Demoscene News

Edited by Adok


A note: Most scene prods and the best demos are released at parties, but (with a few outstanding exceptions) we don't deal with these here. Check the Party Calendar for big events since Hugi 19.


Latest news

Acumen has just released the final versions of his three tunes from Assembly 2000. Check them out at his homepage.

Assembly 2000 is over, this time leaving back a lot of high quality releases, especially demos. The democompo results contain almost only familiar group names, which has led many people suspect that there's been massive preselection - for example, m0ppi's demo wasn't shown. The winner is Spot! Desktop Adventures by Exceed, a software rendering demo that looks a bit like a Pixar movie. After Heaven 7 this is their second big success at an international demoparty, by which they want to get known outside Hungary. Second came Art by Haujobb, third were last year's winners maturefurk with lapsus. Get all releases & results at scene.org, its Dutch mirror or Quad.

Atari Active is a new Atari-scene website by Simon Osborne just opened a few agos. One of the news there, by the way, is that the diskmags Maggie and UCM are merging. The new mag will be called Alive!.

Comprez is a compo for "audio coders" - people who make music on their PC using self-written programs. Entries must be written in ANSI-C and shorter than 5000 code lines. Output must go to stdout as 16-bit, Intel order, 44.1 kHz waves. Deadline is 01 Oct 2000. More on the web.

Devotion is a new Amiga diskmag, whose first issue was released on July 31. Read the review in this Hugi.

Jecoute jazz musicgroup release 007, chillzone by norfair. We're always on the lookout for good jazz tracking talent, so check out the site for more info if you have some skillz. (Smash)

Lucky & Tigrou Party 4. The demogroup NO! released the first invitro for the party whose main organizer is Yes/Orange Juice. Very oldskool effects code by Seffren, chipmusic by Dallas, gfx by Poi and Splif. Available for Win, DOS and Linux (ported by Jylam). Leech it in the stuff part at the LTP site.

Merregnon, a music CD project based on a fantasy theme featuring lotsa famous musicians such as Purple Motion, Jogeir, Lizardking and Chris Hülsbeck, is taking off. Soon you'll be available to download weekly examples of the soundtrack on their website.

Nextempire released the sourcecode of PacMan 4k. It was shown in the 4k intro compo at Assembly 2k but got only 8th because interactivity was disallowed and so it wasn't obvious that it is a real game. The sourcecode is included in the bonus pack to this Hugi issue.

Orange released a new demo, The nonstop ibiza experience, at Assembly 2k after a long break. The final, bugfixed version is out now.

Pain. Asc/Nowadays decided to leave the Pain team. Unlock/Vantage remains as single maineditor and organizator. But he his in the army. During this time, there won't be any issue of Pain.

pouet.net is starting to "leave its own life", writes Kenet, "with a self-growing database maintained by its visitors". In case you don't know this three-week-young service yet, it's an interactive demo screenshot/review database, http-based of course. You can not only comment on demos but even choose an avatar. "Pouet.net is to Dmoz.org what Demoo is to Yahoo."

Rantmonkey. "Check out Rantmonkey, a new demo-review site that pulls no punches." After this short announcement has been posted to csipd, everybody wonders who this "currently active scener" who heavily criticises some demos released at Assembly at this website anonymously is. In the Orange Juice oneliners some people suspected Psychic Symphony and Otis, but the email address (provided by GMX) rather points to Germany. Happy investigating...

Reboot2k isn't a party, but a compo held on the Internet. Categories are: PC demos (Windows, Linux, DOS), Flash anims, webdesign, multichannel and MP3.

Shine+Fleur. "SHINE+FLEUR=TRUE" was announced at Shine's website some time ago. We're experiencing another merger in the world of diskmags. True #1 (or whatever it will be called) will be released within four weeks, perhaps even this weekend. Baloo is making the interface open source so that "other people than me can fix the bugs, cause I'm quite sure that there will exist some".


What has happened since Hugi 19

100% launched a new homepage where you can get their asciis and mods.

7Zone is a new diskmag in Russian language. Its first issue contains a couple of interesting articles and interviews with people like Action and brothomStates (ex-Dune). There's also a bonus directory with an unusual special feature, namely all votesheets that have been submitted to the mag. Usually diskmag editors keep them secret for privacy reasons.

