one of the upsides of a global pandemic has been that demo parties are forced to take place online. this is so great (especially for an american whose only made it to a couple european parties)! 😃 i had a blast watching and chatting along with revision and function which i always wanted to attend plus assembly and a bunch of others. for his inercia party, ps did something really special and streamed his preparation work, demo shows, and seminars all throughout september.

it was really cool to visit boston for @party 2013 🙂 i broke my toe just the week before so i wound up hobbling around in a lot of pain but still had a lot of fun. i split a room with trixter and inspired chaos which was fun and kept costs down too. i was delighted to find boston has Chipotle and enjoyed a fine Massachusetts burrito while staying up late and finishing an entry.

i knew i wasn’t going to be able to make it out to pixelj.am 2012 but i at least wanted to contribute an entry to the demo compo.  i asked basementdigital to see if i he’d be up for doing a tune.  we’d been wanting to do a demo together for yeaaaaars so finally made it happen!  with only a few days i thought it’d be fun to try doing a browser demo with javascript and planned to do it friday before the party on the weekend.

with @party this weekend came the first releases of a new demo group vrtx (pronounced "vertex"). we did two entries for the freestyle graphics compo and got 2nd and 6th place. kirill did this sweet spider web scene and guybrush, kirill, and i did the mazelized text. watch out for more cool graphics and demos coming from vrtx in the future!

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.

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.

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.

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.

last night i had a great time with kirill, guybrush, and matt at microsoft testing out and playing with live music visualization stuff. guybrush and i will be doing the visuals for the portland, oregon and seattle, washington stops of the data beez tour! it’s been a really fun experience for me so far as i’ve been introduced to some great musicians (whose tunes are drilled quite deep into my brain now as they’ve been looping for so many days XD), have picked up the programming environment processing, and given lots of thought to whole new aspects of sync and synesthesia outside of what i’ve previously toyed with in doing demoscene productions.

some time back i was experimenting with some procedural animation and simulation as part of researching how i could animate a creature for a future demo. i didn’t really achieve what i was wanting but i had a lot of fun playing around with it and giving some life to a bowl full of worms. here’s a video capture of them in action:

anyway, when kirill saw the worms he got excited and suggested that he could cut out the top of the fire skull so we could use it as the bowl for the worms.

my first iphone app has made it’s way to the app store! just search for “plasma effect” to find it in the store (or click here to open in itunes directly) and download it for free! the app is a modern implementation of the old school demoscene plasma effect. while running you can touch the screen to interact with the plasma and shake the iphone to switch color palettes and plasma shapes.

this weekend basement digital came up from oregon so we organized a quick demoscene meet up for the area. andr00, guybrush, kirill, and ryiinn also made it out for a fun evening of demo viewings, chatting, food, retro games and movies. we all also got some cool previews of the processing workshop guybrush will be doing at blockparty and i got basement digital up to speed on my latest tools and such for 4k audio so maybe we can collaborate on a 4k prod sometime.

gloom, kirill, and i have released our invitation demo to blockparty 2009! you can visit pouet.net to comment on the demo or watch it online at vimeo or capped.tv. hope you enjoy it!

blockparty 2009 invite from blackpawn on Vimeo.

i needed a quick script tonight to export a slew of curves outta maya and google failed me so now that i’ve hacked a quick script for it i figure i’ll post it for future lazy coders :) here you go - a simple python script to export curves from maya ;) from maya.cmds import * import maya.OpenMaya as OpenMaya def findNode (name): selectionList = OpenMaya.MSelectionList() selectionList.add(name) node = OpenMaya.MObject() selectionList.

not long ago i was tackling again the problem of getting nice sync between visuals and audio and tried a bunch of different things. i made this tool to make manually syncing pretty efficient. it shows you the waveform or amplitude or other visualizations and you draw a curve on top of it with some nice controls for duplicating points and stuff. that still took much too long so then i tried some stuff with rendering out fft and other data to images and using graphics stuff i was more familiar with to process them.

okay nvscene 2008 was awesome! i’m almost fully recovered now from the many sleepless nights in san jose during the party. :) in the end the demo ryiinn, kirill, trace and i made tied asd’s demo for 3rd place in the compo. not too shabby. :) here’s a video capture you can watch from demoscene.tv! you can also download the full demo and rate it here: n-0505 i’ve posted a bunch of photos from the trip to my nvision 2008 photoset on flickr.

