Review: Hypnose by Twilight

Written by Black

HYPNOSE - The winner of ABORT98

Hello and welcome to the review of the demo HYPNOSE by the Slovenian demogroup TWiLiGHT. This file includes the making, a visual description and the overall rating of the demo. Ok, let's start...

It was summer, hot as it was, and we made it hotter. We organised one of our very "popular" Twilight meetings. It was held in Domzale in Slovenia. When we put our computers in cRaZYp's garage we lifted the temperature up a bit. As soon as we got our network going, we went out for a beer. By the time we had nothing but as the drinks came in, we already had a memory of the last meeting, where we had discussed the idea of radioactive bunnies and atom bombs falling down on them. Since that was obviously a bad idea we just started coding stuff. As Klimax already started at the beginning of the demo which included a playboy babe , we decided to name the demo HypnoBabes (don't laugh...). We finished about 20-30 seconds of the demo on that particular weekend. After some of us had got home and sober, I drew a starting design and wrote a poem for the demo.

By the time that was done, school started, and we choose a new, more appropriate, title for the demo. The demo was now named "HYPNOSE".

During that time I coded a lot of stuff, that was totaly fitting the primary design of the demo. And so a blurry final picture of the demo was made just a month before Abort '98. Since the demo was not, by far, done we had another meeting in Kamnik/Slovenia. Since we had only like 4x4mư of room space with only two tables, only the four most productive members of TWi were present. We made some experimental 3D scenes and of that only one was used in the demo. So, only a week before Abort'98 Klimax was adding the final edge to the demo, and synched it pretty well to the music.

After that came Abort98. The demo won the 1st place.

The demo starts with a nice fade in from black to the first "scene". We had a very fast sin/cos table textured plasma, and some chick blending her ass off. The credits slowly roll by. It then blends to some star-like tunnel that rotates the depth map. That could be done faster. Then a sphere-like raytraced thing was drawn. Bla bla... an Abort production... Glad that it's over.

It goes into a raytraced scene... 3D planes and a 3D tunnel are blending over each other, up to the blend into the Hypnose logo picture. Then the 1st 3D-scene kicks in. The scene should be a lake with some mountains in the background. Due to the mapping everything looks 1m tall. The poetry is nice. Then a blue plasma, with an blend-invert filter and text kicks in. Everything starts to get moody.

Next comes the 2nd 3d scene. A malformed correctly mapped torus is rotating around with the camera slamming up and down, some rocks flying around in the no gravity zone with some omni-lights. Then again the blue plasma thing with text. Following that, a 3D wu-lined tunnel kicks in and rocks ass on the big projector. Some weird particles are doing the text.

Finally the last 3D scene comes. It is extremly slow, only like 5-8 fps on my 200 MHz PC. It is dull, featuring only something that bounced around in the middle. It was meant to be a perspective view on silence and emptiness. Now the greets kick in, featuring all kinds of blend/plasma/raytrace stuff. Quite well inventive. It ends with a nice looking plasma and the name of the demogroup.

The demo is fairly well optimized. It doesn't like emm386 or any other memory manager. It is prefered that you run the demo outside Windows. TWiLiGHT has a future in the demoscene if we keep going on like this.

OK, that (unfortunately) is a wrap!

- Black / TWiLiGHT