Apocalypse Design. The first Italian workshop on videogames took place at the University of Crema at June 22-23, 2000. Apocalpyse Design released an invitation intro to it, which paradoxically ends with these three sentences: "Winners do not use drugs / Winners Do not code videogames / Winners Do code demos..."

Astral. If you have any problem with Lettique's demo Time Machine, the winner of Horizon2k, try "TheDemo.exe -setup". This will re-activate the setup screen where you can experiment with the configuration. Actually this is described in the .nfo file, but some "some #$%#^# person" deleted it before uploading the demo to the ftp servers.

Back to the Roots. Bobic wrote a good introductionary article about the demoscene for Krawall Gaming Network. It's also interesting for sceners because it mentions some details about the professional activities of scene legends such as Chaos. The article is in German, though.

Coma2. Watch out for this demoparty - according to Sylphin, it'll be "the first 'serious' demo party (in North America) since crash 97". Will the American scene show more power? Hold on until September 1st.

Calodox. "A demo a day keeps the doctor away." Demoo! is a nice scenewide demo/intro database hosted by Calodox. Good addition to the review site CDE.

Ceibe. The third issue of this Spanish diskmag has been released.

Chrysalis released the sourcecodes of several of their intros.

Cloudcity. One of the last bulletin boards in the scene world is leaving the stage: After seven years, Distance has shut his BBS Cloudcity down for good because of technical reasons.

Condense. Med released seven chiptunes in 45 kbytes. Meanwhile, at No Recess' website you will find static libraries interesting for beginners: a DirectDraw manager (a PTC clone), an OpenGL manager (a GLUT clone), a data compressor, and others things like his Newtek Lightwave 5.x scene replayer. You can download all his productions, including the old ones he did on Amstrad CPC.

Cryptic Design is a new demo group established by a certain Dualtrax. Its members come from Germany and Israel.

Demo Hidden Parts. Revision 19 is out. This document was originally maintained by Phoenix/Hornet, now it's irregularly updated by Rod/Mandula.

Demoscene.ru The Russian demo news/reviews website demoscene.ru can now be viewed in English, too. Besides, it functions as a kind of Orange Juice - Russian Edition: They have permission to translate news from Orange Juice to Russian and publish them.

D.I.S.C. Another attempt to revive the T-rex of diskmags. Zerox writes: "We have the pleasure to inform you that we have begun working on another issue of the legendary diskmag D.I.S.C. Therefore we are in need of support. So please send articles, hot news, cliparts, modules or other support to us. The deadline for the next issue is 30th of August... and yes, year 2000! ;)" D.I.S.C. once was one of the leading diskmags on the Amiga. The last issue was released five years ago. It is planned to publish the new issue both as Amiga executable and HTML for online reading and PC users.

Domainatrix. A new operating system for AMD/Intel x86 PCs is in progress, made by Rohit Dutta, an Indian demofreak. It is made specifically for serving the Web. If you're interested in the current state of development (there's a lot of information available to the public) or even want to join the project, check out the Domainatrix site.

Eichel demo group is still a no-namer in the ass-kicking department. Two members seem to be under the living dead and have therefore been erased from the book of the honorful: cpt. eisenarsch (music) and honk (graphics). Members still striving for activity are: q (design), scientoz (3d) and t.c.p. (code). Thanks to our recruiting facilities new members full of bursting energy have been employed: spoon (graphics) and statler (music). Don't expect any more release promises. We are the non-makers. (t.c.p.)

El Afghano. After a break of 5 months The Afghanistan Posse released a new issue of the diskmag El Afghano, subtitled "temporary permanency". It contains about 15 articles on various subjects like coding, electronic magazines, politics, and it is written in the cynic style that is typical of this magazine. Download it at scene.org.

Ethereal is the new name of the demogroup TDSC, reports FirEdge. There are two new members: Sir-One (code,gfx) and vitafuris (code).

Fool. One year after their demo Changes had won the VIP '99, they released the source code at their website!

Fusecon. Their Demo/Music CD database has been briefly updated: Demobit 00 has a party CD, a C64 game/intro CD called Nexus 6581 is now out, and Neutronic's Re-ID album has recently been released.

