/\ /. \ _____ _____. _____ _____. // \ ______ .___\_ \_ | .___\_ \_ | // .\/ _ \_ | | | |____|_ _| | |____|_ | | | | |____| ______/ \_ | ______/ | | | ^\____ \| |____| | | |____| | |____| | | | | | | | | | | |____. |. | |. | |. | |. | | |. | | |: | |: | |: | |: | | |: | | || | || | || | ||_ | | || | | | | | | | | | \ | | | | | ^\_______/^\_______/|____| | \_____/| |\_______/^ cRu|________\ | | Issue #47 |. __|__ /\ ____ ____ |: \ / __/. \__\_ \___\_ \_ _. August, 2003 || / \ \__/ / / /___// | 284 Subscribers World Wide | /___/ \ / / __/_ / | | / / / / / / // | ^\____ /___/___/ /^\____ //____| \/ /___/ \/ --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Table Of Contents --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Opening: Message From the Editor Features: Party Report -- Asm '03 Party Report -- Pilgrimage '03 Organizing a US Demo Party Reviews: Music: In Tune -- Assembly and Pilgrimage Winners On The Sideline -- "My Sweet Atlas" by Kaneel The Lineup -- Monthly Music Listings Demo: Screen Lit Vertigo -- "Legomania", "I Feel Like a Computer", "Schism", and "Ciasson" Opinion / Commentary: A New Perspective For A Tiny Scene Coplan's Eyes -- A Snob of What? Link List: Get Somewhere in the Scene Closing: Staff and Contact Information --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Message From the Editor --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Welcome to this month's Static Line. Apologies for the slightly late posting; we wanted to bring you party reports of Assembly and Pilgrimage, which meant extending the deadline a bit. We have a great issue this month folks.. no really, it's going to be great. What a month! In this issue we have party reports for both parties, and reviews for some of the winning demos and songs. We also have some insightful commentary from Phoenix about the scene in the USA, and from Legalize about what goes on behind the scene when organizing a party. We finally catch up on the Lineup with one last double-month issue, and Coplan wrote a commentary about platform elitism. Without further ado, enjoy this issue. --Ben Collver --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Party Report Assembly '03 By: Seven --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Because the flight to Helsinki leaves early in the morning, I had two options: get up in the middle of the night, and hurry like mad to get the train to the airport, check in the luggage, and board the plane or (the option I took): leave the evening before, sleep in the airport and take my sweet time to board the plane. As a result I'm already suffering from a lack of sleep before the party even has started, cause I slept only a few hours on the cold hard airport floor. Let's hope I can catch up in the plane :) -=- Thursday 7 August -=- The plane flight went without a hitch, especially since I slept most of the time. Within minutes I had found a taxi that could drive me to Hartwall Arena, the huge hockey stadium in which Assembly takes place. I arrived at noon, right when the doors should open, but that was delayed a bit. Scanning the crowd for familiar faces, I notice Newt and Dubwood/Razor1911 with a couple of Cryogenic guys. When the doors finally open, the queue moves very very slowly to the entrance where you've to open all your bags so the security people can confiscate all your alcohol, drugs, weapons. After a final pat-down I'm deemed not a terrorist (Whahahaa! Little do they know ;) ) and I proceed to the ticket booth. The friendly lady finds my reservation right away, I pay the entrance fee and get tagged with the prestigious red "vip-ticket" wristband which allows me into the holy oldskool area. Having arrived there, I notice there's no place marked on my ticket, so it's back to the infodesk to find out where I should sit. The problem: I seem to have bought an oldskool entry ticket, but that does not include a computer place! I must have missed a check box on the reservation form :( While I curse myself, they call up Abyss to know if there are any places left I could take, and while the oldskool area is completely booked, there are some places left in the main hall close to the oldskool entrance. I gladly take one of those, relieved I can still use my laptop and walk around in the oldskool hall. To further ease the pain, I grab the awesome free Asm03 poster, and my preordered Asm02 compilation DVD. After installing my stuff, I find out what's wrong with my camera (wrongly formatted CF card, easily fixed) and take a peek at the DVD. Wheee! My party report from last year is on it! I feel like a child who got a "well done!" from the teacher :) 16:22: I've been looking around for people I know, but there aren't many yet. The oldskool area is still largely empty, and Boozembly is deserted. In the meantime, I've been snapping away with my now-functioning camera, making souvenirs of the party place, its weird inhabitants and their sometimes wacky computers. 16:57: Just like last year, there is a relay of the demoscene radio Nectarine at the party place. The main sound system is playing it at the moment, time to request some good songs :) 17:50: I've been watching some old C64 demos with Beyond Force, a really oldskool group. When I mentioned the C64 version of "Second Reality" by Smash Design, they said it proves that "Second Reality" on PC was actually a lousy demo because it can be done equally well on a C64 :) I then made the mistake of mentioning the long fractal zoom from "Crystal Dreams II", thinking nothing like that could be done on a C64 but of course they promptly dug up a production with a Mandelbrot zoom. And they had even older equipment: TNT is the proud owner of a Z88 laptop with a screen of maybe 4 LCD lines, upgraded to the max with 512 KB ram and several flash cartridges. The little thingie can run a day on 4 AA batteries, compare that to todays power guzzlers! 18:32: The opening ceremony hasn't started yet, I hope the orgos will follow the schedule as well as they did last year. Bjorn Lynne is selling various scene CDs again, last year I didn't have enough money but now I came prepared. An instant later I've the Meregon, Audiophonic and Instant Remedy CDs in my possession (about time for some of those :)) The lights go out and everyone applauds. The view of the thousands of computers in the dark with their screens, LEDs, case-mod lights etc glowing looks incredible! The opening ceremony is pretty standard: first an animation with the highlights of last year, then Abyss gives a pep talk about how much better this Assembly will be. He sums up the new features (the outdoor concert, the Robotosa demonstration,...) and ends with his "Sceners and gamers: they CAN live together in peace"-speech. Cheezy, but essential if we don't want this party to turn into a bloody carnage. 20:33: The Demo Top10, oldskool edition on Assembly TV just started, and it's also shown on the big screen. It's an attempt to make a scene-version of the usual music top10 on TV, but it has a few flaws IMHO. While the choice of demos and their positions is OK (made with public voting), they are announced from the first to the last place, which kills most of the anticipation. Also, comments that the voters gave for each demo and which the girl who announces the demos reads from paper, are all very similar (think "This is probably one of the best demos ever, with great music and good design. Enjoy!"). But those are minor bad points, it's great to watch some old and newer classics from Byterapers, Bandwagon and PWP again. The pizza is still expensive: 3.5 Euro for one slice :( Behind the various food shops, which sell fast food 24 hours a day, are a number of sponsor booths. Here you can buy overclocking hardware such as water coolers or exotic fans, high-precision mouses and mouse pads for (supposedly) superior gaming, network cards and cables for those who forgot them at home, and fluorescent lights for all your case-modding needs. AMD is showing off a PC running at 4055 Mhz (only a few tens of Mhz better than last year), HP has a area with tens of comfortable sit bags, probably meant to watch one of their presentations but which are quickly co-opted as sleeping area, and Nokia is advertising their new phone-plus-game- console the NGage. I talked a bit to one of the Nokia guys about their business model for the NGage, they want to keep the platform open so everybody can develop for it without paying huge license fees as with Nintendo. You can pay to get libraries so you can develop your game faster, but it's not obliged. So we'll probably see it in the mobile demo compo next year :) 22:40: There'll be a "Dance Dance Revolution" contest in the official "Unofficial compos" at midnight, but in the meantime the organizers allowed everyone to try and make an idiot of theirselves, a chance I happily took :) In case you don't know, DDR is one of those crazy Japanese games where you have to jump on a controller mat with arrows on the buttons, with the aim of duplicating the pattern of arrows that move on your screen in the rhythm of the song you selected. It's rather difficult at first, but it starts to be addicting after a while. The design of the Assembly T-shirt is much better than last year, IMHO, so I bought one before they are gone. There's the same cute animal on it as on the poster, a mix of a dolphin, a tiger, an dragon and a kangaroo. 23:27: Assembly is full of custom made cases and crazy mods, but one of the best has to be the PC-in-a-microwave I saw at the oldskool area. It has a TFT screen in the door, the motherboard and hard drive on the inside and there's a slot loaded DVD at the back, like a toaster. The control buttons on the front are rewired to the power and reset buttons, the OSD (On Screen Display) buttons and the sound volume. It's actually made by a small company, Genesi, that makes PCs for hobbyists or nostalgic people. The hardware is a custom PowerPC board with a 600 Mhz G3 CPU, running the MorphOS. They've quite some software for it, including an emulator for old Sierra games such as Leisure Suit Larry. A mature platform indeed :) The game development entries were distributed before the party, so there's little surprise in this compo. Taat will probably win again with their upgrade to "Stair dismount". In "Truck dismount", you must do as much damage as possible to a little guy, using a wall, a truck and two ramps. In the compos they made the truck hit the wall so it landed standing on its cabin, and then it sloooowly toppled over on the puppets head, cruel but funny to see. The weirdest game has to be "Bailer", a Linux simuation of a leaky boat navigating towards an island. Your mission: to use a cup to shovel enough water out your boat to reach the island. If you succeed, you can buy bigger cups. Mindless and ugly drawn, but funny nonetheless. More playable games include "Space Adventures of a Small Ship", a variant of the old spacewar duels between 2 ships but with lots of different ships and options, "Netpuck", a hockey simulation, and "Pekka Kanna 2", a very well drawn platform game with a rooster. It suffered a bit of the fixed 640*400 resolution, it was shown rather small on the 800*600 big screen. -=- Friday 8 August -=- 1:00: The DDR compo was fun to watch, but it took place beside the Counterstrike compo so occasionally it was interrupted by loud cheers of the fans when their favorite clan had made a frag. I've been making photos of the compos and the party place, because everyone is still awake the first night so you get much more impressive overview pics of the halls. Night after night, more and more monitors are turned off when their owners succumb to the temptation of sleep (which I'm feeling strongly as well right now). When I got to my table, there was a guy telling me I had a nice laptop, and he asked whether it had a DVD or CDRW. At first I was puzzled why he was asking this, then my paranoia woke up and I realized this was interesting info for would-be thieves, so I drew his attention to the lock connecting it to the table. He and his friend suddenly had to go, leaving me feeling rather suspicious. After some doubt I packed my stuff and checked it in at the info desk. They charge a Euro to keep an eye on it, but at least I know my plane ticket, camera or wallet won't be missing when I wake up. 9:30: Back awake, to an extend. I reinstalled my stuff, and went for some food. Sandwiches are also expensive :/ 10:39: Not much is happening. The big screen shows the AssemblyTV broadcasts, but I prefer to listen to Nectarine. It's getting cold in the hall, and I regret not bringing a sweater. 12:42: I started coding a little on my texture generator, an ongoing project to be used in some hypothetical future production. 13:10: The Demo top10, PC edition is shown on the big screen. There's a nice mix of old and new demos, but I have my doubts on the sanity of some voters. Of course tastes differ, blablala :) I'll let you judge for yourself: 1: "Second Reality"/Future Crew 2: "FR-25 (The popular demo)"/Farbrausch 3: "Live Evil"/Mandula 4: "Variform"/Kewlers 5: "Paimen"/Coma 6: "Project Plant"/EMF 7: "Dope"/Complex 8: "Nonstop Ibiza Experience"/Orange 9: "VIP2"/Popsy Team 10: "Haujobb: Liquid wen" After each Top10 a random voter is picked who wins a T-shirt, and this time Melwyn is the lucky winner. 14:33: Last year I was running into people I knew from other demo parties all the time, but this year there seems to be few non-Finnish visitors, even in the oldskool area and at Boozembly. I've seen Nosfe, who said Kewlers & MFX are going to release a demo here, and Dixan and Melwyn should be here too but I haven't seen them yet. 15:52: The ALT party orgos are organizing some small fun-compos, such as a Nethack compo, a marathon (running around the building), and a poetry recital compo which I just saw. Most poems were in Finnish, except one ode to an Atari ST, and two "poems" based on a cooking receipt and the usage instructions of a name tag. As you can guess, participating is more important than winning :) 16:33: The fast graphics compo is about to begin. The participants had only 90 minutes to make a picture about a given subject. The subject seems to have been ice cubes and summer. There were 8 pics, with one very clear winner: "The Magic Ice cube of the Caribbean", it's really a striking picture with amazing colors. The other entries aren't half as good, but still well above joke-entry level. The fast music compo is next, the second entry was my favorite, a really energetic tune whose name I unfortunately don't remember because I was paying too much attention to the giant sound meters on the stairs. Since the arena is a hockey stadium, there are stairs all around the ground level, leading to the chairs. On eight of those, the orgos put large 1-character LED displays on each step. They blink following the volume of the music, so the whole arena looks like a giant sound meter, including the green-yellow-red pattern. And before each compo, the LEDs display the phrases "KILL ALL" "AUDIO & LIGHTS". 18:36: The hand drawn graphics compo is over: 20 pics in various styles, with some very good ones. I really liked "Parallel Twirl" and "Find The Little Green Men". For each picture, the title and entry number are shown first, which leads to some artists messing with the audiences expectations: what would you expect from a picture called "Female Melon Display Extraordinaire?" All pictures are shown twice, but they don't zoom into details so it's hard to judge techniques :( There are two new animations that are shown on the big screen before a compo to make the audience switch off all lights and sound: the first features the same penguins as the original, but a cannon is used to make the point instead of a hammer, and in the second one bad things happen in a drive-in cinema to a car with booming music and flashing lights. I hope we can download them from the FTP server... [ update after the party: I noticed the ones with the penguins are on the Asm'02 DVDs, joy!] After the count down to the instrumental music compo, the big screen says "Our equipment needs a little bit of adjusting. Please hold on." I guess nobody is perfect. The problems were fixed soon, the 15 songs played ranged from so-so to pretty good. I like the "Acula class" song the most, it's a symphonic track suitable for a science fiction movie. A slower tune I liked was Travelogue, although it is probably too calm to get much votes. With only one chance to impress the audience, most musicians make remarkable songs with lots of variation, or very fast or loud, so people will remember them when it is time to vote, and simpler songs don't stand a chance. 