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Okusurika information 2 glöps

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• first name: Okuri
• last name: Shumiya

• demo Amiga AGA Relic by Nerve Axis [web]
• This is a great demo for many reasons. There are also some flaws/problems, but let's get to the good stuff first.
  
  Using the HAM8-mode is both interesting and problematic - it's easy to get lots of colors on screen that beats the old VGA/MCGA DOS demos of earlier years (although by this time, SVGA was already probably the norm), with their measely 256 colors from 262144-color palette, when HAM8 can boast 262144 colors out of 24-bit palette (16 777 216 colors, if I remember correctly).
  
  The HAM8-mode also affords an almost automatic 'motion blur', so that kind of effects are allegedly relatively easy to do, and I think this demo heavily utilizes that stuff.
  
  The presentation is wonderful, it's mysterious, it has an ominous music that keeps you guessing in the beginning, and creates intrique.
  
  The graphics, the 3D objects and the visual effects are top notch, and the demo even has a surprise twist at the end - of sorts. At first, it's easy to think this is just a typical boring 'let's put some 3D objects on the screen'-stuff, and that's pretty much that. It's only when the more energetic part kicks in with the clouds and recognizable objects that you realize - hey, this actually continues from where it left off, this is.. an actual STORY!
  
  Storydemos are very rare in the demoscene for some reason, and people don't tend to admire or like them much. I guess meaningless 'blobs twirling on screen' is what people think demos should be all about. After all, demos are not meant to be movies.
  
  Then again, why do so many games have inane storylines and unskippable cutscenes you have to wade through, because they require interaction, so you can't even go away for the duration? Game is not a storytelling platform, and yet corporations that hijacked the computer and video game scene, have been extensively using it as such, leaving the player with fewer options than an actual game shoudl really have (I could go on forever about these stupidly 'linear games' where you basically just play to 'advance the story', not because the gameplay itself is interesting, but I want to return to talking about this demo).
  
  Ever since demos like TBL's excellent 'Tint', Amiga demomakers have recognized the utility of the Ham8-mode for effects that would look unpolished and silly with fewer colors, like those light+alpha-effects that make this demo look so nice and polishes.
  
  There's of course the low resolution that might bother some people, then there's the cropping, which lowers the amount of pixels even further, and this particular demo practically requiring a 68060 or higher (at least as much power - you can get this from emulators, if you can't afford a real '060 card, and who can these days?), etc.
  
  The other fault is that this begins awfully boringly, it's hard to watch the first part without falling asleep, especially if you don't realize it's all part of a story that has a proper arc. The demo lingers a BIT too long on boring things, so I can see why some people judge this demo to be boring (but I challenge them to say the end bit is boring and not feel like they're lying!)
  
  The story -could- be a bit more imaginative, there could be more things happening - there are basically no characters, no dialogue, and everything proceeds in a very linear and predictable fashion. The musics are not all that 'musical', not very melodic or energetic int he 1980s style, not very 'fusion jazz' where the structure could surprise the viewer, but it's a solid presentation, even if the last flutes ARE copied straight from 'The Fifth Element'.
  
  I also don't like how it ends so abruptly, there's no camera pan to show the asteroids after the events, or to fade into some kind of movielike 'endscroller', or any explanation to what -actually- happened and why - as in, 'where did they actually go' and so on. It just drops you to the OS and that's it. It could've used a bit more finesse.
  
  Xvision, thank you for using the Oxford Comma correctly, it's as rare a sight to see as a storydemo like this!
  
  Another good storydemo is 'Odyssey', but it also is plagued with 'boredom', as after the spacefight, the demo begins a marathon of boring effects and barely legible 'almost-english' with bad grammar, that ends up being more funny and interesting to think about than the actual story - a demo shouldn't be over 40 minutes unless you can make ALL (or at least most) of those minutes exciting!
  
  I can't really think of many other storydemos, which is a sad testament to what the demoscene wants - Budbrain's Megademo has a tiny story in it, but so much more -could- be done.
  
  In any case, this demo went much further than the usual 'hey, we can use Lightwave scenes in our demos, so let's just twirl the camera around as much crap as we can muster'-stuff you see so much of in demos of this era. It actually told a coherent story, it had good design, it showed us what HAM8-mode can do in the right hands, and of course, to please the masses, it gave us a big explosion (which could've been better - for some reason, planetary or spaceship explosions rarely look very three-dimensional - what I mean, is that the bits and pieces rarely move in every direction, and inertia and mass is rarely taken into account.
  
  Imagine how a -real- planetary explosion would look like - it would start pretty slow, because planets are massively big, you would be able to see the surface of the planet, the side of the planet rock, and those massive pieces moving apart from each other in -ALL- directions, also away from the camera, and the firey explosion ball inside would then, with its dark and multi-color clouds (from all the lights and fire happening - ever seen a sunset with multiple, beautiful colors?), all the smoke and gases being released, all the tiny bits moving in every direction faster than the big blocks, then those big blocks cracking and separating into smaller blocks, bumping into each other, etc.
  
