ack i'm finally feeling better after getting sick my last day in Finland and spending the last two weeks with mucus and blood pouring out of my major orifices and my brain acting like meat sauce all while trying to catch up on everything from work! ohhhh it's been miserable. those Finns sure have some crazy powerful viruses.

anyways... day 4 of assembly was quite cool since with the demo submitted we finally had a chance to explore Helsinki and more of the party place. it was especially cool talking to preacher about his demos and coding tricks. then came the compos. the browser demos were quite amazing. i never expected flash to be capable of what everyone is doing with it these days. if adobe can keep optimizing the runtime i look forward to saying good bye to Win32 forever. :) the short film compo was also very nice and i especially liked Realtime Demo Wannabe. the 64k compo was a bit disappointing since there were only three entries this year.

finally the demo compo. and this deserves it's own paragraph. ;) this year's demos at assembly were EPIC! there really should have been 3 or 4 1st places awarded because there were a lot of deserving prods. the best of course was ASD's Life Force. this is one for the history books. i look forward to telling my grandchildren that i was at assembly the year this monster was released. :) for me it's up there with second reality, heaven seven, and the product as something everyone will look back on as a defining production of the demoscene. yeah nice work ASD! :) my other favorite of the compo was Conspiracy's f07 which has so much great energy to it. there was also the demo trace, neurokin, and i threw together sokuseki which didn't hold up at all on the big screen and sandwiched between high energy behemoth productions haha. it was still cool to see it on the big screen in front of so many people though.

after the party i caught up on some much needed sleep only to wake up crazy sick and suffer through the long flight home. doh!! at least when i got back i found out Scratchy also had a great vacation. apparently he found a girlfriend at the boarding place and played with her every day while i was gone. usually it takes him a couple days to get back to his normal insane self but this time he was immediately bouncing off the walls when we got home.

Life Force	F07
Sokuseki	Sokuseki
Sokuseki	Realtime Demo Wannabe

it's assembly day 3!! wow, where have the days gone already?

i was pretty much a zombie on thursday after so many long hours of travelling. i did manage to keep my eyes open long enough to attend the funny demoscene outreach panel though. it was an hour or something of gloom, sir garbagetruck, gargaj, and waffle attempting to explain to non-sceners what the demoscene is about. i'm not sure they made it so clear though - especially with some hilarious attempted analogies by gloom!

friday from early in the morning until 5am trace and i spent working on our demo. we thought the final deadline was 8pm but thanks to preacher we found out we could continue updating it after the submission deadline which helped a ton. it's been very fun working on this one. it's so much simpler collaborating on a demo when you're sitting next to someone than over instant messenger and e-mail with an 8 hour time difference!

friday night the 4k intros were shown and there are some amazing entries this year! my favorites are northern dragons' step back and rgba's stiletto. now i can't wait for tonight to see the 64k intros and demos. :) i'm especially excited to see the xna entries and also asd's latest which i got just a peek of and my jaw dropped!

my demo touring continues this week with a trip to Finland for the Assembly demo party! i'm so psyched! :) trace, neurokin, and i are working on a small demo to submit. we've had very few days to work on it though so are trying to keep the scope small. hopefully we can finish in time. :)

so that i won't be crazy bored during the 14 hours of travel i got some new PSP games. i got final fantasy 2, lego star wars 2, and me and my katamari. they better be really good! when i went to spain last year i lucked out and got addicted to untold legends and that killed like 10 hours alone on the flights in. i never played through final fantasy 2 before so i'm hoping it can do the same for me this time.

i tried to get a sitter for my cat but had two bail on me so now my cat Scratchy will be hanging out at a boarding place. i haven't told him yet, he's really going to hate me!

i've been too busy to post the last couple months but there's been cool stuff with the Guild Wars expansion coming out and the XPLSV floating teeth demo :) maybe i'll get a chance to post whlie bored in an airport, but certainly expect some live blogging from Assembly.

i think it might be fun to post some info on the making of this 4k so i can remember the details when i'm 50 and reminiscing on the days when computers still had buttons and wires and people tried crazy things like fitting as much music and graphics as they could in just 4,096 bytes. oh maybe it'll be interesting for others interested in the scene too. ;)

this thing started when i was playing some tricks with HDR cubic environment maps and procedural geometry and the exceptionally stupid part of my brain woke up and said "hey we could totally do this in 4 kilobytes!" well not realizing what a horrible idea it was i went ahead with it. :) i had done some previous 4ks but never squeezed music into them so i figured i should tackle that as well.

so well things started off nicely and in 4k i managed to squeeze the generation of a pretty HDR cube map, nice shaders using spherical harmonics computed from the cube map for lighting and also some semi interesting geometry. this was in no small part thanks to crinkler which worked waaaaay better than the cab dropping stuff i had done for earlier 4k attempts.

but anyway i still had to push a synthesizer and music data in there. with no musical talent of my own i enlisted the help of the multi-talented trace to cook up a tune for this guy. working with herotyc they managed to make something with some rough tools i sculpted out of my previous audio experiments and after getting a first draft i set to work on packing the data as small as possible.

well i spent a lot of time on size optimizations and design experiments and as it came time for the demo party i had to hack like crazy to get back under 4,096 bytes and in the process throw out all the original bits that started the 4k in the first place! so the "high dynamic range" became "medium dynamic range" (the MDR in 4kmdr) as i replaced nice math with scary approximations, and a lot of neat vertex animation got tossed for the simpler spiking action. i did manage to keep a pretty interesting shader on the ball though with per-pixel ray traced reflections, but on the whole it was pretty painful ripping so much out. at the party place it was funny because as i was torturing myself trying to squeeze the last bytes from this guy (the last 1 byte took like an hour!) s_tec who took pretty much the exact opposite approach on his 4k (by starting with very tight assembly) was working hard to ADD bytes to his intro!

in the end things worked out ok and 4kmdr was born with a funny personality. :) you can download it here and make sure you have a video card that can do pixel shaders 2+ and the latest directx. also i released one of the tools used to create the music and you can get it here and can learn some more details on the audio code in this old blog post. the audio tools actually got some nice features at the last second which we didn't get to take advantage of and trace has come up with a very cool idea that has a good chance of fitting in 4k so hopefully we can find time for a follow up production in the future :)

well i was crazy busy last month with work, my car breaking, my laptop breaking, and the blockparty demoparty, but don't think i'd forget to post about the new nine inch nails album! it's awesome!!! when i first listened i was a little disappointed having hoped for much higher BPM (yeah been listening to too much trance hehe), but it still sucked me in. after buying the CD, a Rhapsody copy, an iTunes copy, and a Zune copy i hope i've done my part to help make Reznor a billionaire. it's the least i can do for him not taking half a decade to release this one. ;)