23:26: The outdoor concert was really worth the time to attend! The location has been changed from the largest corridor, which was overcrowded last year, to the main loading place. So it's kind of outside, but we have still a roof above our heads. Axess Denied opened the concert with a rock version of the "Xenon 2" theme, then went through various other old game tunes from Rob Hubbard and others, some famous demo tracks such as from Dope/Complex, and ended with the "Bubble Bobble" theme. Next CNCD Outside mixed real instruments such as a trumpet, a hobo and some yembes with VIC-20 beeps and basses. Cool, but a bit too long at times. Purple Motion was next, on the synthesizer but with the support of a guitarist, drummer and percussionist. He played some fantastic non-scene songs, I believe the announcer said several were even played public for the first time at Assembly, and he ended with an incredible version of the "Second Reality" score. You can imagine that the public went crazy :) Then there was a surprise guest, a bass guitarist with some groupies that held up jokes about bassists, unfortunately in Finnish only. The concert was closed by the Stereo Gentlemen, and the free earplugs the orgos had handed out at the start were put to use: it was LOUD! There was one long-haired guy paying the electrical guitar, assisted by two young rappers and four dancers in sexy leather outfits. The music was the kind you feel rather than hear, which is not my favorite kind but it was OK. -=- Saturday 9 August -=- 1:42: Talk about coincidence: the guy who organized the DDR compo is Bemmu, who I was sitting next to last year in the oldskool area! We both didn't recognize each other until now :) He has told me how to get "Stepmania", the free PC clone of "Dance Dance Revolution". That's something I have to check out. The winner of the compo, Stuf, and his girlfriend are still playing, it's amazing how fast they move their feet. Two more compos have passed: the oldskool graphics, and the oldskool music. The graphics had one entry that stood out, Blackbeard, although I also liked the 2nd Countess and the Yessagician pics. The music had lots of cool tunes, I can't remember any specific names but it was nice to see some XMs and S3Ms in there so I can listen to them on PC [Update after the party: The orgos where thoughtful enough to make MP3s of the non-PC entries so everyone can listen to them! Great!] 2:08: The oldskool demo compo had 5 entries, one down from last year, and the quality seemed a bit less but still enjoyable. PWP, who won the compo last year, made a funny cartoon-like entry called "Robotic Liberation", Da Jormas had made a port of one of their philosophical demos, and Dekadence had a good effect-based demo. 3:35: The last compo for today is one we can't vote for: the mobile game development compo. It's jury-based, I assume with the sponsors of the development kits (Nokia etc) as the judges. There were 6 games, but most of them were unfinished or had flaws. The best-looking entry featured a top-down view on a 3D environment, but no enemies at all. There was a medieval strategy game that had to pause after every move to "merge changes with the gameworld", I think that would quickly become annoying. There was one game with hedgehogs or so throwing bombs to each others that was actually playable, so that's a good candidate to win the compo :) 9:29: Back awake. I've been sleeping in the sleeping area, but it seems the security people do not really enforce the rules: when walking back to my table, I see plenty of people sleeping on chairs, under tables and in the grand stand, all of which are forbidden due to fire regulations. My right arm feels weirdly insensitive, I slept on it and the bloodstream must have been cut off: when I make a fist, it feels as if my hand is still half- open. But after a shower it slowly goes back to normal . There was no queue in the showers, and the number of black screens in the arena shows I woke up early for Assembly standards. The big screen is showing a wild demo similar to Real Reality/Never: demo scene effects done with real life objects. There's a 3D duckie, clouds, an asteroid, a donut, bubbles, balls, a 3D FPS scene etc. Simple, but nice. At the end the title is shown: Get Real, by the Assembly 99 netcrew. 11:18: And today must be sales pitch day: the promotion teams have escaped from their booths and are roaming in the arena. First there's some guy from Validitas offering a free test of their CAIS system, apparently a service that can simulate all kinds of mobile connections (GPRS, WAP, I-mode etc) with various quality settings. This would be useful to make sure the data-protocol of your mobile application works correctly both in big cities, and small towns with few base stations. I've never made a Symbian program in my life, but that doesn't stop the guy from explaining everything in detail. Next there's a girl from Nokia demonstrating the NGage to everyone whether they're interested or not, with a 3D game called Pandemonium (a port from an old PC game) that looks quite good, but hey, I'm just not a gamer! 12:05: And the last Demo Top10 is shown: the Amiga edition. There are the usual classics like "Desert Dreams"/Kefrens and "State Of The Art & 9 Fingers"/Spaceballs, plus more recent releases such as "Lapsuus"/Maturefurk and "Perfect Circle"/The Black Lotus. It's nice to see them all again, especially on a big screen. 13:50: The Robotosa event was extremely popular: by the time I got to the parking place, where it was held, people were standing 5 lines deep around the battlefield, and only by standing on some stacked boxes could I see anything. Robotosa is a small-scale robot wars variant, where two remote- controlled cars try to defeat each other by immobilizing the enemy, or pushing him out the battlefield. Most cars had some armor added, and some a bladed weapon, but that didn't seem to have much influence. The most effective strategies were to have better traction so you can push the other car around, or to have a sloped edge close to the ground so the enemy cannot have a good grip on you. After the duels, each car had to do a dexterity test: tipping cans over, pressing a lever in a maze, opening a "door" etc, all without falling from the platform. That last part was a problem for most robots, it seems their brakes weren't the most reliable part of them :) 15:00: This afternoon and evening, the majority of the compos will be held. The vocal music compo had only 10 preselected entries, varying in style between ambient, DnB, rap, rock,... I think the quality of the vocals is less amateurish than last year, but I still prefer the instrumental music. The "Never Had A Gun In My Hand" entry was quite good IMO. The free style graphics compo allowed everything that isn't hand drawn, so it's not just ray traced images anymore. There were 25 entries, with a very high average quality, and the usual range of subjects: fantasy(Sentinel, Mental Inferno), science fiction (My City), nature scenes (1-800-xxx, Decommissioned II),... It will be difficult to choose the best 3. I quickly go eat another slice of pizza, before the browser demo starts, and discuss various geeky subjects with Bemmu, such as what chances the NGage has, or how evil Microsoft is :) 16:47: The browser demo had 1O entries, all using flash except one lonely demo made with Director. Java entries have to take part in the normal demo compo. Since flash is pretty much 2D-only, faked 3D effects are quite popular. The best designed entry is without doubt "Super fantastic gay disco all night long", which has also fitting dance music. 17:38: There were no less then 14 great 4K intros! I recognized the one Preacher was working on last year (Another soul lost), seems he finally finished it :) It has some simple DOS-era effects, but also contains a funny story about gamers discussing the demo scene. Then there was a 4K with voice synths, singing the old "99 bottles on the wall" song but with beer instead of bottles, and no effects at all. There was another Humus entry for the Amiga, number 4 in the series and still fantastic, there was a Linux entry ("Topsy Turvy" I think) showing a complete amusement park, with a roller coaster, swings, a merry-go-round, and of course fitting music. I also liked Etherium, showing a cool landscape, also with music, and the final Linux entry that has only a single effect, a white ever- morphing flower with great techno-music. 18:55: I've been feeling sleepy during the compos, but now it's over so I decide to go to the Farbrausch seminar after all. Chaos explains the history of the tools they use to make their awesome productions. It turns out the coders don't code demos anymore: they've made a very complex, ever- evolving tool that allows a artist to design a whole demo , and a player to show that design. So it's a bit like the Demopajaa tool on steroids. Chaos gives lots of tips for people who'd like to make a similar tool: make your own GUI, don't use overlapping windows, give real time feedback, don't hide complexity, make everything from the sounds to the camera movements an operator, etc etc. He also explains how to do the glow- effect from "The Popular Demo": you've to post-process the entire image. First you subtract a fixed amount so only the highlights of the image remain. You blur them a lot ("you can do almost everything with blur!"), increase the brightness again, and combine it with the original scene, and voila: every highlight has an aura around it. 21:22: The first part of the prize ceremony is over. Just like last year, to limit the length of the ceremony it's broken in two, which is a very good thing. Most results were as expected, although the Blackbeard C64 graphic is disqualified due to being a copy. There was also an Asus-sponsored tattoo compo (which I hadn't heard about before), plus the outdoor compos such as basketball, soccer, CD throwing etc. The winners get a chance to say something to the audience, but alas I can't understand Finnish... While we're waiting for the 64K compo, the big screen is showing the Demo Quiz on AssemblyTV. I wouldn't be able to answer a lot of the questions: how many times was Mekka/Symposium held? Who was the coder of ? At which party did this or that demo reached first place? 22:30: The 64K compo is over, with 12 entries. I first thought it would be an average compo, with no really special entries, although I liked "Oddjob"/Kewlers. Then ANDs new entry was shown, and everyone knew who would be the winner. "Zoom 3" is everything Squish was, plus a good voice synthesizer, an incredible model of a giant robot walking through a high- tech environment, a long end scroller, etc etc. The music is from Cybermage this time, so it's not a one-man production this time, but it's still incredible how much AND has been able to improve in one year. Respect! 23:43: Due to the overwhelming success of last year, the mobile demo compo was held again this year, for devices that weight less then 250 gram. At first it looks as if all demos are comparable: using low-res color screens, on the level of the early Pentium demos (1995). But the two last productions run on the monochrome TI calculators, and it's nice to see that the public likes these even more then the more advanced ones. Still, I guess the Matrix spoof "Zion" will win the compo, the subject is just too popular in the Assembly public. I wanted to drop by Boozembly, but it's raining :( Dixan, Uncle X, Droid and Energy are hiding from the rain, we talk about how Assembly has been so far. Dixan is miffed only 10 vocal music where preselected out of over 40 entries, versus 15 in the oldskool and instrumental music compos. I hadn't noticed it yet, but it's indeed a bit strange. On the other hand, I believe last year the time limit was 3 minutes, versus 3m30 now... 2:44: The animation compo had only 5 entries, but the quality was OK. Most had short stories, like the medieval tale of the sword of Nur, or the beer- stealing rats from Dice Productions, but I also liked the pure art of "Energy of The Atom". The wild demo compo had the opposite problem: plenty of entries, but the majority were boring home-videos, not even funny, and in Finnish only. Newborn had at least a kind of story arc, "The Trip" was funny, although the group name "Low Budget Movies" was not a joke. There was a spoof of a Finnish children TV show with birds, which the audience found hilarious, but I preferred the real-life "Grand Theft Auto" movie: funny, and with some nice rendered elements in it. The only real wild demo according to the old definition (a demo on a non-standard platform) was the LCD mega demo, which ran on a 4*20-character LCD screen, build into someone's PC case. Outside any competition, Yodel made good on their promise last year that they would make a boys-band-clip as a successor to their "What's up (in the Gangsta-hood)" clip. And indeed, their "2 Hard (2 Get)" could easily rival the latest Take That or Boyzone in sheer quality :) 3:00: The compos are over for today, but the Tiny Music compo results are played on the main sound system (as this is was an unofficial compo, the results are already known). After that the disqualified demos are shown, some are not bad at all. This gives me hope for the quality of the preselected entries! After a problem with my FTP settings (thanks to the NetCrew for fixing it!) I manage to download the releases from the first prize ceremony. By this time people are sleeping everywhere and the security guys don't seem to mind, so instead of giving my laptop to the info desk I just sleep next to it on the table. 7:52: I'm awake again, luckily not due to the security crew. Nosfe is collecting bottles for the return money, his wild demo was once again not preselected, even though there were too many low-quality home videos. I can only nod sadly. All during the party, people have been playing this extremely annoying MP3 with a child singing very off-key "I'm an apple", but in Finnish, over and over again. It's like a virus, everyone hates it but they still become infected with it and play it themselves. 9:51: The demo compos is about to start, so the orgos play loud music in order to wake everyone up. 11:21: This was hands down one of the best demo compos ever! In order of my personal preferences: Doomsday is back, with probably the best demo of 2003: "Legomania". Remember the scene in Boost, where a giant lego man walked around a planet? He's tired of walking, and goes on an adventure with his brothers. Besides the funny lego-scenes in cartoon rendering, this demo also has great normal effects, interesting transitions, splendid design, and very cool music. My bet for the second place is "I Feel Like A Computer", by Melon Design. Yes, they're back as well, and they bring you an entertaining story with a drunken dog, John Travolta, Donky Kong, aliens and cops. Everything is rendered with flat shaded cubes, but it really fits the Melon style. Moppi Productions released something completely different from their last demo, as usual :) "Ix" is an innovative demo with a mix of 3D objects and 2D people, about the people (and animals) taking the tram. Fairlight made "Digital Dynamix", with excellent modeling and 3D effects, and I also liked "Feed Your Machine"/Faktory, with a brand new 3D smoke effect and an amazing fur- rendered dog. And then there were the demos from Complex (on the X-box!), Farbrausch, Kewlers, MFX,... With this much choice, I'm glad the orgos allow us to vote for 5 demos instead of the usual 3. 13:50: People are slowly starting to pack. I've had a discussion with Bjorn Lynne about MP3s, he believes people have simply become accustomed to not having to pay for MP3s, and thus never will. I think students will always copy music for free, but that people with enough income are willing to support the artists, which is not the same as supporting the recording industry. 