  But no, we just see a 'light effect while some un-detailed (non-detailed? detailless?), generic asteroids fly into a few directions' and that's it.
  
  It could've been so much better - but that goes for so many 'spaceship explosions' as well, the 'spaceship' is usually just replaced by some yellow explosion gas ball and that's that, even in movies, but especially video games and demos.
  
  I was very surprised to watch Orville and see an actually good-looking spaceship explosion, where the bits don't just disappear, but actually spread to different directions, while the inner section is exploding - it looked very realistic and how I always imagined a proper explosion should look like.
  
  But these nitpicks aside, this is a marvellous demo, that actually tries to do what I have always wondered about; putting 'demo effects' to good use. Instead of just some watery twirl on the screen, why couldn't such an effect display an actual water somewhere in a story, in a meaningful way? For example, a spaceship flying over a lake, that is full of this 'watery effect', that could also reflect that spaceship, etc.
  
  One interesting mention about this demo; if I remember correctly (it's been awhile) the interlaced high-res image of the bearded man suddenly changing to lower-than-low-res (basically from 1x1 hires+interlace into 2x2 lores) is VERY jarring and funny, so I don't know why they didn't have at least 1x1 lores or even 2x2 lores-version of that image instead of friggin' 1x1 hires+interlace..
  
  I mean, it doesn't kill the immersion or anything, but it's jarring and funny. I suppose it wouldn't look that bad viewed from a big screen, but why make it such a high-res image to begin with?
  
  Too bad nothing ever came out of this demo showing how it could be done. When I saw this back in the day, I figured this would be a BEGINNING of something great, a sort of pioneering effort that would then be expanded upon and improved until we get something truly breathtaking - nothing was actually 'built upon' the legacy of this demo, no other storydemo was created that would be coherent and interesting, and show even better effects or at least longer story with perhaps some kind of hand-pixeled animation and dialogue, etc.
  
  Great demo anyways, one that can easily be used to showcase the wonderful world of Amiga and Amiga demos especially. (Even someone that lives in Japan (japanese) loves this demo!)
• rulezadded on the 2021-11-17 03:39:23
• demo MS-Dos/gus Dope by Complex [web]
• Dope, the 'miracle demo' of 1995.
  
  This figuratively blew my socks off, as it was the first time I had ever seen "realtime Phong-shading", and it took me awhile to even believe it WAS realtime and not a pre-rendered animation!
  
  The music seemed atmospheric and epic at the time, although it didn't really go anywhere, and just became a rhythmic background flow that supported the amazing effects.
  
  The thing that makes this demo so impressive (at least back then), is that everything is pretty much super smooth - at least on a powerful enough a PC. The effects are huge, unseen-before (instead of boxes and donuts, this demo introduced 'shadow-mapped, phong-shaded cats' and very complicated objects instead of the typical simple box or face), they get in-your-face, as if to say "look how huge this object is" (Nooon's demo does a similar thing with a bee object).
  
  Then there are the amazing crossfade-effects - very smooth, very beautiful, and in the end, a bit tedious as well. On a bright, old CRT monitor (15 inch perhaps), these look really cool.
  
  On repeat viewings, things seem a bit tedious and boring, though.
  
  The 'cat-effect' will always be eyecandy, but some of the stuff just doesn't seem that impressive anymore. I am not even talking about the amazing 'phong' stuff that can be compared to modern, textured 3D stuff - I mean things like the drawn graphics. The 'space background' is neat, but when you compare it to actual hubble nebula pictures in all their colorful glory, suddenly the space background looks like a dim, ugly, lackluster stain and nothing much more.
  
  I wonder what the crossfade-effects would've looked like if they had done a proper rendition of a colorful space nebula.. (perhaps the space background is dim and lackluster for a reason?)
  
  "Dope" (I wonder why they put the name of the demo in quotes in the demo) has style, it has polish, the effects look very bright, colorful and almost 'reflective' - you could almost swear some 'metallic' objects really are made of some kind of beautiful, polished metal.
  
  My favorite bit, though, has always been the smoothly-scrolling, epic, huge opening 'Complex Media Labs' logo. It's flawless in execution, and it changes the color palette so smoothly you barely notice it (though it seems like it goes from 'blue to orange' just by basically adjusting the 'sliders' for each color simultaneously - so first blue is lessened while red is added, so it gives a more purple color, then more violet, pink - then green is added, so we get grey/brown color, then we end up in the orange range).
  
  This thing is also -huge-, and actually has interesting location for the light source (low middle), and pretty weird textures (though you can see some flaws in the texturing if you look carefully, the letter "p"'s sides look messed up.
  
  No other demo, game or even movie has ever since impressed me with a more interesting, better or amazing scrolling logo.
  
