From: pjunold@daimi.aau.dk (Peter Joachim Unold)
Subject: Re: How could SpaceBalls win?
Organization: DAIMI: Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Denmark
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 22:27:44 GMT

jawil@hpx13.aid.no (Jan Roger Wilkens) writes:

>In article <C0qwv7.G3G@lysator.liu.se>, marvil@lysator.liu.se (Martin Vilcans) writes:

>| >But Triangle's demo is great! The title says it all: No vectors!
>|> It takes me back to the years before the vector demos, but it has new
>|> ideas and effects with bitplane graphics! OK, the music is not better
>|> than demo standard, and it could fit on one disk, but it still is
>|> great. 
>The title says it all? WHAT? The demo is FILLED(!) with vectors. The most
>embarrasing part of it is when the actually write: No More Vectors in BIG a
>BIG vector scroll. Utterly hopless.
>OK.. So the demo has got some new ways of doing old things, but not any great
>new ideas. And the music is, as you point out, terrible.
The Triangle demo being great? Nonono - Compare it with Fairlight's and judge
again.

>|> Far better than State of the Art. How can a demo with just one
>|> simple effect win a big demo competition? The coding isn't advanced,
>|> it just displays vectorized graphics in different ways (easy to code),
>|> there are no bitmap graphics (except for the dragon in the beginning,
>|> which I admit looks good) and the music sucks. And this takes a whole
>|> disk and demands 1 meg of memory (and the memory should be at $c00000
>|> in the original version, before Skid Row were kind enough to fix it).
>|> The only thing that takes a bit of work on that demo is the creation
>|> of the animations, which I guess were made in some animation program.
>The demo won because nobody had ever seen something like it before. The scene
>is tired of things bouncing around in demos, and want something new. And with
>the HUGE screen and pretty good sound equipment at the party it just made a
>sudden impact. After seeing it I was SURE it would win. It got the loudest
>applouse by far.
>The animiations was not made in an animation, something I'm sure you could
>notice if you looked at the demo once more. They are first digitzed in one
>bitplane a girl dancing, and then they have run a vectortracingprogram on it
>afterwards.
>|> I'm not saying that State of the Art is worthless. It would be a good
>|> file intro, but as a trackmo, it just isn't state of the art.
>Intro?? Do you know how much vector data this trackmo contains? And do you
>think the music would fit into an intro of about 50K? Agh..
The most impressive thing about the Spaceball demo, was how they got all the
coordinates. Must have been taken alot of time, to singlestep thru the pics on
a video, and vectorize the ladies. But this has nothing to do with tough 
coding. Right now people want techno demos, and therefore spaceball had to
win. No doubt that a great demo like Fairlight's, contains way harder code
than the spaceballs demo. 

And BTW - the most impressive stuff i saw at the party, was some of the c=64
demos. There seems to be no limits for what they can pull out of that little
machine. The oxygene demo with filled vectors, glenz vectors and perfect plasma
was real amazing. 

Could anyone tell me what Future Crew's PC demo contained? I got scared away 
from the big screen, after watching some truely lame PC demos(Phoney coder's 
was nice tho). I've been told some real hard code and new ideas.
Newsgroups: alt.sys.amiga.demos