14:33: Aha! A quick look on the FTP server shows that the orgos are uploading the remaining releases. Since the network was dismantled right after the prize ceremony last year, I start leeching them ASAP. 15:05: The ceremony hasn't begun yet, I'm starting to get nervous about the train and bus I have to take to get back to the airport... And finally it begins! There's a collage of fragments of the best releases shown on the big screen,after which Abyss starts to give away the prizes. There are some sponsored compos, such as the fastest PC or coolest case (photos at coolputer.fi), and the Altparty orgos have improvised a special prize for the most original production, which goes to the Yellow Rose of Texas 4K by Fit & bandwagon. That one also wins the 4K compo, with humus 4 placing 2nd. The makers of Topsy Turvy apologize for placing third and pushing the other demos a place down (they deserve the 3th place IMHO). Next are the game compos, "Unreal Tournament", "Counterstrike" etc... The winners don't get much applause from the (largely gamers-)crowd, maybe there's more rivalry between gamers than between sceners. I'm glad no home videos got in the Wild demo top 3, instead "Grand Theft", that children show and the LCD-demo place first to third. Abyss announces the prize money for the 64K compo has been increased, which is nice for AND and Cybermage, whose Zoom 3 has almost 3 times as many votes as the entry from Cryonics. AND gives a little speech to thank the voters in broken English, and people just keep applauding! The demo compo starts with a big disappointment: Melon Designs demo is disqualified because they used two minutes of copyrighted music without permission. This sucks badly :( I know the rule is necessary, but it's sad when good groups are hit by it... How could they forget about it?! Abyss is obviously sad about it as well, and gives them a change to thank the voters, who had wanted to see them take the 3th place... "Legomania" wins the compo, of course, and Doomsday give Abyss some lego men as a present. Moppi Productions place second place for the 3th time in a row (Halla in 2002, and Gerbera in 2001). "Doomsday" by Complex is the new number 3, I hope they release a PC port as well. The ambient "Dreamchild" demo by ASD is 4th, and "Mental"/Push Entertainment shows there is still a place (5th, to be exact) for Amiga demos in 2003. After the usual thanks to the participants, sponsors, and crew, Abyss invites us all to Assembly'04, and I hope I'll be able to attend. Stuf/Xill and Janita are so kind to give me a lift to the airport, much thanks to them! I fall asleep while the plane is still on the ground, and the rest of the trip back home goes smoothly as well. I don't think it needs to be said, but just in case: Assembly'03 rocked! There were several big improvements over last year, and after the party the orgos actively asked for feedback on the mailing list. I have no doubt they'll listen to it carefully, to make Asm'04 even better. Personally I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't sit in the oldskool area (for which I have only myself to blame, I know), and I also expected to see more people I knew. But these were minor points, and I'd like to greet everyone I met there. See you again next year! --Seven --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Party Report Pilgrimage '03 By: N-site --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Let me preface this review by saying that I've never been to a demo party before going to Pilgrimage 2003, and would not be considered a true demo scenester by many of those who attended, considering I haven't paid attention to demos since my dated computer stopped being able to run them back in 1999. I was, however, amazed with demos ever since my brother showed me Second Reality on a computer in a Radio Shack store back in 1994. From what I've heard that demo also got a lot of other people interested in graphics programming, but I'm sure there are plenty of you out there more l337 than I am so you'll have to bear with me on this one. Organizers Adam Helps and Richard Thomson chose to host Pilgrimage 2003 in Salt Lake City most likely because they're both from SLC, but as they explained on the demo web site the city does have an impressive history of research and innovation in computer graphics technologies. Besides, as a major airport hub in a central position within the country, the city was a jump, hop and a skip for most Americans (and even the obligatory Canadian or two). More importantly, the actual space for the event, SLCC's Metro Learning Center, worked out perfect for the party, with a convenient downtown location, friendly staff, air conditioners pumping cold air a plenty, and enough Internet hookups and desktop real estate for everyone's PCs. The morning's speakers covered topics ranging from beginning to advanced and some of these presentations were very good. In "Designing Your Own Game Console" Russ Christensen discussed his own experiences designing a simple 5MHz video game console, and the presentation attracted a large audience, though his project was probably more suitable for the engineering and electronics gurus in the audience than your average Playstation 2 enthusiast. Adam Helps taught newbies how to track, and Thant Tessman wowed audiences with his very fancy real-time 3D shading demos, while Jason Ehrhart helped many early risers catch up on their sleep with his 1fps rotating Java cubes. I didn't see David's, Rich's, and Dan's presentations, so I can't say anything about theirs, but from what I did see the presenters had quality, interesting information to offer. After the presentations the rest of the day was spent showing off previous demos on projector screens while those competing rushed to finish up their entries. This part of the day perhaps could have used more organization, as there was really no order to what was happening. For instance, I heard beforehand that there would be a live broadcast of Assembly '03, and I was hoping there would be a specific room where I could go and check out what was going on at Assembly, but the room that was broadcasting it was also being used to show demos, to film video postcards, and to show off a certain somebody's 5MHz game console. Now all these other things were fine and dandy, but I wanted to see the Assembly telecast! They should have had a separate room for coders, a room for watching the demo DVD, a then a third room for the live Assembly broadcast. Hey, a room with a couple X-box's and Halo would have been cool too, but I guess that's asking for too much, isn't it! The actual competition itself took place later in the evening, and ended a little too quickly because of the limited number of participants. This, too, was disappointing, since I saw so many people there during the day and expected all of them to have something in the works for the competition. While the votes were being tallied Jeremiah Johnson a.k.a. Nullsleep put on a show of music composed using a couple Gameboys and an NES. Depeche Mode on a Gameboy is quite a feat indeed, but Gameboy arpeggios at 10 in the evening is quite another matter! Luckily I used to listen to a lot of Piano Maker PC Speaker tunes, so I felt right at home. Apart from one or two shining moments, most of the demos and music entries were noticeably inferior to what you find at Assembly, which made the whole event at Pilgrimage '03 seem like more of a tribute to or a fan club of the vastly more popular European demo scene than an actual competition. The nuts and bolts of an American demo scene are there--I can gripe about the lack of a dedicated Assembly broadcast or a larger room for the competition, but really Richard and Adam put a lot of work into organizing the event, and we're lucky to have them there taking the initiative. They laid the groundwork, but the problem is there aren't enough American coders out there yet who either know about demos or have tried putting their energy and talent into making good demos. All of us who want to see a real American demo scene ultimately share the responsibility not only to bite the bullet and show up the Europeans through our own hard work, but also to spread the word to all the skilled coders and electronic musicians out there that might not know about the demo scene so that we can increase our ranks. University of Utah's own Phong Bui-Toung (Phong shading), Ed Catmull (texture mapping, Z-buffer hidden surface removal), Jim Blinn (environmental reflection mapping, bump mapping), and most all of the great innovators of computer graphics techniques developed their skills on this side of the Atlantic. Pilgrimage is just the place for that legacy to be reclaimed, but it's going to take more than Pilgrimage '03 to do so. Many thanks to Richard Thomson and Adam Helps for putting on the even this year in Salt Lake City, and see you again next year! --N-site --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Organizing a US Demo Party By: Legalize / Polygony --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Pilgrimage 2003 is over and now that I've had time to get things back to normal, I'm going to talk about Pilgrimage from the organizer's perspective. I'm combining a recounting of my experiences with advice for other organizers. -=- Don't Know Nuthin' -=- I've never been to a demo party before. I first heard about the demo scene in August 2002 at SIGGRAPH in San Antonio, Texas. I have never organized a demo party before, or anything as large as Pilgrimage. I've seen pictures, read trip reports, browsed slengpung, talked to people on IRC, browsed pouet and ojuice, downloaded the demoshow CDs and watched as many demos as I could, downloaded Assembly 2002 results after SIGGRAPH 2002, browsed two headed squirrel, monostep.org and other personally recommended demos lists. I can't really tell you if our demo party "felt" like a European demo party or previous North American parties having attended none of them. In addition to my lack of experience, we have the current state of the demo scene in the USA. Very few people know about demos at this point. Those who do know about demos are not necessarily geographically concentrated and don't have a well defined electronic community web portal. The interests are currently splintered across the music, graphics, and gaming communities. -=- Demo Scene Cherry -=- After seeing the demo scene panel at SIGGRAPH 2002, I wanted to do something involving the demo scene. I went to the demoscene BOF and spent time talking over the demo scene with Vince Scheib and Phil Taylor over dinner at SIGGRAPH. I think this is where I first got the idea to organize a demo party. I started putting together my plans for what I wanted a demo party to contain besides the usual socializing and compos. I wanted something to fall back on should there end up not being very many compo entries. The easiest backup plan was to show demos from the demoshow CD compilations on scene.org. I could contact the people I know and ask them to come talk on a subject at the event. I could try to organize a concert finale. From what I could tell in the scene, your only currency is the amount of respect you get for what you have done. I didn't want to organize an event that sucked! I couldn't depend on compo entries to float my event by itself, so it needed something extra. To simplify the problem, I constrained the event to a single day. Being only a single day was also likely to reduce participation from out of town, but the logistics and expense of a multi-day event were just out of our grasp the first time around. It would be better to run a great 1 day event than a sucky 3 day event. After being back from SIGGRAPH for a short while, I was contacted by Adam Helps, a CS undergraduate student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, about a 45 minute drive south from Salt Lake City. Adam and I exchanged phone numbers by email and talked at length on the phone discussing our ideas for a demo party and how to raise interest in the event. Both of us had very similar ideas for organizing a party, so it was a great coming-together of like-minded sceners. Where each of us had specific ideas on some aspect of the organizing, they were either synergistic with or identical to the ideas of the other. Adam would be able to reach people in Utah County while I could reach people in Salt Lake County. Just as the USA is geographically large, Utah itself is a large western state with most of its urban population along the western edge of the mountains called the Wasatch front. The major cities of Utah are Salt Lake City, Provo and Ogden. They all lie on the Wasatch front. -=- Parties as Non-Profit Corporations -=- While I didn't have any experience with demo parties, I do have planning and organizing skills. My plan was to: form a non-profit Utah corporation to handle the financial and legal details of running an event, hold a 1 day event, and file for IRS 501(c)3 status. My biggest single resource for these tasks is "Non-Profits for Dummies" which, despite the title, contains lots of good information for would-be US party organizers. A non-profit corporation shares many of the same problems and attributes as an organization that puts on a demo party. The book contains these chapters in about 350 pages: Part I: Getting Started with Nonprofits Chapter 1: Tuning In to the World of Nonprofit Organizations Chapter 2: Deciding to Start a Nonprofit Chapter 3: Writing Your Mission Statement Chapter 4: Incorporating and Applying for Tax Exemption Chapter 5: Safeguarding Your Nonprofit Status Part II: Managing a Nonprofit Organization Chapter 6: Building Your Board of Directors Chapter 7: Getting the Work Done with Paid Staff Chapter 8: Getting the Work Done with Volunteers Chapter 9: Planning: Why and How Nonprofits Make Plans Chapter 10: Showing the Money: Budgets and Financial Reports Chapter 11: Creating a Home for Your Nonprofit and Insuring It Chapter 12: Finding Outside Help When You Need It Part II: Raising Money and Visibility Chapter 13: Crafting a Fundraising Plan Chapter 14: Raising Money from Individuals Chapter 15: Making the Most of Special Events Chapter 16: Finding the Grant-Givers Chapter 17: Writing a Grant Proposal Chapter 18: Marketing: Spreading the Word about Your Good Work Part IV: The Part of Tens Chapter 20: Ten Myths about Nonprofit Organizations Chapter 21: Ten Tips for Raising Money As you can see from the chapter titles, many of the activities that nonprofit corporations perform are the same things that demo party organizers must go through in order to have a successful party. If you're forming an event in the USA and want to organize a non-profit corporation around the event, get things in motion about a year before your event date. If you don't have that much time, start this process first since it will take a while to complete in full. The book (and others like it) has the full details on what you need. It is also possible to operate underneath a sponsoring Nonprofit corporation, check out the book for details on this option. For Pilgrimage, it was pretty easy based on the advice given in the book and the guidelines given by the State of Utah to construct the articles of incorporation and the bylaws. A small filing fee of $20 and about 2 months of processing time and we had our Utah nonprofit corporation. Showing proof of incorporation was required to open up a bank account at the bank we used (University of Utah Credit Union). You will definitely want a separate bank account through which you track your financial transactions. Why go through all this? Because you won't ever get any sizable donations or grants unless you have a 501(c)3 IRS designation. If you look at art grant applications from local, state and federal sources you will see that they all require applicants to be 501(c)3 organizations. The same is true for philanthropy from private foundations. You don't want to be funding demo parties out of your own pocket if you can help it. -=- Web Site & Domain Name -=- My ISP, XMission, offers pro bono accounts to nonprofit organizations in the state of Utah, so that got us a web space once we had our incorporation papers. A couple of email messages to scene.org and XMission staff and we had a DNS entry for pilgrimage.scene.org resolving to our web space on XMission. At the time we applied for scene.org DNS hosting, they were on their old server and were temporarily holding all applications for FTP or web space. We needed a consistent web site ASAP to keep interest growing from one familiar place, rather than a string of changed URLs. Have you ever noticed how many stale North American demo scene links are out there on the web and in NFO files and such? I didn't want to add to the pot! While we got the whole nonprofit/webspace/domain thing sorted out, Mike No Worth worked on a web design for the pages that we ultimately stole and expanded for content into the pages we have today. A preliminary version of this was placed on Adam's CS account at BYU and leaked to