pouët.net

video comparison to nexus 7: http://viewsync.net/watch?v=0Jdi3I3Ep6k&t=2&v=Xs88vNBylQ4&t=0

A note on how the music for this production came to be.
We started off with the original 4ch track, which of course had several instruments in each track. Blueberry rendered a new Renoise-file that split each instrument into it's own seperate track, which made the conversion a lot easier.

From there - one sample at a time was replaced with an instrument using the new custom synth. The synth itself was built to be able to create exactly the instruments needed in this production, and particularly the percussions were all important.

I replaced the samples one by one, by adding an extra track next to the sample-track, to better be able to check if similarity was as intact as possible. I started with the drums/percussions and kept the basslines and melody samples as long as possible, so I could get a feeling on how the drums worked in combination with "the real" basses, leads and strings.

Of course, the pattern effects were the thing causing us the biggest problem recreating. Particularly the volume slides, pitch slides and portamento is excessively used (like in most proper 4ch tracks of that age) but with a bit of tinkering with a narrow band filter that swept from high to low frequency, it gave the impression of a pitch-glide. It's not entirely perfect, but it got as close as it could.

After about 20-30 iterations of the trak, we finally had a version with only synth instruments that would actually play in the intro. However, the size was HUGE, so the tedious work of reducing size started.

First off - I identified the instruments, that could replace others - I.e. there's three claps/snares in the original. That was reduced to a single instrument, that when played at different pitch and velocity, was "close enough (tm)" to the original.

Also the note data itself wasn't exactly optimal. The hihat "skipped" a note every now and then (due to the 4 channel limitation of the original, naturally) which completely broke the patterns that would pack nicely. So most of the percussion were recreated in a way, I'm sure Interphace would have wanted it, had he had the liberty of more than 4 channels. This made the song data pack a LOT better.

Blueberry added quantization of parameters in the synth, giving us yet another size-win at the cost of slightly reduced quality of each instrument.

After another 15-20 iterations, we kinda hit the absolute bare bone of the music, but still more cuts were needed to get the size further down. This was where the biggest corners were cut, and I had to find a plausible compromise between the original and our version.

When we finally had a size, that would work for the intro, the final mixing were done, adjusting the volume of each instrument to fit the final song. A problem in the synth (causing the Poo-Brainque 4k intro to sound terribly wrong - sorry, guys!) was identified, and a couple of last-minute iterations had to be done in a hurry to fix the problem. That's the reason the party-version was in mono!

I believe the music went through 62-63 iterations to get to the final version. Whenever Blueberry decides to release the synth, I'd be happy to provide anyone who's interested, with all the different steps of the music.

Thanks for all your nice comments here as well :)

Kyleran: I'm inclined to not buy in on the "no creativity of your own"-statement. Of course it's true in the sense, that the content was already laid out and we knew exactly what needed to be done. However, when it comes to the way a given effect could be achieved, given the size limitations, an enormous amount of creativity is needed. So only in the sense that "creativity" is considered the proces of choosing which effects to use and in what order, you're right :)

Regarding the design and improvements, I think Nexus 7 represents the pinnacle of the classical era, including it's very clean look, and that it doesn't try do things the hardware can't do well enough to actually look good (maybe except the resolution on the motion blur part). This is why it's such classic compared to other demos that may have been even more popular back then.

So even if there had been space for it, we really didn't want to change that clean look, and for instance adding postfx would seem very wrong (though I would have liked a post pass just to do a gamma curve for the additive particles).
We had to somewhat redesign parts to fit the 16:9 aspect (for instance the balls are bouncing at twice the period due to the longer travel) and we have lifted limitations where it made sense (much like what punqtured wrote about 4ch limiitations). When the galaxy is no longer an animation it doesn't have to be that small and repeating, we could do real volumetrics and shading for the disco ball, the scroller can be properly shaded etc. And otherwise kept it at subtle improvements like AO for the natural motion part (it just looked too 90s without it while the rest IS more contemporary).

Hyde: Really glad you liked it (and that we managed to get hold of at least you and Archmage in time for the compo). For the natural motion, Blueberry reverse engineered both the data and the code interpreting it, and then there was a lot of cleanup, rearranging and simplification going on, reducing it to around 250 bytes, while the shader code can share bezier interpolation with the pictures etc.

LordHelmet: You are welcome. The most common complaint from people we talked to after the compo was those missing fuckings, so we sought to rectify that omission by mentioning you at the prizegiving. :)

Knoeki: Some comparison to Stalin was made in a diskmag a gazillion years ago. Andromeda retaliated in the scroller 😉

manwe: this svg (converts/compresses to ~290 bytes) calculated as a 2d sdf with some custom shading, procedural background and the (almost) normal text overlay.

Yes, as mentioned in the nfo, we dropped support for d3dcompiler_43, since it takes more than 10 minutes to compile our shader.

If you want to run the intro on Windows 7, simply copy d3dcompiler_47.dll from C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer to the intro directory, or to C:\Windows\SysWOW64, and you are set. That takes significantly less than 10 minutes. :)

I do agree.