Grapevine. Some people wanted to resurrect the UK-based Amiga diskmag Grapevine by LSD (last issue released in 1994) as a web-magazine but the old editors stopped the project. "There is already a much superior 'magazine' to Grapevine for all to see, it's called the World Wide Web!" someone who said to be one of "the original Grapevine guys" explained to me in an email.

HeadcrasH. .d.p.l. - the Demopartylinkpage has been completely updated and moved to a suitable address.

Hellbender Group released their 4th artpack with fourty "compositions", available on the web.

Hornet. After a little facelift, the entrance page to the Hornet Archive says: "Under re-construction". Does this implicate that hornet.org may return to its full functionality, including uploading files? Phoenix told me: "Basically, nothing is ruled impossible at this point, but re-opening the site will take a lot of time and effort. I'll add some more info to the web page as time goes by."

Hugi Core released the articles from Hugi #19 as HTML files and a final version of Hugi #18. This one incorporates the third bugfix that was released a few days after the first version of the mag. The bug was so minimal that I don't even know any more what was actually fixed. That's why I uploaded the bugfix only separately and didn't upload a hugi18c.zip until the very day I was suggested to add more http download mirrors. Besides, the Hugi Size Coding Competiton 11 results (task: the smallest possible maze pathfinder) are out.

Lackluster. Squadron, a compilation CD with tracks from Lackluster & Frank Bolero, md, brothomStates, salice, bauri, proswell, lexaunculpt, komp, novel 23, fizzarum, syndrone, sense, ambidextrous, machine drum has been released, and it is available from multiple places on the Net. m3rck.net for more info. The Lackluster website is now located at the same server.

Last Ninja SID music compo. ReeBoK has forwarded to me an email of Ninja/DRM/TMP/GO64!. He is organizing a SID music compo. The entries have to be related to the legendary C64 games Last Ninja 1-3. "Your contribution can be a cover of just one tune or be a medley, that doesn't matter. But it should be related to the music of Last Ninja 1-3. Of course, you have enough room for own interpretations. A simple 1:1 copy would be boring, wouldn't it? Contributions must be handed in as standard C64-executables and must run on a plain C64 with a 1541-floppy drive. Please specify if an old or a new SID is preferred. You may show graphics or text while your tune is played, but we won't take it into consideration for the judgement. Only unreleased musics are allowed. After the winners have been announced, all contributions will be spread together with the results. Finally, just one tune per composer is accepted. Deadline will be 31.12.2000, 23:59." Until then your contribution should have been mailed to Ninja.

Less Music Productions. Their e-mag has moved to ukscene.org. Another new release is their third musicdisk Hexology. Finally, they now have a WAP site for mobile phone access.

Macintosh Demoscene HQ. Orange Juice recently published the address of a Macintosh demoscene newssite "much like Orange Juice". Certainly interesting for most of us who think there are no demos for Macs.

Marshals. Their website has reportedly been updated, with the main changes being "new slidetro (PC), new members, many new functional links and more terrible English :)".

Monotonik. There are several new releases, such as a scene-based music mix by "Portugese designer and all-round 'nice guy'" Rents, "covering .MOD and .MP3s from the weird but lovely 'demo-scene' that Monotonik+211+friends has grown out of". They also released an interesting EP containing nine remixed tunes from the Super Nintendo games Super Mario World and Super Mario All-Stars. In total they are 24.8 megs, but they can be downloaded separately. Just log on the Net to find out what it's all about...

MS2000 alternative music rip. The winner of the alternative music competition at Mekka & Symposium 2000 was BZZ. The tune he submitted, however, had in fact been written by Carlos/Mandula and had appeared in the demo "dis" first. It seems that the matter has now been resolved. Optimus has forwarded to the newsgroup comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos Tomcat's translation of a Hungarian letter BZZ sent to him. Tomcat had originally posted this translated letter to the Greenroom Forum. In this letter BZZ states that he did not want to enter the tune into the competition. He did not even attend the party, but friends of his (Mr. Pixel and Lord) did. They found the tune on his harddisk and entered it in the competition. They took it for an original tune by BZZ because it happened to be in the directory where he stored his self-made tunes. BZZ yet said that the fault lied with him, because he should not have stored a tune which he did not create in the directory with his own tunes. He apologized and promised to send the prize back to the Mekka & Symposium organizers, then leave the scene.

Nah-kolor. Performer (Polish pc coder) joined Nah-kolor and got 3rd place at Horizon00 with the demo 33. Also Spark joined.