OJuice :-). Shortly thereafter our real web site was available and running. I thought that having a scene.org domain name would give us more cred, but you can do any domain naming scheme you want for your party. As a first time organizer, I was going to do everything within my reach to increase the credibility and image of our party as a new birth for the demo scene in the USA. I looked at a scene.org domain name as one that would be good for our reputation. Once our web account was created on XMission, it was a snap to have pilgrimage.scene.org resolve out to our virtual web server on XMission. We initially created our XMission account with the name 'demos', but this resulted in us receiving large amounts of spam. Spammers now routinely do "dictionary attacks" on email servers hoping to deliver as much spam as possible to "john@" and apparently "demos" is a word that's often used on these dictionary style attacks. So unless you're willing to deal with the spam, I'd suggest using an account name or email alias that's unique to your event and unlikely to be spammed with such an attack. -=- Mailing Lists and Discussion Forums -=- Hopefully you've got at least one other person working on organizing your event! You will need a way to communicate what each of you is doing and have a place to refer back to for a refreshening of details. A mailing list is perfect for this and everyone's got email now, right? We formed an internal mailing list for the Pilgrimage organizers. It was getting to the point where mail sent back and forth between two people needed to be sent to all three people so that we were all on the same page. It was just easier to setup a mailing list and then we all send to the list to keep everyone informed. We probably would have started a mailing list for party goers but SceneSpot stepped into action and provided us with a discussion forum area on the web. Personally I prefer a mailing list or a newsgroup, but they offered and we took it! This is an example of a good rule of thumb for organizers: don't look gift horses in the mouth! Take everything you can get and any opportunity that's offered to you even if you would prefer to "implement" things differently. Now that Pilgrimage is over, we will probably implement a pilgrims mailing list from our contact list at the party. -=- Outreach -=- Let's face it -- the scene in the USA is dispersed to the four corners of the continent at this point. To get a successful event happening, you're going to need to talk to people in your area as often as you can manage it. This is a long-term strategy. Expect a few onesy twosy sort of recruitment from this approach at first. Community involvement requires persistence and patience from you as an organizer and outreach activist. Each time you do it, it becomes easier and soon you'll be able to make an outreach presentation on the demo scene in your sleep. You will also learn that different audiences require different kinds of talks -- you'll want to go into more details about code if you're talking to a programming class, for instance. A good goal would be to perform a demo scene outreach activity at least once a month. "Activity" could be anything from introducing a single individual to the demo scene (say, with the demoshow CDs), talking to a class of programming students as a guest lecturer, giving a talk at the local library (always showing demos, of course), or participating in a community fair, county fair or state fair. The best thing about demo outreach is that you basically just let the demos sell themselves. All you need to do is shut up and play the demos! A little introduction at the beginning helps, but I've done events where I just dimmed the lights, put on the DemoDVD, cranked up the sound, and propped open the doors with trash cans to encourage people to just get into it without a lot of intellectual blather. -=- Reaching Out -=- You not only have to talk to audiences, you need to reach out to them to get them involved in the demo scene. Ask them if they are coders? musicians? graphic artists? If they are any of those, make a note of it for when you talk to them later. Have a contact sign up sheet so that people can provide you with information that you can use to build a relationship with them over time. Will they remember to phone/email you? (In my experience, they won't.) Get their contact information so that you can initiate contact with them. When you talk to people during your outreach and they make specific offers or comments, write them down next to their name so that you can match that up with the contact sheet later. Ask them to sign the contact sheet if they haven't yet done so when you talk to them. Your contact sheet will be your source of potential volunteers and attendees at your future events. Besides getting people to work with you on your demo party, you're going to need funds to pay for your event's expenses. Unless you can work directly with another nonprofit that helps fund your event, you shouldn't expect any financial assistance from grants or corporate foundations in your first year. You're going to need to find sponsors and financial support from yourself, people you know and any relationships with corporations you personally have formed. One way to raise money is to always have something that you provide as a gift for a donation of a certain amount of money. My personal rule of thumb is that the gift should not cost more than 10% of the donated amount -- remember that you are doing this to raise money for your nonprofit/event, not to make a 10% margin on retail goods. Now you know why you get a $1.95 coffee mug for donating $50 to PBS! You can also sell items outright as a nonprofit corporation. The details are in the nonprofit book mentioned above. -=- Literature on the Demo Scene -=- Beyond the immediate-gratification aspect of demos, you'll want to have printed information ready to explain the details of demos. I didn't have anything printed at my first outreach event. At my second outreach event at the SynOrgy 2002 Decompression party, I had a printed one-sheet pamphlet that gave some basic information about demos and the demo scene. I refined this handout for the next outreach event I did for a programming class. It was further refined into a three-panel foldout style pamphlet to contain information about the demo scene as well as our upcoming event. I would recommend having a "What is the demo scene?" style pamphlet ready for use in all events. I'm preparing one right now and will make this available for all to use and re-use when its finished. A generic pamphlet gets the preliminaries out of the way for complete newbies and can be reused year-in and year-out. You can make minor updates and clarifications based on how well it works for your local audience. Supplement the basic demo scene pamphlet with a pamphlet or flyer on your event. You don't have to go into tons of detail if you want to do a flyer-style promotion, just make sure you include a one line summary of your event ("Chicago's First Demo Party!"), and contact information for your event: phone number, email address and URL. Make a flyer or pamphlet for each event that you do, big or small. It may just announce a talk on the demo scene given at a particular place and time, or it may be the time and place of your party. We are preparing a pamphlet for First Night 2004, which we expect to be our next event. -=- Finding a Space -=- Finding a space for your event is your primary item of concern once you've gotten certain that you want to hold a demo party. This was the stickiest issue for Pilgrimage because spaces would appear and disappear and we were getting closer to the party date and we needed to address this first. Start at least one year in advance of your party date to start scouting out a party space. There are several areas of concern when scouting a space: availability, logistical, and legal. You want to make certain that the space will be available when your event is taking place. This seems pretty straightforward, but once you start talking to potential space you find out they have constraints on operating hours, may be available only on a first-come first serve basis, and so-on. I would recommend having at least one backup space in case your first choice falls apart. Having two backup spaces would be preferable. The logistical aspects of a space cover the mundane aspects of what a demo party requires: control of the lighting, adequate power for the number of computers and additional equipment you expect, adequate HVAC (cooling/heating) for the time of year and number of people, and so-on. You'll have to figure in the amount of time it will take you to setup any infrastructure you may need on top of renting the space itself: tables, chairs, power supply, network cabling, projection screens, etc. The legal aspects mostly have to deal with fire, safety and health regulations. If you plan a multi-day event, you may wish to consider using a local hotel as the venue, with rented rooms for sleeping. Make sure that your event has a comfortable environment! I'm talking creature comforts here -- ensure that there is adequate cooling in the summer and adequate heating in the winter. Make sure that you have good, clean toilet facilities at your event. People will go home remembering how hot/cold they were at your event as their first memory if you don't take care of this. Make sure that there are enough chairs for people to sit down if they want. I would recommend having chairs for a event where you will be showing demos. Even if it were just showing demos on the street, I would have four chairs in front of the screen. -=- Start Up Tasks -=- Many of these things are tasks that you only have to do once when you are starting up your event for the first time. Once you have a nonprofit corporation and your tax status settled, they pretty much take care of themselves from that point on. The same goes for getting a web space setup, although the web content updating is a job that is ongoing in nature. Writing your compo rules is another area where the difficulty is getting the first set written. We used a combination of specific recommendations and rules from other parties to create the rules for Pilgrimage. Next year, it will only require minor changes before we are ready to announce the rules. -=- Last Minute Party Tasks -=- As we got closer to the date of Pilgrimage, I had a list of outreach activities designed to give a local last-minute pump to the attendance. I wanted to draw some of the club crowd over with our free concert promotion and also hit the clubs with small flyers to generate some interest in our web site and to encourage the participation of more first timers to the demo scene. I had also planned to practice creating video postcards so that I was familiar with the software before the party date. At the same time, I was unemployed and looking for work. About three weeks before the party date, I interviewed for a job. They made me an offer and I took it, starting the following Tuesday. Oops. Now I had some major competition for my time working 40 hour weeks again and still trying to do all my demo party tasks. Fortunately for my wallet, but unfortunately for Pilgrimage, I placed work a higher priority than Pilgrimage promotional tasks, so not much was done in the last few weeks before the party date. I did take off the Friday before Pilgrimage from work so that I could finish off the last tasks that must be done before the party could start. I had three people to pick up at the airport for Pilgrimage, two of whom were going to be staying at my house. We got a press release faxed out to a bunch of local news organizations the day before the party. -=- The Day of Pilgrimage -=- We officially let people start coming in to setup their computers at 8 AM. Since we were the only event going on at the facility, they had setup our tables and chairs weeks in advance. I had to get up at 5:30 am to start getting all my equipment and all the Pilgrimage materials packed into my Ford Explorer. We were ready to leave with a fully loaded truck around 7:30 AM. My truck was loaded to capacity -- if anything else needed to go it would have to be strapped to the luggage rack on top! Once we got down to the party place (just a 10-15 minute drive), we had to unpack everything from my truck, up the elevator, and start setting it up. Volunteers helped move the boxes and equipment up to the party place while I parked my truck. -=- Greets -=- Once back to the party place, it was time to get the Greeting table set up. You want your Greeting table to be the first thing people see when they get to your event. Here you give them a name badge, ask them to sign your contact list and ask them to make a donation. Remember to have something in return for the donation, even if it is just a lollipop! Follow my 10% rule above. That last bit is important, so I'm going to repeat it again: - ASK THEM TO SIGN YOUR CONTACT SHEET - ASK THEM TO MAKE A DONATION I'm sorry for the shouting, but its really important that you do this! Most people will sign up or donate if you ask, but its up to you to do the asking. If you don't ask for donations and participation, you will find it much harder to get your event off the ground and prosper. Your greeting table should also display your literature ("What is the Demo Scene?" plus your event literature) and any giveaways you have from corporate sponsors. We gave out ATI lollipops, keychains and temporary tattoos on the main table and our greeter Fred asked everyone who came if they were a coder and would like a copy of VS.NET. We didn't charge any money for our first Pilgrimage, but if we did, it would be charged at the greet table. -=- Event Setup -=- We had three rooms available for Pilgrimage, so we used 3 easels to display poster board showing the schedule for each room. We didn't have time to get them printed up nicely so we just used magic marker to write them out. It was OK, at least it was something better than nothing. The IT staff at the facility had power and networking already setup in our computer spaces room when we got there, so all we had to do was plug in and go. There was a sticky point with sharing files later, which we resolved by setting up an FTP server on a machine I had brought. There was also a miscommunication about the availability of wireless Internet access -- the marketing guys for the facility told us it was available, but the IT guy said it was only for students at the facility. Oh well, since I didn't have a wireless card, I didn't test this part of their network before hand. If your facility is providing you with any IT services, be sure to test all of the services in advance to find out exactly what is available and working. -=- Keeping the Schedule -=- We had an aggressive schedule of up to three simultaneous speakers in our morning session. I did this because I wanted to get all the "seminar" type stuff out of the way in the morning. I gave myself the first talk time slot in one of the rooms so that I could get it over with right in the beginning. I didn't expect much of an audience at my talk unless there were lots of newbie coders at the event. Most people there seemed proficient in coding, so I only had a couple people just casually talking about Direct3D with me in my talk. Thant's talk came right after mine and his had more of an audience. Dan Wright wanted to shift his talk to the afternoon, which was fine with us since the rooms were not specifically scheduled for the afternoon. Dan's talk was moved to 2 PM. After the talks are done, we dispersed for lunch. I took a group of guys down to the Crown Burger, a local burger chain whose specialty is a cheese burger topped with pastrami -- The Crown Burger. We head back to the party place with full bellies :). Once I get back to the party place, I just hang around solving whatever problems are coming up until Dan's talk starts up. I go in and notice that there is a lot of drunk people at this party :-). -=- Video Postcards -=- The video postcards -- where each scener has an opportunity to make a short video presentation to the scene -- were a novel aspect for our party. I'm not aware of any other party specifically trying to create video greetings of the guests. I hadn't had a chance to setup the machine lent to us by Serious Magic to run their Visual Communicator product. They had shipped us two big boxes and we started unpacking them and setting up the equipment around 3 PM. When we opened the boxes, which I expected to