. Ideas and other support have and will come from other members as well.

It will be interesting to see how much the list will change.

There will probably be some kind of introductions from each member later on..

–fragment

Yay,

just wrote my first shader.. There’s still an insane amount of small stuff to test and try out.

–fragment

Most of the members have been interested in demos and demoscene since the early 1990s but it was at late as early 2000s when we actually started doing our own real-time productions.

In 2003 our first demo was released. It was called “LCD megademo” and it was written for a 20×4 character LCD. By changing some characters we extended the resolution to 20×12. The display was connected to a PC running Linux via parallel port. We had lots of processing power and the effects were simple so the demo wasn’t technically too impressive but the presentation was somewhat unique.

Two years passed and we released another LCD demo, “Liquid Crystal”. This time the LCD was bigger and graphical instead of character based. Also we used an Amiga 1200 with 50MHz Motorola 68060 processor to run the demo. Personally I thought the demo was better than the earlier one but it failed to get enough votes at the Assembly 2005.

At the same event we released our first mobile demo, “Back in Time”. The device used wasn’t really mobile but the rules allowed it because it weighted under 300g and run on batteries. We got the hardware from FirstTechnology so big thanks to them for loaning it. The device used was a PXA-3 and it run Linux. It had a 200MHz Intel XScale processor and 32MB RAM. Unfortunately we started writing the demo too late. We worked furiously at the party place trying to finish it but there was just too much stuff to do. We ended up releasing the demo anyway and placed 4th which was a small surprise. There were six entries total in the mobile competition.

Another year passed and for Assembly 2006 we had some ideas and a new device to abuse. This time we wrote the demo for GamePark Holdings’ GP2X. Again, we had some problems with the schedule but we managed to write the missing parts for the demo at the party place although some parts looked very bad and unfinished. The name “Pulque” was chosen just before deadline. But the effects worked and the crowd liked the demo and we won!

We also made a quick demo called “Debris” about a week before Assembly for a small demo competition. The platform was the same. We used two days for the demo and placed second.Later in the year 2006 we made our first Windows demo called “Carbon Monoxide”. It was made for the TMDC which is only for textmode demos. Although we got very positive feedback we only placed 4th which was a slight disappointment.

A soundtrack in a demo is a must.

I’m currently prototyping miscellaneous stuff and just did my first audio playback test with the XNA. Standard wave files can be played on both win32 and XBOX360 environments. Uncompressed wave files tend to be huge and luckily it is possible to compress the sounds. On win32 the only option is ADPCM and for the XBOX there is XMA. It would be nice if MP3 or OGG were supported..The tune I tested for compression was originally a variable bit rate MP3 10MB in size. Uncompressing it into wave produced a 54MB file. Again compressing the wave file using the XACT tool with default compression settings (128 samples per block for ADPCM and quality level 60 for XMA) resulted in a 15MB file with ADPCM and a 7MB file with XMA compression. With quality value of 100 the XMA compressed file was 20MB in size. I didn’t do any proper listening tests yet so I don’t know what the worst quality sounds like.

The XACT tool may be confusing at the first glance but there is a good example in the documentation. However there is no compression used in the example. It is pretty straightforward to do: add a new compression preset, adjust the quality settings if needed and finally set the wave bank to use the new compression preset.

The actual playback is a very simple thing to do. Just load the sound and wave bank files and play the cue. Again, there is a good example in the documentation. It took less than 10 minutes to configure and compress the wave file and to make it play in the XNA application.

There is one important feature missing from the XNA. There is no way to know at what position is the sound clip currently playing. This information is crucial when the demo uses the music to sync all the effects (not the actual sound data but the playing time). One solution is to start a timer at the same time with the music and hope it won’t go out of sync. I have to test this later.

– fragment