i couldn't make it out to blockparty again this year but i did participate online through the ustream stream and chat which was a blast! i really hope more demo parties do this in the future. watching live party streams is fun but being able to chat at the same time with people at the party and others watching the stream during the compos is just so much better. the archived video is available on ustream but unfortunately the hilarious chat doesn't replay with it haha. and of course lots of the entries are available for download on pouet.

though we didn't make it out in person, xplsv took 1st in the hi-rez graphics compo with kirill's rad render! it's actually using assets from a demo we started after finishing our invite for blockparty 2009. we wanted to release the demo at blockparty 2009 but didn't have time to finish and then again for 2010 we wanted to do it and again didn't find the time. don't worry though we'll release this guy eventually. :)

congrats to everyone who did manage to make a release or make it to the party! and how great to hear the fifth edition of blockparty will be on the west coast in california! see you there? :)

if you've encountered me at all in the last week either in person or online then you know i got into the Starcraft 2 beta!!@ with Starcraft still being my favorite game of all time i can't help but be exploding with excitement over this! now i'm not going to write a big review or anything like that here because everyone already knows it's fantastic and will be buying at least one copy when it's released. but well okay... it's amazing fantastic wonderful true to the original super fun crazy addictive and all these things which is making it really hard for me to do anything productive!!! gg blizzard. :)

but anyway sole has been diligently blogging daily on her breakpoint demo progress so i should at least be able to manage weekly updates right? thanks for being a good influence sole!

so recently i've added what i think are some really neat animation and sync controls to the demo system but haven't capped a video of that yet so you'll just have to wait for those details. :) also got in material support, more controls over copied instances, metaballs, and mesh displacement.

here are some new pictures of a simple scene generated in demo studio and rendered offline:

and once again here's a peek at the construction:

okay now i need to get in a match of SC2... or maybe two... :)

this year i've been working on the next version of demo studio. so in brief, version 1 (tokyo, mudballs, ccc) was your typical drop effects into a timeline and edit the parameters, version 2 (hofn, sokuseki) had more powerful sync and scripted effects, version 3 (n-0505, blockparty invite) was entirely code driven with pop-up ui only for tweaking. with version 4 i hope to get the best of both worlds between artist/designer support with ui but without sacrificing the handcrafted codery goodness that comes from not having ui. :)

with lots of the core of the new system done now i can get things animating and syncing to music. here's one of the quick tests from this weekend and a peek at the ui showing how it was done. the music is from Zardonic's remix of Nine Inch Nails Ghosts track 35.

twitchy from blackpawn on Vimeo.

so 16 years ago i started keeping a journal, 14 years ago i started saving all my source code, 10 years ago i started saving regular screenshots of my projects and since then have been accelerating the rate at which i store off snapshots from originally around one every month to by the end of 2009 one image a day and one video a week. this is quite a lot of data but the rate of technological advance in storage has far exceeded the increasing rate of data i store. right now you can buy 1.5TB of storage for $100. this is insane and it makes my data set look pretty tiny and pathetic!

so to get started on the next decade i've upped the ante and created some software to help. inspired by gordon bell's research and latest book Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything my app grabs a screenshot of my multi-monitor desktop every 15 seconds and stores it off with lots of metadata. this was actually a bit too much data for my tastes since each compressed snapshot comes out to many megabytes. so i added an additional layer of inter-frame compression similar to what is done with video and this gets me down to well under 100 kilobytes for most snapshots and it's currently trending around 100 megabytes per day. this still sounds like a lot but that 1.5TB drive is actually large enough to store that rate of data for me for the next 40 years! ridiculous right?

of course you're probably wondering what the point is... well, there are lots! for one, just like the journal it is fun and rewarding to go back in time and see what my life was like in the past and recall the things i was thinking about and doing. it helps to gain perspective on things. with this automated capture now so many more possibilities unfold. my simple playback app at the moment can already give me fast replays of the past as well as statistics on my activity (how much time spent coding, web browsing, chatting, etc). in the future i'll be able to run OCR on the data to recognize any text on screen and then be able to search effectively and quickly extract text from my computer at any moment in the past. further in the future i'll be able to feed all this into generic AI software to train it to respond, work, and think like me so i can have great digital assistants and even further in the future provide a much more accurate history and memory to my simulated consciousness after all of our brains have been scanned and moved to processors in space! :)

anyway this work is the reason i didn't make as much progress as i wanted on other projects this holiday. :P

wow, cool! the invitation demo that kirill, gloom, and i made for blockparty 2009 was deemed one of the best invites of the year by 4sceners.de! that makes me happy. :) here's the google translation of their best of 2009 page.

i'm still bummed i didn't make it to the actual party. oh well in 2010 i should make it. i'm also planning on attending the new @party in massachusetts. oh and breakpoint in germany in 2011. fellow usa demosceners please go to all those parties too! :)