both contain bits of the computer for some reason, one of them contained about 30 copies of Visual Communicator. Bonus! I took the box out to a table near the center of the action and called out to everyone that if they wanted a copy of Visual Communicator, they should come over and get one. I think some people were taking them at first not quite realizing what the software did :-). We then went back to setting up the video camera and machine for making the postcards. We got the machine all setup and did some practice runs and things seemed to be working fine until we realized that there was no audio on the published video file. After a little debugging, we concluded that we needed a microphone on the PC in order to get audio working properly, so I pulled a microphone out of my box of computer equipment and we used that. We would have been set up much faster if I had the chance to use Visual Communicator before the party date, but even with our audio bugs and late setup we got 4 video postcards recorded, which I thought was a good number. I would like to see more people making video postcards at their demo parties. Next year I would like to have someone who is familiar with the software "operating" it for the duration. Then we could have people walk in, get interviewed by the operator who uses their responses to write the script. The person rehearses their script and then the operator helps them add any effects, transitions, video clips, backgrounds, etc., that they want in their postcard. They record it, the operator publishes the video file and the next person is ready to walk in and sit down. For this year, the best we could do was setup the machine and leave people to their own devices :-). Considering the situation, I think we did pretty good with 4 postcards. -=- Compo Server -=- For the compo server, we couldn't seem to mount shares by either NetBUI name or IP address. We never did get to the bottom of that one! Instead, we decided to install an FTP server. I had never installed an FTP server on this machine before, so we needed a Windows 2000 Professional installation CD in order to get the server components installed. Fortunately Adam had an image of one that he could burn to CD-R. So 15 minutes later, we were continuing with the FTP server installation. Once the server was installed, we created a party account on the machine, gave everyone the IP address and party account/password pair. We logged the party user into the desktop so that people could make submissions by floppy or by CD-ROM by dragging files onto a folder on the desktop. In the future we would like to have a better system for submitting results, but it was another one of those things where there just wasn't time beforehand to setup anything sophisticated. We should have tested the network facility for sharing a hard drive between two machines though. That gets back to testing everything your facility says they are going to provide in terms of IT services. Try everything first in a test run for your party to avoid last minute surprises. -=- Gathering Compo Results -=- The music and graphics compo entries were done on time. We let the demo compo deadline slip so that Tfinn could finish curses demo and Hurricane could finish Charged. Unfortunately Charged didn't end up being quite as finished as we would have liked :-(, but the advantage of stating that you can change your rules at any time is so that you can be flexible enough to adapt to the situation. We could have been hard-nosed about the demo compo deadline, but that only would have resulted in two less demos to show during voting. Once we had all the compo entries gathered, we assembled our juries who did the job of qualifying the entries. A qualified entry is one that is judged to have been made in accordance with the compo rules. Judges are also given the flexibility to adapt to the situation. We didn't want to discourage people from participating. I believe we had only a single disqualified entry from all the compos; a graphics entry was disqualified because the final image was missing. -=- Voting -=- Once we had the entries qualified, we assembled everyone into the middle Salon for the voting. Since we are a small party, we just manually displayed each entry on the big screen and sound system, letting people vote for the entries they liked. We had a voting system that gave everyone the ability to specify preferences within each compo and gave heavier weighting to the jury of the compo. The end result is that each production had a number of points assigned to it and the top three point getting entries won our 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prizes. At one point during the music compo, I looked out towards the hallway and saw some people dancing to the entries! We had everyone write out their votes on a sheet of paper. In the future, we will have a printed ballot with the production names already recorded so that people could just cast their ballot without having to write any of the other information down. It could have been better, but at least we had some sort of system, even if it was very low tech. -=- Concert -=- I tried confirming our sound system guy the day before the event, but being a Friday night, I was unable to reach him only his answering machine. During the afternoon of the event I still hadn't heard back any confirmation, so we started working on a backup plan for the concert sound. The facility staff were very helpful in offering to let us use an additional space as large as the one we rented for the concert performance and they were going to provide sound through the overhead speakers. While not great, this was at least something. Another backup plan was for me to go back to my house and get my stereo! However, just as we were putting contingencies in place, our sound man Stephen called and confirmed he would be there to provide a proper sound system for us. Yay! Stephen arrived while we were voting on the music compo entries and started setting up Nullsleep's sound. By the time the voting was over, we had everyone go over to listen to Nullsleep's performance while we tallied the votes. This was a good distraction for everyone, since they all wanted to know the results of the voting. -=- Awarding the Prizes -=- Adam hand tallied the results for each production. We then paired on adding the entries up in sa a spread sheet: I would read out the points for each vote while Adam typed them in. After the totals were counted up for all the productions, we gathered them up along with the prizes and went into the concert room. I got to groove out to a particularly cool part of Nullsleep's performance until I interjected during a song break. We had given out raffle tickets for the remaining ATI material that wasn't awarded during our compos, including a chance to win a Radeon 9800 since we had 5 cards and 3 compos. First we raffled off the last of the remaining ATI promotional material: a bunch of calendars and some battery operated fans. People were wanting to get to the Radeons, but you want to give out the weakest items first. In the first place, people won't stick around for the weaker items if you give out the best items first. In the second place, you want to build from weakest to best items in your prize presentations to end on a high note. After the calendars and fans, I went to the compo winners. I announced in the order of 3rd place, 2nd place and 1st place for each compo. I did the compos in the order of weakest to strongest. Our weakest compo was the graphics compo, followed by the music and demo compos. After giving out the compo prizes, I raffled off the last two Radeon 9800 Pros. -=- Nullsleep Encore -=- Since I had interrupted Nullsleep in between songs, I asked him to keep playing after I awarded all the prizes. Ending on a tune seemed like the better thing to do! Besides, we still had some time left on the room. Nullsleep played for another 15 or 20 minutes. -=- Breakdown and Cleanup -=- We started packing up the equipment around 11:30 PM. After getting it all loaded into my truck and ready to head home, it was around 12:30 AM. The next day, Mac mentioned that its amazing how fast things clean up when you don't allow boozing and eating at the party place! -=- Next Year -=- If you're planning an ongoing event like Pilgrimage, there is always next year. There is always something you could have done better and some things you know you will do better the next year. Mac commented that Pilgrimage had about the same showing in terms of people and entries as BCN'01, a Spanish demo party. I personally felt that it would be a success if we could get at least 50 people to show up throughout the day. Our contact list shows about 65-75 people throughout the day, so I achieved my attendance goal as an organizer. The number and quality of entries in all compos made me proud to have organized Pilgrimage. I was also proud that the graphics and music compos were both won by Utahns. Specific things we would like to do for next year are: - compo submission / voting server. We need to have this worked out in advance next time and we need to provide printed ballots for voting. - grow to a traditional 3-day event - printed party information handouts (schedule, compo rules, etc.) - double our level of local participation - get more high school participation -=- Ongoing Efforts -=- As demo party organizers in the USA we need to work more closely in networking with local rave scenes, local gaming scenes, local music scenes and local graphic artist scenes. Pilgrimage has been building contacts in these areas but we also need to do more. Sceners in the USA need to pool their resources to create a more closely knit Internet portal (web, news, email and beyond) with low barriers for participation. The geographic hugeness of the US needs to be addressed in any Internet portal so that sceners can find others local to their area. SceneSpot could evolve in this direction, but it currently lacks news or email access and has no geographic oriented tools. --Legalize --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- In Tune Assembly and Pilgrimage Winners By: Coplan --=--=------=--=------=--=---- -=- Introduction -=- The weekend of August 9th yielded two demo parties that were vastly different from each other. First was Assembly. Assembly has been around for years, and it can be argued as the most popular demo party still alive today. This year, there were an estimated 4,000 people in attendance. Pilgrimage, on the other hand, made its debut this year in Salt Lake City, USA. It was a much smaller party pulling only around 50 or so people. But whether a party is 50 people or 4,500 people, there are still music competitions to be had, and we still have winners for each. This month, I'm going to review some of the winning tunes for each of the parties. Unlike other times with In Tune, I am not going to break out each song's information separately. Every single song that I review here this month can be found on Scene.org (http://www.scene.org) in the respective party sections. -=- "Acula Class" by !Cube / Armada + SCS*TRC + Skalaria -=- 1st Place at Assembly: Instrumental Music competition The thing I liked about this tune is that you had a mix of modern music technology with a twist of the oldskool demo scene sound. This is a song that you might see on the sound track for some dramatic action movie, maybe even the title track. The quality of the tune can be left to none other than the chord progression and the incredible work with the stringed instruments. !Cube has done a wonderful job with his mixing. Unlike so many other scene tunes out there, the strings don't hold a static volume. The introduction is simple, but very characteristic of a dramatic song such as this. You get a couple riffs from the high strings, and then it fades momentarily before the percussion kicks in. If it were a title track for a movie, this is where the main title would come up. But after a short time with the dramatic percussion and background, you get a more mellow stretch again. Mellow, but not any less dramatic. This song is definitely worth a download. -=- "Mist of Deceit" by Quasian -=- 2nd Place at Assembly: Instrumental Music Competition If this were an oldskool scene competition, this song would've taken the trophy. It has all the ingredients of a good demo scene production, the complicated base lines, the catchy leads, the multiple moods and the high- energy production. But there is no way you could ever get this kind of sound out of the file size limitations of yesterday. I like the way Quasian did the percussion in this song. It really sounds like a real drummer is sitting there in the flesh. The samples are incredible, and the riffs are clean, crisp and refreshing. I want to make a big deal of the percussion because it truly makes the song. Don't get me wrong, it would be an awesome song with a lesser quality percussion track. But if you really want to feel the emotion portrayed by this song, the percussion molds you into Quasian's mind-set. Even at the very mellow parts of the song, you'll hear a couple of taps on the hi hats and the ride cymbals. Very classy, very awesome. In my own experiences, one of the instruments that is hardest to work with in electronic music is the electric over-driven guitar. Quasian does exceptionally well. From the lead to the second string guitar riffs, the sound is almost as if it were a live recording. Writing a guitar song like this requires some understanding of the instrument, and Quasian has definitely demonstrated his wisdom. If I were a judge at Assembly, I might even pick this song as the winner of the competition. I think it's cleaner and shows more skill than "Acula Class". But again, that's just my opinion, and I wasn't a judge there. It would be difficult to choose between the two songs. -=- "Awaken" by _pk_ -=- 3rd Place at Assembly: Instrumental Music Competition If you ever want to please me with a tune, make sure you have a piano and a violin playing off of each other. But I offer one caveat: If you're going to do some sort of dramatic piece with these two instruments, leave the electric guitar out of it. I have only ever heard a couple of songs that managed the combination well. It's difficult, and often not done very well. The best part of this song is the piano riffs at the beginning and the end. It's a very simple riff that lays out the chord progression for the rest of the track. The piano itself sounds almost muffled and has the sound as if it's being played in a glass room. It's a feeling that I really enjoy. I said earlier that my favorite combination of instruments is the piano and violin. I'll give _pk_ credit for the combination. But the violin samples are lacking the quality I would've expected in a competition like this. The background mid-strings are nice. But the lead strings are of poor quality. I'm not even sure if its a Violin or a Viola. To me, it sounds like a violin sample that has been taken out of its range. I'm very disappointed in that fact. In a competition this large, one should pay very close attention to such details. As a musician, you should always be conscious of such things. Now before you think I'm entirely discrediting the song, please realize that I recognize the skill involved in writing a song like this. The reality is that it's a great song. The choice of instrument samples, however, has affected my judgment of the tune. I would like it a great deal better if the samples were better. And that electric guitar riff about two-thirds of the way through could've been done with nice brass instrument or some sort of deep, powerful woodwind. I think the guitar is a bit inappropriate and out of place. Regardless, this is a much better song than average, and I suggest that you download the tune. The technical aspects of the song are very nice and worth a good study. But it won't be on my play list. -=- "Ipanema Sands" by Mr. Moses -=- 1st at Pilgrimage Beating out second place ("Her Lazer Light Eyes" by Nullsleep) by only seven points was this tune by the talented Mr. Moses. I've never heard anything by this individual before today, and I can say I'm quite impressed. This is one of those tunes where you can't quite identify the genre of the song. And like almost every case when I've discovered such a situation, I'm not disappointed at all. There was an old MOD that was popular when I first entered the scene many years ago. The MOD was called "Cheerleader" and it toted a reputation for some incredible