  The problem with this demo is that although it has some breathtaking stuff for its time (realtime phong shading with timed shadowmap to make it look like the rings around the cat are 'reflected' is just something really cool to look at, even nowadays - maybe not a technical marvel from modern perspective, but to us artistical types, if something looks good, it looks good), it does some things a bit too slowly, some things take too long, and the last effect is a real anti-climax (just some squiggly lines that do not look like anything, turning around slowly.. is this supposed to be a spaceship? Couldn't they at least model something as interesting as a cat?), and as some people pointed out, it really doesn't have a storyline, design, or anything to keep your interest, besides just 'object-effect after object-effect' and then it ends.
  
  If you take the 'phong-shaded turning objects' and the 'unnecessarily 28-channel music' away, what are you left with?
  
  The 'one-melody-miracle' song doesn't even end properly, and keeps repeating itself -way- too much. It never changes its winning strategy, but just keeps plowing the same, identical structure over and over again with only minuscule changes. Changing the whole structure at some point would've been really cool.
  
  It was a surprise to find out the song actually takes TWENTY-EIGHT channels! For this? You can do this song with two channels.. Why so much waste? It certainly doesn't sound like it's a 28-channel song, I bet you could do a decent rendition as 4-channel Amiga module and not miss anything important.
  
  The song never ends properly, it just suddenly stops, after wearing out its welcome by repeating itself ad nauseam. It's like after coming up wit a couple of nice melodies, the musician ran out of ideas and juice, and just kept repeating the same thing - despite a small respite, the song is indeed 'pompous' and repetitive, as good as it otherwise might be.
  
  The melody lead is also never changed, it's the same, lackluster thing for the whole duration, and if you have toyed around with analog synths and explored their vast and deep possibilities for interesting, very lively leadsounds, this is not going to sound very impressive.
  
  Listen to things Lizardking used to do even before this demo, or the old C64 game musics, Amiga game musics.. plenty of examples of how to create an engaging song that goes to places and brings you with it. This song remains marching in place and never moves anywhere.
  
  The thing about this demo is, it's very 'technical'. It's polished, but it lacks some innovation, it lacks quirks, it's not very 'alive', it's like 'here's a technical marvel, and that's all you get'. I would have wanted something more artistical, more in the sense of design, and perhaps even some storyline.
  
  The scenery at the end is also extremely lackluster - it could've at least had a properly drawn pixel art, but it doesn't. How are you going to have 1995 World Domination if you can't even draw one decent picture? Yes, count the pixel art in this demo; not even one good 'pixel art' picture, just one tedious 'space background', and the rest is rendered.
  
  Saffron: What do you mean the effects aren't that amazing and they're presented in 'convincing way'? What separates an effect from its presentation, and what exactly makes it convincing?
  
  I thought it's exactly the other way around - this demo has no design, it only HAS 'amazing effects' - and they truly ARE amazing. But that's all there is..
  
  I wouldn't say a demo that talks about 'world domination' while presenting some squiggly lines-object (what were they thinking here?) is taking itself too seriously, either..
  
  Coherence? Coherence is not what makes people remember a demo. This demo is no more or less coherent or incoherent than other similar demos of the era. This point I also don't quite understand. What do you even mean by coherence, when it comes to demos? Showing a few 'rotating object'-effects and then ending is 'coherence'?
  
  I wouldn't say the graphics are bad, I'd say they just didn't seem to have a pixel artist to draw any actual graphics - they're mostly rendered, lackluster or non-existent - the realtime-graphics are great, the background graphics are nothing too interesting, but the problem is, there really aren't "graphics" in this demo per se. No artistic pixel pictures, nothing hand-drawn, just a rendered logo, almost unedited, heavily dimmed-down conversion from some real nebula, and that's it.
  
  I don't think this demo has 'attitude' per se - it's more like the authors wished to show off a 'technical marvel' and tried to make it look pretty with superficial glitter added to relatively low-poly-but-nice-looking objects, while a 'beautiful melody plays'.
  
  Too bad the demo never veers anywhere from that premise, as it does that premise very well.
  
  Analogue: How can you NOT be bored with a song with only two or three 'melodies' that repeat ad nauseam after it finally begins after making the viewer wait for minutes, just listening to rhythmic nothing? This soundtrack is not awesome, it's mediocre at best. It has some beautiful parts, but those parts are shoved down your throat so much it's like eating two big bags of syrapy chocolate and you want to vomit if you hear even one more note of that awful lead sample.
  
  The song is also very simplistic, it doesn't deviate from a couple basic chords and simple structure, it repeats it until you're so bored, you're happy to hear something different, even though the small respite is even simpler and doesn't go anywhere.
  
  "Dope" has some good bits, but it doesn't dare go anywhere interesting with them, and as someone said, Nooon's demo is way more interesting and daring, and its music is also more energetic and brave, and actually goes places. Plus, it has more variety. This demo is like one-trick marvel - nice to look at for awhile, but then you realize how little there is to it - the music repeats, the effects repeat without adding anything new, and in the end, you're not left with much.
  
  The ending is also SO abrupt, that
• isokadded on the 2021-07-26 10:54:50