pouët.net

I'll make a vidcap tomorrow, or Monday, or asap in general.

video finally: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ncdA3t_vzF8

Gargaj, TropicalTrevor: I measured before the party that it takes about 90 seconds to render the music (Oidos) on an i7-7700K. On my aging Intel E8500 it's about 3 minutes. I'd say those are about the range to except most current CPUs to fall between. Efforts were made to try to make Oidos run in its own thread but even letting the synth catch ahead a little bit (like up to 30 seconds, or even more) and then calling Oidos to start playing the buffer wouldn't work; the result was always just silence if you wouldn't let the entire precalc finish. Would be interested in knowing myself why this is tbh.

Thanks everyone for the comments of course <3. This was really just a test of a new path tracer implementation. Hope you get to see something more grand at some upcoming parties!

Yeah that makes sense, and it's pretty much what I suspected was the reason behind it. Thanks for the info :)

(and the synth itself!)

done :)

Will share xnrs and patch files later too, probably along with the rest of the sources.

In theory yes. If someone has a 4K display they can create one with kkapture. Unfortunately I don't though. This intro uses the default windows OpenGL framebuffer for all render passes, which I don't think can exceed the display dimensions. Could be rewritten to be more robust of course (sacrificing the size limit) but I don't really feel like doing that right now.

If anyone wants to do that I can provide an exe. I should make a post-party release anyway since the exe show in the compo was accidentally too bright (the current youtube video is correct though).

@Magic: Not really. I provided some raytracing code and helped out fixing some stuff but noby did the vast majority of the work on this both visually and musically. By contast, noby did all of the music for Oscar's Chair, which provides a large portion of that demo's feeling.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment, metoikos, it really means a lot to me. I don't make these works for myself, other than as an outlet for self-growth and as validation in the sense of exploring my own capabilities. Other than that I create these for an audience, for anyone interested in lending and eye and an ear for a few minutes, and if I get one impression such as yours, I feel I've made it.

Artistic intent generally is at best dubious, often irrelevant, but by my account you hit the nail on the head with your thoughts. This demo started out with absolutely no plan at all. I had written a new much improved path tracer recently but my mind was bereft of any explicit visual I wanted to make. The development occurred just organically experimenting with cuboid-intersection functions and not much else. It wasn't until about a week before the party when I finished off a piece of music I was satisfied enough with to construct an intro around. I guess that's when I finally knew what I wanted to express through the visuals.

There is no explicit narrative going on, but themes such as Stillness, Discomfort, Longing, Detachment... Hope. Everything is in confined space, one that we can peer into but not out of; while the space is malleable, this fact remains. What begun as a simple test scene, eventually was something I started to feel compassion for. It's the same kind of feeling of futility or inability to break our own social or other confines. The mid section with the stripes that might just appear as an arbitrary visual is the most visible form of this entrapment. I experimented with more explicitly trying to find a way out, an escape, for the cuboids, but the idea felt naïve and obtuse, too simple. I decided to leave both the beginning and end open as well as tie into one another. I'm glad to hear this apparently came through well enough from the demo, but even if it didn't I appreciate your effort reading into it.

The title comes from the manga series Shōjo Shūmatsu Ryokō and more specifically one of its thematic keywords zetsubō* (ぜつぼう), a Japanese word which can be translated as "despair" or "hopelessness". The series one of the pieces of art and media that has resonated with me the most recently, especially during the creation of this demo, and it's the title of the demo where the overlap between the two felt to concentrate the most. The name is what this demo made me feel, that and hope.

As a bonus, if you go read and finish the above manga, there's at the very last page showing the main characters includes a wonderful coincidental visual (and in a way thematic) tie-in back to this demo; one that I funnily enough only discovered on my flight back from Revision 2018 during which I finished reading the series.

*(I'm still thinking of posthumously re-titling this with the more appropriate transliteration "Zetsubou"...)

Almost two years later I at last bring you the final version of this intro. I've been meaning to do this since the release, as the compo version by accident had the wrong brightness adjustment constant in it, making everything 30% brighter instead of dimmer, but applied before tonemapping so it wasn't quite so obvious. The screenshot and YouTube videos have always been at the correct brightness levels though. This along with many other tiny fixes (see info file) as well as a proper amount of resolutions warranted me to finally get this over with, thanks to maeln for the push as well.

Sincerely thank you to everyone who has enjoyed this again.

Download

(Note that all the resolutions 1080p and over are more for future proofing. They require RTX level cards minimum (2070 and up, probably). Even though this intro obviously doesn't any such HW ray tracing features the new architecture copes much better with this intro.)

On Shadertoy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/7lsfRr

(not a perfect 1:1 port due to... "reasons" (see comment notes), but mostly correct anyway)