percussion and some rather bizarre riffs on instruments not intended for percussion. That old MOD is what this song reminds me of. There is a great base line, and some really fun Calypso sounds carried throughout the song. How often do you hear someone talk about Calypso music in the demo scene? I think the thing that won so many votes on this tune is the fact that is was so much fun to listen to. It's the type of song you want to move to when you hear it. It's fun, and for most people, that is why they like a song. That is why I like it, and that is why many of you will like it. If you want to prove me wrong, download the tune, and make sure you send me a message. But you'll find some appreciation for the tune, regardless of what type of genre you prefer. -=- "Her Lazer Light Eyes" by Nullsleep -=- 2nd at Pilgrimage When I first played this song, I wasn't exactly sure what to think. I felt like I was taken back to the Atari age. But once I was able to identify the tune as a classic chip tune, I found a new appreciation for the song. For those of you who aren't aware, a chip tune is something that uses VERY small audio samples called "chips". The version of this song that I'm listening to is an MP3. So, you can understand why I didn't think of it as a chip tune at first. The file size isn't as small as a chip (chips often full at a size less than 1k, rarely over). Unfortunately, the drawback about listening to an MP3 version of a chip (other than file size) is the fact that I can't see what wonderful effects Nullsleep was able to use, or how many channels the fellow used. But true to form, there is always something going on in a chip tune, and Nullsleep covered his bases. I will admit that it takes a certain type of person to appreciate a chip tune. There are a lot of people that think of them as a dying style. I, on the other hand, have a great deal of appreciation for such things. Knowing what Pilgrimage was, an introduction to many new sceners, this was an appropriate tune, and I'm glad it placed as well as it did. I wish I could say a whole lot about the tune. Unfortunately, I have always found it difficult to describe chip tunes. They are definitely not high quality, but that's not the intent. This tune, just like any good chip tune, is definitely an art form. And it is one that is often overlooked as a good song. This is an awesome example of a great work of art, and I highly recommend it. -=- "Embraced" by ChaoticOne and Troll -=- I have two things to say before I review this. First is the fact that I've known Troll for a long time. And this is the first tune I've heard from him (granted the fact that this was a co-op) in well over three years. He has come a long way, and I'm proud of his advancement in the music world. Second is the fact that according to the Sample Message data, this song was written in a matter of hours. So while I might be a bit critical of this piece, keep this simple fact in mind: Refinement does not come in a matter of minutes. It comes in a matter of days. And days, they did not have. That being said, I tend to put the negative thoughts first. I was not happy with the piano. It was not natural, and the sample was clipped. I would've expected this sort of work from an S3M module, but not with IT. Impulse Tracker supports New Note Actions (NNAs), which should make the sound of a piano sample such as this much cleaner, much more realistic. Any IT artist should know this, and should write with this in mind. NNAs and the instrument setting should be set before anything else. There should still be some cleanup involved...but not nearly this much. Aside from that simple fact, I am quite intrigued by the tune. There are two things that I like most about the song. The percussion and the base lines. The base lines are almost inaudible on my standard PC speakers. But when you turn on the stereo with the sub-woofer, I'm quite happy with the base progression. It's simple, but it does so much to add to the depth of the song. The percussion, on the other hand, does not benefit from the high quality samples that are so often heard in such competitions. But the percussion is tight, and very justified. The percussion is simple, but it's clean, and very precise. Simplicity, in some cases, is a virtue. And the percussion in this song does not detract from the quality of the song. It creates a very warm sound to the song, and that is something that makes this song special. There is a little spot where there is some sort of pan flute. I love pan flute, but I think it should've been used more in this song. Regardless of that fact, it was used in a rather sensual way. When that pan flute struck my ear drums, I felt a sense of resolve. I was both happy and satisfied. A great introduction of an instrument, even as late in the song as this was. This song is definitely worth the download. --Coplan "In Tune" is a regular column dedicated to the review of original and singular works by fellow trackers. It is to be used as a tool to expand your listening and writing horizons, but should not be used as a general rating system. Coplan's opinions are not the opinions of the Static Line Staff. If you have heard a song you would like to recommend (either your own, or another person's), We can be contacted through e-mail using the addresses found in the closing notes. Please do not send files attached to e-mail without first contacting us. Thank you! --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- On The Sideline "My Sweet Atlas" by Kaneel By: Ben --=--=------=--=------=--=---- I found this in The Lineup for March, and at first I did not like the repetitive theme and anxious atmosphere. But over time the song grew on me, because a certain intelligence has been used in the composition, and it succeeds in conveying an idea of boredom and longing. "My Sweet Atlas" starts quietly with slow minor scales and subdued percusion. The introduction sets a bleak backdrop for the wistful motif to come. I like Kaneel's use of the portamento effect throughout the song, it adds an expressiveness to the lead. The retrigger percussive chirps and buzzes are also charming. I thought the arpeggio on the delayed lead in patterns 49 and 50 was interesting, it made for more of a hectic sensation. There isn't much variation from the initial theme, it transitions smoothly from minimalism to a louder and more crowded sound. In my opinion Kaneel makes artful use of the instruments as a whole, and I could imagine lyrics being made for this song. It is a good example of epic ambient music, and Kaneel's other songs are similar in style. Song Information: Title: My Sweet Atlas Author: Kaneel Length: 4:51 Filename: kl_msa.zip File Size: 1120k Source: ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/kaneel/ --Ben Collver --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- The Lineup By: Novus --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Welcome to The Lineup! Every month, I scour through the hundreds of new releases on the scene's major archive sites to find the best new music, saving you the trouble of having to download 20 instant-delete songs to find 1 that's worth keeping. The Lineup is still playing catch-up, so here's the comeback plan: for August's issue, the issue you're reading right now, you'll get the best tracks of June and July, which means we're officially caught up now. Yay! Next month's issue will feature the best tracks of August. As always, you can add YOUR feedback, positive or negative by e-mailing me at vince_young@hotmail.com. In the meantime, you may consider the following 35 tunes to be the best tracks of June and July 2003: -=- THE BEST OF THE BEST: JUNE 2003 -=- "Umber Dawn" - Quasian - progressive rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_umber_dawn.zip -=- THE BEST OF THE BEST: JULY 2003 -=- "Winter Night" - Butch - fantasy ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/butch/b_winter.zip -=- THE REST OF THE BEST -=- "Alone In Infinity" - Butch - fantasy ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/butch/b_alone.zip "Blindmind" - Quasian - demostyle ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_blindmind.zip "Blue Lotus" - Impulse - light rock http://pp.kpnet.fi/mavis/i_blue.it "Da Feelin'" - Josss - funk ftp://ftp.scenesp.org/pub/modulez/josss/Jos-dfln.zip "Damask Rose" - Quasian - progressive rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_damask_rose_16bit.zip "Elusive Images" - Quasian - pop/rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_elusive_images.zip "Feeling My Way" - Quasian - light rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_feeling_my_way.zip "For A Friend" - Xerxes - fantasy ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/xerxes/xm/xr-frnd.zip "Fragging Arena" - Speci - trance http://www.mbnet.fi/~special1/files2001/spc-frag.zip "Frozen" - Dr. Abez - ambient http://www.modplug.com/mods/nrdetail.php3?session=&detailno=10662 "Gamejube" - Sebuko - demostyle http://www.novusmusic.org/songs/gamejube.zip "Homeless" - Gargoyle - funk http://www.tunestore.de/songs/homeless.zip "Horisont" - Xerxes - fantasy ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/xerxes/xm/xr-hsont.zip "Improvise" - Wizard - acid jazz ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/wizard/wiz_imp.zip "Injection" - Mempheria - pop ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/mempheria/mpn-inj.zip "Lost Cause" - Quasian - light rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_lost_cause.zip "Magenta Magnet" - Quasian - funk ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_magenta_magnet.zip "Meaning" - Quasian - pop/rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_meaning.zip "New Life" - Kricke - pop http://www.modarchive.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi/K/ke-life.xm "Night Of The Wolf" - SaxxonPike - trance http://www.modarchive.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi/S/spk-notw.it "OA Theme" - DJ Relax - orchestral http://www.modplug.com/mods/nrdetail.php3?session=&detailno=10676 "Overdose" - Quasian - demostyle ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_overdose.zip "Parasite Blessing" - Quasian - demostyle ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_parasite_blessing.zip "Relix" - Pro-Xex - electronica http://pro-xex.kenamick.com/tracks/relix.zip "Return To Nebula 9" - Gopher - demostyle http://www.planetheck.co.uk/~gophers/Download/gh-rtn9.rar "Second Time" - Quasian - pop/rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_second_time.zip "Shades Of Futility" - Christofori - jazz http://www.christofori.net/music.php?file=fb-sofutile.it "Shadow Dancing" - Speci - trance http://www.mbnet.fi/~special1/files2002/spc-sd.zip "Stream Of Lethe" - Quasian - rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_stream_of_lethe.zip "System 51" - Quasian - rock ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/quasian/quasian_-_system51.zip "Unreal Fantasy" - Prophecy - fantasy http://koti.mbnet.fi/~prophecy/musat/p-unrlf.it "Ventil" - Xerxes - dance ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/xerxes/xm/xr-vent.zip "You Wanna Battle Me?" - Wizard - pop ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/wizard/wiz_ywbm.zip Latez! --Novus --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Screen Lit Vertigo "Legomania", "I Feel Like a Computer", "Schism", and "Ciasson" By: Seven --=--=------=--=------=--=---- -=- "Legomania" by Doomsday -=- (party-version) 1st place at the Assembly 2003 demo compo System requirements: 14 MB HD, OpenGL 3D card, Windows. Test Machine: P4 2.6GHz 512MB DDR, Realtek AC'97, NVidia 488 GO 64MB, WinXP (Did not run on P3 900 640MB, Gamesurround 3, Radeon 8500 LE 64MB, Win98 SE) The credits: Code: MRI, Memon/Moppi (for DemoPajaa) 3D & 2D: Dice, Wode Music: Firestorm The demo: "Legomania" starts with a scene from Boost: the lego man walking on a small planet. After 6 years walking, the planet has visibly eroded, and the lego man is tired of it and jumps away. The flight with the Star Wars X-wing that follows is only one of the scenes that gave this demo it's name, other lego scenes include a medieval ship, a graveyard, a highway and an apartment block. That last scene even has a subtle reference to the Matrix, can you find it? The round lego blocks actually look round, except the tops on the blocks that are hexagons. There's a subtle snow- effect added on top of the 3D scenes, which makes them look less flat. The only bad point to the Lego scenes are the poems that are displayed, they're cheezy and don't make much sense. The lego parts are pieced together with normal 3D and effects, and it's obvious they put some thought in the transitions. The way we go from the ship to the "Doomsday still rules!" coffee cup is surprising, and the puzzle with the flashy 3D blob looks lovely. Some effects are almost hidden, like the texture morphing on the cinema screen and the rubics cube. There are little winks to oldskool effects, such as the golden scroller on top of the chessboard, and some not-so-subtle elite arrogance, such as the coffee cup, or implying that Doomsday lives and the groups they greet are dead. The music really ties everything together. It's like a condensed movie track, quickly changing emotions and styles: electronic, symphonic, ambient,... It adapts to the scenes shown (f.e, trumpets are added in the medieval part), and all changes in scenes are synchronized perfectly to it. Overall: This is IMHO the best demo of 2003 so far. Doomsday show their skills haven't deteriorated since Off. They know how to make a demo that grabs your attention and doesn't let go for the whole 8 minutes. The whole design and story are perfectly executed, it has the right mix between 3D scenes and effects, between fast and slow parts, it even has imperfections that add something (the missing puzzle piece, f.e.) The only bad points are the poems, and the fact it loops automatically (make that an option, boys). If your hardware can run this, you HAVE to check it out. It's a really amazing demo! Now if only Doomsday had listed the minimum requirements in their info file... -=- "I FEEL Like A Computer" by Melon Dezign -=- (party-version) Found at the assembly FTP server, but should be at www.scene.org Disqualified at the Assembly 2003 demo compo (would have been 3th) System requirements: 15.5 MB HD, OpenGL 3D card, Windows. Test Machine: P3 900 640MB, Gamesurround 3, Radeon 8500 LE 64MB, Win98 SE The credits: Code: jumbo Borger, Toyos Graphics: Walt Music: Nico The demo: Melon Dezigns demo is made almost entirely of flat-shaded cubes. A ship in a waving sea, the clouds in the sky, rainbows, cars, a dog, a phone, John Travolta: everything looks as if it escaped from a low-resolution 8-bit game. The best part of the demo is its story, and I don't want to spoil it so you should really watch it for yourself. Suffice to say its as bizarre as you would expect from Melon Dezign, and it includes some references to popular movies and games. There are some rubber vectors and square smoke from the ship, and transitions between different parts are marked with rainbows sweeping over the screen, but for the rest there are little to no effects, it's all pure 3D animation. The models are very simple and the animation of the characters is choppy (think bitmap-animations of early games), but the camera switches, the physics and the flow of the story are good enough to keep your attention. The music switches constantly with each part of the story, with sudden breaks, and sometimes there's no music at all, only sound effects. There's DnB, techno with computer vocals, ancient Gameboy music,... I have no idea which fragment of the music was ripped without permission, or even if this is the same version that played in the compo: it wasn't available during the party, I got it the next day from the assembly server, and it's possible they've already fixed the sound track as they said they would. Overall: I FEEL Like A Computer doesn't have spectacular effects or impressive 3D, its main attractions are the bizarre but funny story, the simple rendering and the smooth flow. Be patient when you load it, because unpacking takes a while on a slow computer and there is no progress bar or any other indication the demo is running. But it'll definitely be worth the wait! -=- "Schism" by Noice -=- (party-version) Found at www.scene.org 1st place at the Remedy 2003 demo compo System requirements: 19 MB HD, OpenGL 1.1 compatible 3D card (DX9 card recommended), Windows. (Did not