Nextempire registered three domains, with the endings .com, .org and .net. They point to the same page, though. Their radio now broadcasts live.

Orange Juice. The homepage of Orange Juice's netradio Nectarine is up. Check it out if you don't know it yet! The charts section and the domain are also too new to have been mentioned in Hugi 19. Besides, the 2000th scener has recently added himself to the people database.

Orbital Dreams and Savage released the Dark Rituals musicdisk. According to Trace, this music disk features "speed-heavy-metal tracks" and a "cool graphic interface".

Outlaw Triad will no more make demos, they just continue their game project and will release tutorials on creating games. Some of their members are looking for new groups to join.

Pain 05/2000 (2.1 mb) is out! The current issue works on Windows 95, 98 and 2000, their DOS Frontend isn't compatible with this issue. You can also download previous issues and fill the voting form for the next Pain at the official Pain site.

Radwar. MWS announces a new C=64 Tribute Page organized by Radwar, Haujobb, Avancada and The Wanderer Group. They still need people to support the site. The Radwar Party organizers also opened a new site where you'll soon be able to find pictures and reports.

Rift. The first issue of the South African demoscene diskmag is also online now (web version).

Satori (Zden and Loonie) released a new demo for Win32 called Different engine, apparently for pure fun - it didn't compete at any party.

Scene City have announced that their first diskmag will come soon. You can check out a screenshot at their site - somehow looks a bit like the Sega Mega CD player interface.

Scenet. Current version is #33. New interviews & news have been added to scenet.de.

Scene.org. The scene.org site has been redesigned. It looks more colourful and is still well structured. Now you can also search the archive directly here (and don't have to go to the Orange Juice site first). The credits on the site suggest that the scene.org staff are still planning to create a web magazine. In other words: Heavy extensions may be likely to happen in the near future.

Smash Designs. The final version of their demo Sleepless, Mekka & Symposium 2k winner, is now available at their FTP.

Subkult. The 6th issue of this dubious, aggressive fake-magazine by Dr. Spock and Pop has been released. Rumour has it that the staff is involved in a civil lawsuit because of its contents.

Talent released the first issue of The Official Eurochart PC. Read our Official Review in this Hugi issue!

TAP. A small but cool, funny, refreshing diskmag in German language, TAP.MAG #3, and a new domain - that's what's new about TAP.

Tempo. There are new releases by Tempo, especially worth checking out according to Keskitalo is the musicdisk by Mr. Blue (10 mbytes to download though).

The CPC Demoscene. A new homepage about CPC demos. Top demos to download, screenshots of many demos and much more to come. I plan to make it a center for the CPC demoscene. There existed nothing like that before, that's the reason I wanted to do this page, to make the CPC scene more known to other non CPC sceners! (Optimus)

The Greek Demoscene. At the beginning I wanted to put all the Greek productions I had found on this page, so that Greek people could find them easier. There were many demos which are not on Hornet or common ftps but only in the collection of some Greek sceners. There are also other infos about our scene and some screenshots from Greek demos. I have many plans for this page in the future, it will be a page about the demoscene culture in Greece, the history, the groups, other infos, the productions to download, etc. so that means for every machine, from PC, CPC to every other demoscene that existed in Greece! (Optimus)

The Lost Souls. Cyberfish has "just finished a beta/demoversion of our game Snok. It's the result of several years of hobbyprogramming and a schoolproject, ending up with a first person realtime multiplayer 3D-snake game." Civax of CFXweb finds it "COOL" although it's confusing with more than three players.

The new introduction to the demoscene. I tried to make a new page which will introduce the demoscene to newbies. Actually there was a special reason for doing this page. You will find my list of the best demos from the old introduction to the demoscene, updated and with half links from the hornet ftp to download. The nicest are some screenshots not only from PC demos but from some other machines. (Optimus)

The Party complain center. Trifox/Nuance has registered a .de domain for his therapeutic center. Basically this is a web-based forum where you can post your thoughts about last year's edition of The Party in Aars/Denmark, and you can vote for your favourite argument why The Party "sucks". Recently photos that explain Trifox's point of view have been added. I just want to remind in this context that the organizers of The Party are planning to make the event more attractive for the demoscene this year.