it’s the last day of nvscene - a demo party hosted by nvidia as part of their nvision event. it’s been awesome! ryiinn and i got down here to san jose on saturday and immediately dived into nonstop work on the demo to get it finished. saturday and sunday were pretty much nothing but caffeine + junk food + demo demo demo. sunday night was cool as we met up with sceners in the nvscene hall before it opened and went out for a proper dinner.

eek only a couple weeks left until nvidia's demoparty! i really gotta stop messing around with random experimentation and focus on making a demo. :P so since i may not be getting back to these for awhile here are some images of stringing some soft organic blobbies on a spiky armature

some failed coding experimentation last weekend turned into some creepy worms… this weekend i couldn’t resist putting them to music! ;) the music is a clip from trent reznor’s instrumental remix of reptile

here’s a special sneak peak at work in progress for a new demo! this is just one scene played for a long time with the awesome marilyn manson resident evil theme music. the geometry and animation is all procedural and video was captured on my laptop’s x1600. enjoy!

looks like 2008 is going to be a great year for the north american demoscene! :)

in an epic alliance, the northern dragons and XPLSV worked together to create the winning entry to the textmode demo competition 10: clockwerk! it was very special for me for this demo to be well received because it’s the first time i had a chance to collaborate with the dragons since meeting them at blockparty 2007. as it turned out guybrush lives not far from me so we got together to talk demo stuff a couple times then the opportunity to collaborate on the TMDC entry came up.

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’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!

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 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 "

posting live now from the hotel lobby as blockparty has just ended and everyone is off to catch flights or drive home. this morning i slept through the alarm but luckily woke up in time to make it to the award ceremony and party wrap up. the northern dragons took 1st place in the combined demo compo with their demo, in 2nd place was my 4k intro 4kmdr, in 3rd was s_tec’s 4k intro, and 4th the demo with my friends from work (welcome to the scene ben, dave, and kirill!

live at blockparty demoparty in cleveland ohio! i’m quite sleepy now as i was up all last night trying to finish a 4KB intro i was preparing for the party, wrap up a tool i did to help with the audio for that guy which i’m releasing to the wild compo, and helping rapidly piece together a 16MB production with friends from work. the deadline was 3:00 today but that wiggled a bit and let us squeeze in a little polish to the big demo but it’s still pretty rough.

so i’ve gotten sucked back into audio stuff a bit lately. here’s what happened… at the beginning of the month i was playing around with some graphics stuff for a demo and realized i could fit it into 4k with some tricks, so i spent time that weekend coding it up. after a bunch of optimization i got it down to around 3kb so it seemed i would finally have space for some audio!

i might have slept through all of friday, but a UPS dude woke me up to give me a copy of mindcandy volume 2.  how considerate!  it totally made my day.  massive respect to trixter and everyone else who put it together.  i'm sure my poor 360 is going to be completely sick of it soon though as i have it on non-stop random repeat.

xplsv release for sundown 2006! 

 

i’m back from spain and euskal 14! this was my first trip to europe and i expected the travel to kill me but it turned out to be cake.  i passed the flight time there with untold legends, family guy, and gta 3 on the psp.  the only hitch was at the paris airport which didn’t display the connection info for my flight getting me quite lost.  it wasn’t so bad though because i got to talk to many cute french girls to find my way.

i think i've now got everything set for my trip to spain and the euskal 14 demoparty! plane tickets, hotel, passport, and party reservation.  now what's left?  hmmm... a demo!

 

a great way to introduce your un-enlightened friends to the demo scene is with trixter’s mindcandy dvd. just make sure they understand the context or they’ll be all like “uhh i don’t get it.'  this is especially true with the old school side of the dvd. the selection of demos in mindcandy is pretty good, but a demo i really want on dvd is tribes.  when i saw it for the first time it burrowed deep into my brain and created a home for itself there.

i was very thirsty today so i coded up some water. it requires a video card that supports pixel shaders 2.0 mostly because i'm lazy. thirst will do that to you, you know?

whipped up a quick test of using tg to make textures in small demos/intros. it's 4kguts.
the tg routines create a diffuse and normal texture that's then applied to an animated plane.

hey, finally got some free time. i've posted an update of tg with a little bit of goodness
added. also posted version 0.1 of an audio sample generator based on the same technology.

i've posted version 0.1 of a new texture generator called tg. you can find it here.

threepixels has released mdma to the euskal 10 demo party. the demo received second place in the open demo competition.

a new megademo: despair.