pouët.net

wow. thanks a lot for all this scarily incredible feedback.
there have been lots of comments about possible influences of films and videos, so maybe i can add something to this.
dark city is obvious. then there's of course panic room, and some spiderman 2. and the fish swarms in deep blue (i guess that film was also responsible for a certain scene in starstruck ;) also koyanisqatsi was very important to what i seek for in achieving with a demo in general. i haven't seen finalfantasyVII the movie or metropolis (the anime), though (but i think i should do so). nobody has mentioned radioheads "go to sleep" by alex rutterford (also director of the incredible gantz graf video), yet. also very obviously the 3.7 billion movies and tv-series' with shaky handcamera influenced my camera work and i think there's also some christo in debris. i had the worst moment when about one year ago i bought "onedotzero_select dvd4" as it contained the brillant music-video to airs "electronic performers". it also contained another video: "sometimes" by pleix (it is linked somewhere above). when i saw it i just thought "damn. that's just what i had in mind for debris. only better." since then i force everybody to see that video. the second moment of "omg. - they 'stole' my idea before i could use it myself" was when i saw x-men3 and they had a giant moving bridge in it. same as with the pleix video i loved and hated it at the same time. but the most important influence probably was living in a city. during the last two years whenever i was walking through hamburg i imagined rotating houses, moving objects, diving bridges, crushing streets. waiting for a train can be quite entertaining that way ;) also visiting l.a. had its influence on debris. (you might even recognize some buildings). one bridge was taken from the white stripes' "the hardest button to button".
two more incidents were quite influencial, too. although this demo has nothing to do with 911 at all, the word "debris" was burned into my head when watching a documentary about 911. i just loved the phonetics of it. and, coincidentally, also the other big american catastrophy left its mark. when the pictures of the flooded new orleans appeared, there were houses and bridges melting with the water everywhere. as tragic as it was, the visual impression was incredible. there was one particular picture of a bridge, which looked as if it was just diving into the water and i knew i had to somehow capture that impression for debris.
some more similarities to films i came up with are the scene with the pirate corporations in "the meaning of life" and the first appearance of the marshmallow man in "ghostbusters".
k... that's all that comes to my mind at the moment. let me know if you find some more :)

thanks for all the applause. it is a thrilling experience. unbelievable. and sorry that it took so long. our next demo will surely be smaller in scope and larger in filesize.

this is not a 64k intro that missed the size limit. we just wanted to see where we end with our intro technology if we don't care about size. no compromises, no months of tweaking, no throwing away of ideas because we need another kilobyte. in fact it is quite wasteful in terms of code size, and we won't fix that in a final version.

we asked the friendly glöperators to change the screenshot because it took away too much of the "story". it's no use to build up atmosphere for several minutes when everybody waits for the moment when things are blowing up. well, it worked for debris, but if you make screenshots of demos that evolve, please make sure that you only show the beginning stages. don't spoil it for the poor majority that wasn't able to see it at the party.

if you wonder about the great physics engine we've built, sorry, it's all faked. obviously. still we only use shader model 2.0, so we had to move all the particles by hand.

my personal thanks have to go to fiver2 aka theunitedstatesofamerica, who is of course the creative mind, artist and hard working craftsman of this production. also this demo would never have worked without ryg's dedication. he tuned and rewrote everything over and over again to the point where i don't understand it any more. and ronny really saved the day when he did the last minute soundtrack. we were so close to the edge.

no, the demo doesn't need (or even use) dualcore. what resolution/multisampling settings are you using? did you try to use a lower resolution (e.g. 800x600/640x480) with multisampling disabled?

the exploding text thingy is probably one of the most cliché effects ever - and was overused to death in late 80s/early 90s animations (with far lower polygon count and flat shading, of course). we actually had some discussion about whether we could put it in (or if it was just too cheap :), but it looked nice so what the heck...

\o/ :)

should be (relatively) smooth on a 7800, unless you fiddle with the default settings. (then it's your own fault ;)

use normal texture quality if you have <1gb ram. also use a low resolution if you have a slow graphics card :)

probably the priciest 2 glöps you ever got - i hope you've learned something! :)

write. them. a. mail. seriously.

they're not very low-poly actually; every window is modelled individually, for example. i believe we're between 600k and 1000k tris drawn for most scenes. that's after multipass rendering - but there's still on the ballpark of 120k to 180k tris "source material" for most scenes, which doesn't really qualify as low-poly for me.

HAHAH

Self-voting sucks!