run on P3 900 640MB, Gamesurround 3, Radeon 8500 LE 64MB, Win98 SE) The credits: Code: Mazy, Gnilk Graphics: Twixy, Flood 3D: Vaniljus Music: Evade, Erik Lyden The demo: Noices latest production weights a whopping 19.6 MB, and they offer no apology: "we dislike file size limitations in demo compos, this is the 21th century". Call me old fashioned, but I still think demos are about breaking limits, and that goes out of the window if you allow file sizes that approach those of their DivX equivalents. But to each his own :-/ Schism is a heavy 3D effects demo, and requires DirectX9 compatible hardware (which has fragment shaders) for optimal viewing pleasure. But even if you don't have a GeForce FX or ATI 9700, you can still enjoy it because the demo sacrifices quality for frame rate. So the demo runs smooth, but some surfaces have textures that aren't as fancy as they should be. Still, on my inadequate GF 488 Go, there are some effects that really impressed me: a very detailed human head with animated hair for example, or the typical valley fly through with atmospheric perspective: the horizon isn't hidden by mist, but instead hills further away look fuzzy because of the air through which we are (supposedly) looking. Some effects in the "done before but still nice" category include the texts breaking in thousands of cubes, and the zooming into a picture where each pixel becomes a new image itself. Both those and the few background images are gray or amber-tinted faces of gorgeous women, I recognize a few old Flood pics in there. Maybe it's just to rake in the votes but who's complaining :) Several 3D objects have a weird organic look, there's something that resembles an alien train following a trail of lights, and a cave that looks like the inside of a sponge with blue ribbons flying through it. The white greetings on top of the 3 linked virus-like objects are difficult to read, a font with more contrast would have been better. The music is a typical good old demo tune, starting slowly and a bit ambient with sweeping leads and little percussion but it quickly transforms into a more electronic tune with a drum track that make you tap the rhythm with your feet. Overall: I don't really have the hardware to judge Schism fairly. The effects are nice, although it's obvious there are textures missing in places. The models are original and very detailed, and the music binds everything together. But there isn't much coherent design, and the demo is quite short for its size (only 3min30). OTOH, I guess that if you have the 3D card to run this baby in it's full glory, you'll have the Internet connection to match. For the people with GeForce 2's and dialup connections, I suggest you wait getting this one until your next upgrade. -=- "Caisson" by TBC -=- (debugged party-version) Found at www.scene.org 1st place at the SceneEvent 2003 demo compo System requirements: 8.8 MB HD, 800Mhz CPU, 256 MB RAM, GeForce2 Test Machine: P4 2.6GHz 512MB DDR, Realtek AC'97, NVidia 488 GO 64MB, WinXP (crashed after 3th effect on a P3 900 640MB, Gamesurround 3, Radeon 8500 LE 64MB, Win98 SE) The credits: Code: Mentor Visuals: Cheezy Music: Puryx/Scarab The demo: "Caisson" is also a 3D effect demo, no story, no theme, and only a few elaborate 3D objects. Some of the effects I like best are amazingly simple, but they are effective due to the close syncing with the music: the blue particles with gravity at the start for example, lighting up to the beat, or the six glass plates in a circle that are each linked to a different note. It has also a few over-used effects (how much more variants on swirling octopi or TVs-on-a-stake do we need? None for the next few years I say), but others look simply beautiful, like the swarm of blue threads with flares at the top. In fact, it annoys me that TBC tries to hide them behind layers of snow, or overlays of black smudges. Aren't we supposed to admire them? There's no 2D artwork, but all kinds of 3D ones. It looks like TBC tried to cover every style under the sun, from half-smooth half-polygonal morphing blobs to a human torso suspended by wires, and from a metallic ring with hundreds of white words floating around it (a la Farbrausch) to a very realistic prison block (someone in TBC must have seen one from the inside recently :) ). There's no theme or link between scenes, each stands on its own. The best part of the demo IMHO is the music: it has a simple but infectious happy lead melody that is repeated over and over again, accompanied by heavy drums and little beeps. All effects are synced to it, and unfortunately each and every camera change as well. This is a bit overdone IMO. There's a break in the middle, and the torso-part which is shown at that time is stretched too long match the break. More variation please! Overall: One of the meanings of caisson is "a chest to hold ammunition". It looks like TBC threw all their ammo in one program, added some funky music, shaked the whole and released the explosive result at SceneEvent. It looks good and it sounds great, even though the mood swings around between happy (the music, the effects) and dark (the 3D parts, the overlays). Recommended for everyone, although I hope the final fixes the crash on my main machine. --Seven --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- New Perspective For A Tiny Scene What American Demosceners Can Learn From LAN Parties By: Phoenix --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Just recently, a small gathering called Pilgrimage took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, attracting somewhere around 50 people. Their common interest: Underground PC creativity, in the form of demos, music tracking, and pixel painting. Seminars were held and there were three competitions for prizes. This event was highly unusual. Those of you reading this may be puzzled why. What made it unusual was that it was held in the United States. In fact, it was the first "demo party" in the states in four years. The last one also attracted just around 50 people. European demosceners have always been puzzled by this phenomenon - how can a country chock full of creative computer users find opportunities to gather so scarce? I am not going to try to explain that in this article. I'm often asked that question when I'm at parties in Europe, and try as I may, I can never come up with definitive answers. You may have your own, and they may be right or wrong. But naturally, actions speak louder than excuses. What I will write about is something that has caught my interest. I often check up on Tom's Hardware, a well-known computer news/review website. Lately, they've published many gaming articles to appeal to the massive computer gaming community. They include reports from LAN parties, which are like demoparties without the demos, basically - just a bunch of PCs, a LAN, and plenty of frag-hungry gamers. What interested me was that most of these party reviews were in the United States. I couldn't help but read deeper into how these LAN parties happened. At this point, you may be thinking that good ol' demo-boy Phoenix has finally lost it, and turned to the "dark side" of computing - a drooling, joystick/mouse wiggling zombie That couldn't be further from the truth. I am merely curious as to how LAN parties tick, and more importantly, WHY they can be so seemingly easy to organize in the US while demoparties are not. Let's look at a few that happened recently. Lanaholics - Dekalb, IL - early August? - www.lanaholics.com Reviewed at http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20030809 This party was held in a convention/sports arena at Northern Illinois University. The venue is new and the entrance view almost reminds me of the Hartwall Arena for Assembly (though this place was certainly smaller). There were a large number of PC component sponsors. There weren't so many attenders, but they plan a larger event next March. PCA LAN - Zion, IL - July 18-20 - www.pcalan.com Reviewed at http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20030727 This party was held in a more remote location. In fact, it was inside a barn! But there was room for at least a couple hundred people. I couldn't help but think of Breakpoint when looked through the pictures and descriptions. It seemed just as casual an atmosphere. Million Man LAN - Louisville, KY - June 26-29 - www.millionmanlan.com Reviewed at http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20030628 The name for this LAN party is no doubt a bit ambitious... in reality, only about 1000 people attended. For America, that seems really good, but bear in mind that Assembly, The Party, and The Gathering all attract at least 4000 gamers each. MML had a dream team of sponsors, including Cisco, AMD, ATi, and NVidia. That should give some hope to would-be American demo party organizers. These guys have no less than 20 parties under their belt. Winter Fragnation - Buffalo, NY - January - www.fragnation.com Reviewed at http://www.tomshardware.com/game/20030111 Trust me, winters in Buffalo are about on par with Scandinavian nations - so events like this are no doubt welcomed. This one had a bit of a military theme - which I suppose is just fine for people who like to blow stuff up. Accomodations were provided by the Armed Forces Reserve Unit - again, Breakpoint anyone? You may notice that I said nothing about gaming activities, because like I said, I couldn't care less about gaming. But I've certainly come to some conclusions: 1. Demoscener culture and gamer culture have a lot more in common than you would imagine. Sure, they do different things with their PCs, but the parties they do them at are run basically the same way. Surely, the above is proof that demo culture in the US may not be shunned as much as you'd think. 2. The notion that multi-day events of this caliber are impossible in the US is a bunch of bull. There's no doubt that fire and building codes are stricter over here, but LAN party organizers seem to go the extra mile to ensure their attenders have a place to crash. 3. You'd think that tech-savvy towns like San Francisco, Portland, Austin, and Seattle would have all the parties. Well, it looks like just the opposite is true, and that in fact the midwest is the hot spot. This shows that parties aren't dependent on location - but certainly being centralized is a plus. 4. Sponsors are no doubt attracted more by consumers than by producers. They see LAN parties as a haven for kids demanding the latest hardware, even if it means several upgrades a year. Demosceners are a bit more frugal with their machines, but a bit wiser in how to use them. The message American demo party organizers should convey to sponsors is that these are great people to hire and to demonstrate the power of their equipment. So, in summary, you can still hate gamers, but I hope that reading about the above parties inspire some potential American demo party organizers. "Outreach" events held by DOG and the Pilgrimage organizers have done a great job of presenting the world of demos to others. But at the same time, remember that it's all about having a great time! And surely, we Americans can figure out how do THAT, can't we? --Phoenix --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Coplan's Eyes A Snob of What? By: Coplan --=--=------=--=------=--=---- There was a time when I would've never given any thought to the fact that I was anti-anything-that-wasn't-IBM-Clone (They call it PC now, which is silly). Yes, that was a time when BBS was king, and I was a guy who logged on twice a day and added at least ten posts per visit. That was a day when I was king. MS-DOS was the OS of choice, and Windows had yet to reach the horizon.. A song any larger than 100k was considered large, and anything faster than 2,400 BPS was fast. Broadband was the brand new 28.8k BPS modems. Up until that point, we waited all day to download the latest tunes from Skaven and Purple Motion. Apple was something you played "Oregon Trail" on at school, and even then, you thought it was a simple game. Segregation was rampant then. I had a friend whose father worked in Mainframe. He was learning about Unix, and I couldn't give it two thoughts. I had another friend who was raving about this new computer that Apple was bringing out called the Macintosh. The only thing I thought was cool about the mighty Macintosh was the commercial on TV. I can remember it now: Some guy (maybe it was a woman) was running with a hammer. There were lines of people acting like androids. Perhaps they were androids. But they were obviously not thinking on their own. They were all piling into an auditorium, and this runner (with the hammer) was running down the central aisle. Then the runner started swinging that hammer much like the hammer throw in the olympics. There was a speaker on stage shouting orders. It was either a scene from Orsen Well's "1984" or something from the Third Reich. But everyone was listening to him. And behind him was a large screen with him and a whole bunch of other gibberish. But this hammer thrower, formerly the runner, was spinning this damn hammer...and then let go. The hammer crashed into the screen. Back then, I was a PC snob. I wouldn't admit it, but it was a good commercial. It was classy. But it didn't give me the information I needed. Would I be able to do what I wanted to do with this new computer that was coming out? I didn't care. I had my good old 8088, which even at that time was kinda old, and I was happy. I had my modem, I had my piles of floppys. I even had an add-on 5MB hard drive, and a dot matrix printer that had a "Near Letter Quality" setting. I was living the high life. When it came to music, I was already on a 486dx-33mhz. Yes, that's a 33mhz to you young-uns. That was all that I needed to run Scream Tracker. Well, that and my good old SB-16. The 16 meant that I could track a total of 16 channels, not 16-bit. That came later. But that was what I needed to make music. Unix, on the other hand, was still very business...very NASA. Macintosh toted it's cute little mouse and silly sounds. That GUI got in the way of any real music genious. A true artist didn't need a GUI. A true artist worked with what he had. If his vision or his tune was clear in his head, he needed nothing else. Right? How naive I was. That was a long time ago. I wasn't releasing music for the 'scene yet. I hadn't even really gotten on the Internet. Hell, the 'net wasn't even available to most people yet. When I entered the scene, it was Amiga or PC, and that was about it. Things came down to Gravis Ultrasound or Sound Blaster. None of which even worked on a MAC. Unix didn't support either, that wasn't their focus. And Linux hadn't yet been officially born outside the mind of Linus himself. No one ever thought that any of these alternative operating systems would ever catch on. Well, we all thought OS2-warp would've caught on. But it didn't stand the test of time. And now we sit in 2003. Mac OSX is almost as popular as Linux, which is catching up to Windows more and more each day. I've seen demos for almost any operating system you could think of. Some of the best musicians use Mac, and you wouldn't know with an MP3. And some of the best artists use Linux with Gimp, and you wouldn't know with a JPG. And just a few weeks ago, I grabbed myself an iPod (an apple product) with some skepticism. Yes, some of my PC snobbery still holds out. But anymore, it has to do with the price. It's true that I'm not a huge fan of the interface, but there are things that one can do about that. My friend Ranger Rick, and avid supporter of both SceneSpot and Static Line (The hardware behind all this is his), is working on the Fink Project to bring KDE (familiar to you Linux guys) to OSX. Throw a Unix core under OSX, and you're bound to make someone happy. I see Microsoft losing ground in the OS war every day. And I see PC and MAC hardware blending more every day. Just look at the 'scene. I can think of three guys who use MAC exclusively for their music. I can think of five that use it for their art. I can think of many more who use Linux exclusively, even for their demo coding. And if you threw it all up on the big screen with the computer hidden from a watchful eye... you wouldn't know the difference. So a guy comes to my forums today and asks about Mac as a usable medium for the demo scene. I had to be honest with the guy, it's very usable. But it'll be a bumpy road, 'cause there are still many PC snobs out there. Then I scratch my head and wonder two things. First: