pouët.net

@uncle-x: I agree to a) and b).
But is this bad? I think finding alternatives to professional cgi characters is one of the strength of demoscene stuff.

pixtur, white flashes are the shit. your ex may be a movie director, but she's not also a vj! that said, fade-to-blacks are even more awesome, of course.

skrebbel: Forget all that high-tech mumbo-jumbo: just cut directly to the new scene instead!

Navis: interesting ideas about using time there. I've been working by having a timer that counts in BPM instead of seconds, which makes timing easy (just add that white flash once per second, and it gets magically synched..). I think I'll change that and use a time line editor to edit time instead, so that time can slow down if the tune slows, or flow backwards etc. Should be fun :)

I think the best way to do it is with a crossfade where the FPS drops like a stone for a second or so. Especially if it's combined with a postprocessing bug when the two scenes are displayed simultaneously.

psionice: I have a BPM counter that you can query values from (it returns 1 if it's exactly on the beat, 0 if it's just before the next beat, and otherwise interpolates between them), but I use mostly seconds for general timing. I'm building a new engine now and I also added triggers (which work the same way as the BPM except they calculate the distance from a fixed point in time), as well as scripted events.

We'll see if my next demo has better sync :)

elsewhere: I used seconds initially, but I found timing stuff was hard and I was always reaching for a calculator. With a BPM based timer, everything is much easier (e.g. musicians tend to work in power of two sequences, so you find scene transitions happen say every 16 beats). It's good for small scale synch too, you can make stuff follow a short pattern (say that matches a hi-hat) and repeat it every 1 beat. The catch is that you need the exact BPM, and if the BPM changes during the track you're in trouble.

Triggers are definitely good, especially if they can be set to repeat :)

sometimes u need to have a black screen with nothing on runing ,
just to pre-calculate stuff.
is there solution to avoid this ?

whiteflashes and fade to black are for newbs. i've recently heard of a new revolutionary basic guideline for awesome design: when it feels like a scene is getting boring, turn on the hypnoglow.

and a pinkflash ?

psionice: Calculator? I just listen to the song, watch the milliseconds and then tune my values if they're off :) But trying to sync to the BPM count properly.. an interesting idea. I will need to try that some day.

ra: calculate it before the demo starts and put in a loader bar or a picture?

as an example: i saw animal attraction (on dtv) , and this version got a black screen

ra: avoid precalculating stuff? Otherwise, run something else and precalc in the background if possible, or if that's not workable perhaps show what you're precalculating (if it's something like texture generating, seeing all of the stages flash through would be way more interesting than a loading bar).

I've only ever used a timer that counts quarter-beats. Makes most sense when you make demos with boring sync, as I do :)

ra: No, "Animal Attraction" has a loader-image. Demoscene.tv just cut out most of the loading when encoding to video. :)

it has probably been already applied, but what about linearly linking the speed (or better, acceleration) of the campath to the speed of the music (bpm) ?

Preacher: for transgression 2 we actually had the raytracer running in the background of a few less cpu intensive transitional effects so that we wouldn't get a jump UP in the fps ;-)

It's Zest's Random Not-Thought-Through Idea Time! Actually linking camera speed or acceleration to the BPM would be really restrictive, you wouldn't be able to control it much at all and getting a decent camera path would be a nightmare.

I've always used milliseconds timers... but for one thing that needed BPM stuff, tolemac wrote a very simple application which wrote the script for that part with all BPM milliseconds. On every scene I can use a "local timer" or a "global timer" so if it's something synched with music, I use the global timer... if it's something depending on the effect/scene, I use the local one (so I can move the effect in time and all synchs will still be there and working).

Apart from that, there's always FFT synching, which I've had to use more often than not: if worked nicely (with decent interpolation schemes using automatic BPM tweening, and not simple linear interp.) can do some pretty nice effects (yeah, other than flashes or hypnoglow :-) )

Too bad I haven't done any demos in a while (2002 I think), which doesn't mean I didn't keep doing music-synched stuff (for work) :)

No wonder people have difficulties doing synchs if you're not using BPM based timers... :)

it seems there was a bug with animal attraction and older versions of .kkapture that caused the black screen.

there is pinkflash in this demo! see, we are totally revolutionary! (also featuring cyanflash, and some other kind of flashes :)

i don't understand why you guys don't just use gnu rocket.

I agree with: Skrebbel.

kusma: get off the fucking internet and enjoy roskilde. (whatthefuck???) :)