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Dark Purpose by The Surrounders
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║ ║╓─╢║ ╟╨╖ A Real-time multimedia presentation
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║ ║║ ║║ ║ ║║ ║╙─╖╟─╜ (C)Copyright 1995 by The Surrounders.
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Hi. Parallax typing here. I won't spend hours to write a stupid info
file that nobody reads, but I thought that some information concerning
Dark Purpose might interest you. Dark Purpose was presented at the first
demo competition ever held in America called NAID '95. The results haven't
been made public yet, but we expect to be in the 11 best ones (there were
11 demos presented after all).
What you get when running DARK.EXE is an enhanced version of the
original demo which has been presented on a giant screen with a 700 Watts
audio system. It is obvious that you do not have this equipment at home, but
it is as enjoyable on a home computer system. We mostly corrected a few
synchro bugs and we linked all 38 files (yes, there were 38 in the one we
presented) into a single file to prevent lamers from playing with them such
as it has happened with our demo at the competition. A few details were also
added, but all the effects in this version were presented at NAID.
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█ C R E D I T S █
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MATRYX YNGWIE T.L.S.
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Coding, Design Coding Coding
BLACK BEAST PARALLAX WARP
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Coding, Graphics Music, Graphics Music
MAD SCIENTIST
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Graphics
Moral and spiritual support by
LE BARMAN, MAT and MUSIC MAN
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█ S Y S T E M R E Q U I R E M E N T S █
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- Dark Purpose runs optimally on a 486DX or better.
- VGA monitor and fast VGA card. No CGA version available.
- DOS 2.11 or later and 640k of memory needed. ;-)
- Gravis UltraSound recommended.
- 250+ watts power supply recommended. (that's a joke)
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█ A B S T R A C T █
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Dark Purpose was programmed in C++ as well as in Assembler, in a total
of 19,583 lines of code. Please take notice that no COBOL sources were
included. It uses a special module player that plays our own music format
which is named SRD. It is NOT guaranteed to work on a 386 computer system.
The music player and plasma routines came from a game called MindStorm
that Matryx did last winter. Someone else was supposed to help us out with
his voxel engine, but he backed out three weeks before the competition.
Then, another part of the demo has been coded two weeks before the
NAID competition with the help of T.L.S and Yngwie who had joined forces
with the group. Thank God we met them! We must also mention that about a
third of Dark Purpose has been coded during the Friday night and all day on
Saturday right before the deadline of the demo compo which had been set at
Midnight on Saturday. We had to chop off both tunes since we didn't have
time to add some new effects. After the compo, everybody was glad to sleep!
No wonder some people at the party told us that our HQ, set up in a
classroom, was comparable to a top secret hideout! We also had a booth in
the cafeteria on Saturday but since it had not been a success, we'd brought
back the computer in the classroom. We didn't meet a lot of people, but
those who actually dared to come in our HQ were really cool. We still e
remember the one who had the T-Shirt "I AM NOT AN ATOMIC PLAYBOY!". Our HQ
was also the Official Mortal Kombat Spot where Matryx has been able to
release all the anger associated to a bug which took the coders 4 hours to
fix and resulted in the loss of an effect for the demo.
Dark Purpose has been officially relased on May 11th at the Sherbrooke
College, a couple of days after it had been available to the public. It was
displayed on a huge screen with a powerful sound system so that people could
live an experience such as the one NAID attenders had lived.
The Surrounders have also presented five songs at the music competition,
but three of them have been presented under the name of 'Formula One' since
a judge for the music compo, who lives in our city and hates us, happened to
be evaluating the songs (no, it wasn't Snowman!). Three of the Surrounders'
musicians who were present wanted to be judged with a total impartiality so
they changed their aliases for the music compo. The two other songs stayed
in their original form.
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█ T H E D E L E T E D F I L E S S T O R Y █
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By Parallax, Founder of The Surrounders.
A crappy gitano tried to bring all our work to nothing by deleting
files from the demo we presented at NAID. Some people might argue with this,
but I honestly say that all the files missing were on the original disk we
submitted (we just had to uncompress them back to fix the problem). They were
missing from TVK's hard disk though. Who deleted them? Someone must have been
able to tamper with the computer between the time the demos have been
uncompressed and shown to the jury. Who was it? I think I have a pretty
good idea.
Now, a word to this fragging(*) moron miserably outdated...
Lighten up. I know that you must have been through hard things during
your childhood which makes you think that you're such a total looser that you
bash everybody else who is able to make something better than you. Not only
did you cause trouble in our group in your miserable life, but also to people
in England (remember?) as well as so many people that you are probably one of
the - er... no, you definetely are the least liked person who is involved in
computing over here. Not only does your reputation affect badly both
companies you work for, your attitude also follows you as soon as you step
into a world which doesn't think the same way as you do. You must have found
it very funny to delete 4 files from our demo before it was privately
presented to the jury. Obviously, we didn't. I can only say one thing to you,
and this thing is suck(*) you. We should have put YOUR face in the distrosion
effect rather than Mad Scientist's graphic.
This whole story can only make everybody in our group thank the judges
that they have beta tested the demoes right before the competiton. It was a
heck of a good idea!
(*) Uncensored version available upon request.
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█ T H E E N D █
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