I question whether or not I've been reformed. I still use PC, and I still prefer it (That includes my Linux machine, which runs on the same hardware). But I'm much more accepting of MAC. I guess I'm not so much of a snob anymore. And Second: What do the snobs know that I don't know? Is it really a war worth fighting? The end product is just as enjoyable. So what does it really matter? That's what I thought. --Coplan --=--=-- --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Link List --=--=------=--=------=--=---- Portals: SceneSpot (Home of Static Line).......http://www.scenespot.org CFXweb.......................................http://cfxweb.net Czech Scene................................http://www.scene.cz Danish Scene..............................http://demo-scene.dk Demoscene.org.........................http://www.demoscene.org Demo.org...................................http://www.demo.org Diskmag.de...................................http://diskmag.de Greek Scene............................http://www.demoscene.gr Hungarian Scene........................http://www.demoscene.hu Italian Scene...........................http://run.to/la_scena ModPlug Central Resources..........http://www.castlex.com/mods Noerror.................................http://www.noerror.org Norwegian Scene........................http://www.demoscene.no Orange Juice.............................http://www.ojuice.net Planet Zeus..........................http://www.planetzeus.net Polish Scene...........................http://www.demoscena.pl Pouet.net.................................http://www.pouet.net Russian Scene..........................http://www.demoscene.ru Scene.org.................................http://www.scene.org Scenergy on-line (8bit)............http://www.scenergy.natm.ru Scenet....................................http://www.scenet.de Spanish Scene............................http://www.escena.org Swiss Scene..............................http://www.chscene.ch United Trackers.................http://www.united-trackers.org Archives: Acid2.....................................ftp://acid2.stack.nl Amber.......................................ftp://amber.bti.pl Aminet.....................http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/~aminet/ Cyberbox.....................................ftp://cyberbox.de Hornet (1992-1996)........................ftp://ftp.hornet.org MOD Archive..........................http://www.modarchive.com Scene.org..................................ftp://ftp.scene.org Scene.org Austra........................ftp://ftp.au.scene.org Scene.org Netherlands...................ftp://ftp.nl.scene.org Swiss Scene FTP...........................ftp://ftp.chscene.ch Demo Groups: 3g Design..............................http://3gdesign.cjb.net 3State...................................http://threestate.com 7 Gods.........................................http://7gods.sk Aardbei.....................................http://aardbei.com Acid Rain..............................http://surf.to/acidrain Addict..................................http://addict.scene.pl Agravedict........................http://www.agravedict.art.pl Alien Prophets.....................http://www.alienprophets.dk Anakata..............................http://www.anakata.art.pl ASD....................................http://asd.demoscene.gr Astral..............................http://astral.scene-hu.com Astroidea........................http://astroidea.scene-hu.com BlaBla..............................http://blabla.planet-d.net Blasphemy..............................http://www.blasphemy.dk Bomb..................................http://bomb.planet-d.net Broncs..................................http://broncs.scene.cz Byterapers.....................http://www.byterapers.scene.org Bypass.................................http://bypass.scene.org Calodox.................................http://www.calodox.org Cocoon..............................http://cocoon.planet-d.net Confine.................................http://www.confine.org Damage...................................http://come.to/damage Dc5.........................................http://www.dc5.org Delirium..............................http://delirium.scene.pl Eclipse............................http://www.eclipse-game.com Elitegroup..........................http://elitegroup.demo.org Exceed...........................http://www.inf.bme.hu/~exceed Fairlight.............................http://www.fairlight.com Fobia Design...........................http://www.fd.scene.org Freestyle............................http://www.freestylas.org Fresh! Mindworks...................http://kac.poliod.hu/~fresh Future Crew..........................http://www.futurecrew.org Fuzzion.................................http://www.fuzzion.org GODS...................................http://www.idf.net/gods Halcyon...........................http://www.halcyon.scene.org Haujobb..................................http://www.haujobb.de Hellcore............................http://www.hellcore.art.pl Infuse...................................http://www.infuse.org Inquisition....................http://inquisition.demoscene.hu Kilobite...............................http://kilobite.cjb.net Kolor................................http://www.kaoz.org/kolor Komplex.................................http://www.komplex.org Kooma.....................................http://www.kooma.com Mandula.........................http://www.inf.bme.hu/~mandula Maturefurk...........................http://www.maturefurk.com Monar................ftp://amber.bti.pl/pub/scene/distro/monar MOVSD....................................http://movsd.scene.cz Nextempire...........................http://www.nextempire.com Noice.....................................http://www.noice.org Orange.................................http://orange.scene.org Orion................................http://orion.planet-d.net Outbreak................................http://www.outbreak.nu Popsy Team............................http://popsyteam.rtel.fr Prone................................http://www.prone.ninja.dk Purple....................................http://www.purple.dk Rage........................................http://www.rage.nu Replay.......................http://www.shine.scene.org/replay Retro A.C...........................http://www.retroac.cjb.net Sista Vip..........................http://www.sistavip.exit.de Skytech team............................http://www.skytech.org Skrju.....................................http://www.skrju.org Spinning Kids......................http://www.spinningkids.org Sunflower.......................http://sunflower.opengl.org.pl Talent.............................http://talent.eurochart.org The Black Lotus.............................http://www.tbl.org The Digital Artists Wired Nation.http://digitalartists.cjb.net The Lost Souls...............................http://www.tls.no TPOLM.....................................http://www.tpolm.com Trauma.................................http://sauna.net/trauma T-Rex.....................................http://www.t-rex.org Unik........................................http://www.unik.de Universe..........................http://universe.planet-d.net Vantage..................................http://www.vantage.ch Wipe....................................http://www.wipe-fr.org Music Labels, Music Sites: Aisth.....................................http://www.aisth.com Aural Planet........................http://www.auralplanet.com Azure...................................http://azure-music.com Blacktron Music Production...........http://www.d-zign.com/bmp BrothomStates.............http://www.katastro.fi/brothomstates Chill..........................http://www.chillproductions.com Chippendales......................http://www.sunpoint.net/~cnd Chiptune...............................http://www.chiptune.com Da Jormas................................http://www.jormas.com Fabtrax......http://www.cyberverse.com/~boris/fabtrax/home.htm Fairlight Music.....................http://fairlight.scene.org Five Musicians.........................http://www.fm.scene.org Fusion Music Crew.................http://members.home.nl/cyrex Goodstuff..........................http://artloop.de/goodstuff Hellven.................................http://www.hellven.org Ignorance.............................http://www.ignorance.org Immortal Coil.............................http://www.ic.l7.net Intense...........................http://intense.ignorance.org Jecoute.................................http://jecoute.cjb.net Kosmic Free Music Foundation.............http://www.kosmic.org Lackluster.....................http://www.m3rck.net/lackluster Level-D.................................http://www.level-d.com Mah Music.............................http://come.to/mah.music Maniacs of noise...............http://home.worldonline.nl/~mon MAZ's sound homepage..................http://www.maz-sound.com Med.......................................http://www.med.fr.fm Miasmah.............................http://www.miasmah.cjb.net Milk.......................................http://milk.sgic.fi Mo'playaz..........................http://ssmedion.de/moplayaz Mono211.................................http://www.mono211.com Morbid Minds..............http://www.raveordie.com/morbidminds Moods..............................http://www.moodymusic.de.vu Mstation.....................http://mstation.org/software.html <*> Nectarine Demoscene Radio................http://scenemusic.net Noise................................http://www.noisemusic.org One Touch Records......................http://otr.planet-d.net Park..................................http://park.planet-d.net pHluid..................................http://phluid.acid.org Radical Rhythms.....http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/merrelli/rr RBi Music.............................http://www.rbi-music.com Ruff Engine................http://members.xoom.com/ruff_engine SHR8M......................................http://1st.to/shr8m Sound Devotion................http://sugarbomb.x2o.net/soundev Soundstate.........................http://listen.to/soundstate Sunlikamelo-D.....................http://www.sunlikamelo-d.com Suspect Records........................http://www.tande.com/sr Tequila........................http://www.defacto2.net/tequila Tempo................................http://tempomusic.cjb.net Tetris....................................http://msg.sk/tetris Theralite...........................http://theralite.avalon.hr Tokyo Dawn Records........................http://tokyodawn.org Triad's C64 music archive.............http://www.triad.c64.org UltraBeat.........................http://www.innerverse.com/ub Vibrants................................http://www.vibrants.dk Zen of Tracking.........................http://surf.to/the-imm Programming: 3D engines..........http://cg.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ki/engines.html 3D programming portal.................http://www.3dgamedev.com Documents...............http://www.neutralzone.org/home/faqsys File format collection...................http://www.wotsit.org Game programming portal...............http://www.gamasutra.com LCC (free C compiler).........http://www.remcomp.com/lcc-win32 NASM (free Assembly compiler)......http://www.cryogen.com/nasm Programming portal......................http://www.gamedev.net Programming portal.....................http://www.flipcode.com Programming portal......................http://www.exaflop.org Programming portal............http://www.programmersheaven.com Programming portal.....................http://www.freecode.com PTC video engine.........................http://www.gaffer.org Magazines: Amber...............................http://amber.bti.pl/di_mag Amnesia...............http://amnesia-dist.future.easyspace.com Demojournal....................http://demojournal.planet-d.net Eurochart.............................http://www.eurochart.org Heroin...................................http://www.heroin.net Hugi........................................http://www.hugi.de Music Massage......................http://www.scene.cz/massage Jurassic Pack...........................www.jurassicpack.de.vu Pain..................................http://pain.planet-d.net Scenial...........................http://www.scenial.scene.org Shine...............................http://www.shine.scene.org Static Line................http://www.scenespot.org/staticline Sunray..............................http://sunray.planet-d.net TUHB.......................................http://www.tuhb.org WildMag..................................http://www.wildmag.de Parties: Assembly (Finland).....................http://www.assembly.org Ambience (The Netherlands)..............http://www.ambience.nl Buenzli (Switzerland)......................http://www.buenz.li Dreamhack (Sweden)....................http://www.dreamhack.org Gravity (Poland)............http://www.demoscena.cp.pl/gravity Mekka-Symposium (Germany)...................http://ms.demo.org <*> Pilgrimage (Utah, US)..............http://pilgrimage.scene.org ReAct (Greece).............................http://www.react.gr Takeover (The Netherlands).............,http://www.takeover.nl The Party (Denmark).....................http://www.theparty.dk Others: Demo secret parts....http://www.inf.bme.hu/~mandula/secret.txt Textmode Demo Archive.................http://tmda.planet-d.net Arf!Studios..........................http://www.arfstudios.org #coders..................................http://coderz.cjb.net Csound-tekno e-mail list...................................... ............http://plot.bek.no/mailman/listinfo/csoundtekno Demonews Express.........http://www.teeselink.demon.nl/express Demo fanclub........................http://jerware.org/fanclub Digital Undergrounds.....................http://dug.iscool.net Everything tracking..http://zolaweb.com/Zola/trax/tracking.htm Freax.....................................http://www.freax.hu/ GfxZone............................http://gfxzone.planet-d.net Mod-Radio.....................http://www.back2roots.org/Radio/ PC-demos explained.....http://www.oldskool.org/demos/explained Pixel...................................http://pixel.scene.org #trax e-mail list............................................. .............http://www.scenespot.org/mailman/listinfo/trax Underground Mine.............http://www.spinningkids.org/umine IRC Channels: Graphics.........................................ircnet #pixel Graphics (French)..............................ircnet #pixelfr Music......................................irc.scene.org #trax Music.............................................ircnet #trax Programming.....................................ircnet #coders Programming....................................efnet #flipcode Programming (French)............................ircnet #codefr Programming (German)........................ircnet #coders.ger Programming (Hungarian)......................ircnet #coders.hu Scene.........................................ircnet #thescene Scene (French)..................................ircnet #demofr Scene (Hungarian)............................ircnet #demoscene Zx-spectrum scene..................................ircnet #z80 --=--=-- ----=--=------=--=------=--=------=--=------=--=------=--=------=--=------ -=- Staff -=- Editors: Ciaran / Ciaran Hamilton / staticline@theblob.org Ben / Ben Collver / collver1@comcast.net Staff Writers: Coplan / D. Travis North / coplan@scenespot.org Dilvie / Eric Hamilton / dilvie@dilvie.com Novus / Vince Young / vince_young@hotmail.com Psitron / Tim Soderstrom / tigerhawk@stic.net Setec / Jesper Pederson / jesped@post.tele.dk Seven / Stefaan VanNieuwenhuyze/ seven7@pandora.be Tryhuk / Tryhuk Vojtech / vojtech.tryhuk@worldonline.cz Vill / Brian Frank / darkvill@yahoo.com The Watcher / Paul-Jan Pauptit / sprout@zonnet.nl The current issue of Static Line can always be found on the Web at: http://staticline.scenespot.org/issues/current_issue Static Line Subscription Management: http://www.scenespot.org/mailman/listinfo/static_line If you would like to contribute an article to Static Line, be aware that we will format your article to 76 columns with two columns at the beginning of each line. Please avoid foul language and high ASCII characters. Contributions (Plain Text) should be e-mailed to (static_line-owner@scenespot.org) by the last Friday of each month. New issues are released on a monthly basis. See you next month! -eof---=------=--=------=--=--