TPOLM. The Win32 version of the hugely succesful intro Björ7000 by TPOLM (placed 2nd at The Party 1997) has been released - followed by vegetarian dishes a few weeks later.

Triton. The homepage of the oldskool musician Lizardking was heavily updated. Also, the homepage of his band project together with D-Luxe, Fashion8, is under way.

Underground Conference 4 Gw. Snotrag released a photopack from the open-air scene party.

Vantage just moved onto their own domain.

Visuale. Makke releases his first musicdisk in 1.5 years. It's called evolution. XM and MP3. No interface, though. Makke has also interviewed for Trax o'Wolk.

Winter in July. CoaXCable is proud to announce that he has teamed up with some legendary groups: "TRSI & RED sECTOR and also HOLY EMPIRE :>".


Errata

4t Thieves is not a group of "famous chipmakers" but a single person.

Back to the Roots. Haujobb made a demo for Back to the Roots, but Back to the Roots itself isn't Haujobb's project. The site is mantained by an individual named Bobic.

Ronny/Farbrausch (formerly also known as Herr Weltschaft/Elitegroup) would like to have made clear that Farbrausch and Elitegroup are two different groups. Besides, Elitegroup is dead.


New Utils for Demomakers

3DS Max Export. CodeX announced that he has developed an export plugin for 3D Studio Max 2. It can be downloaded at the Magic Dreams site. "Included is the description of the file format, so that everybody should be able to use the data. It is only an alpha-version and if I get enough feedback I'll continue this project."

Deliplayer is a brand-new state of the art module player made by the creators of the Amiga tracker DeliTracker, writes Yes at Orange Juice. Indeed the feature listing is amazing: TONS of formats I've never heard of (some of which were probably used only by single composers) are supported plus all common ones like .mod, .xm, .it, .s3m, .sid, and so on. Download it!

Effect Explorer. rDev Software describe their new program as follows: "The Effect Explorer is a tool for programmers who want to code optical effects. The usage of Effect Explorer offers you the possibility to test your effects, zoom them and save samples. This makes the Effect Explorer to a useful utility for demo coders and effect designers. You need basic knowledge of C to create your own effects." You can freely download it for non-commercial purposes.

Generic Musicdisk interface. Seffren/NO! has a generic musicdisk interface ("like pr0n") that he will give out on request, if the tunes have the right quality.

OpenIL is, according to Flipcode, "a programming library in C/C++ designed to load, save, convert, manipulate and display a variety of image formats. Current, it saves .h, .jpg, .tga, .raw, .ppm, .pbm and .pgm files. It can also load .bmp, .cut, .jpg, .pal, .col, .pcd, .pcx, .pic, .pbm, .pgm, .png, .ppm, .raw, .sgi, .tga and .tif files." A new version has been released, get it here.

PHP 4, a kind of development system for server-based Internet scripts, has been released. It now supports several new web servers and is supposed to execute scripts faster. Get it!

TinyPTC. More updates on the TinyPTC front: There are now ports for Java, SDL and X11. The Win32 version now supports GDI as well as DirectDraw and is ready to be used as a graphics library for 64k intros. Ports to DOS, Amiga, BeOS and Mac are planned.


Wanted: People and Groups!

Apocalypse Design are searching for good 3dgfx (modellers and animators) and 2dgfx (for pics & textures) artists. If you are interested contact Turbo.

Delirium is looking for new members from all over the world, especially for coders and 2d graphicians! Contact Goro. (Goro)

Digital Nerds. Already quite some time ago, Snotrag posted to Orange Juice: "Digital nerds are looking for a demo musician to join them. Have a look at the site, they did some great java demos..." I hardly believe they haven't found one meanwhile, but why not try it?

Fairlight. The legendary Fairlight is opening a demo section which already holds many skilled members. But there is still a need for 2D/3D graphicians. Email Musik for information! (Musik>

Icarus, the group I founded as a way to introduce newbies to the scene with some skills, is facing problems, with a lack of support from sceners... If you would be interested in helping out Icarus, by being a mentor to a newbie, and helping them with a certain skill (coding, tracking, etc.), please email me. Also, if you are interested in becoming part of the organisation team (at the moment consisting of me...), please write as well... Icarus needs you! (Dante)

Magic Dreams also told us a while ago that they were in need of a good 3d graphician for their next demo. "We offer direct export from 3ds max (no 3ds!) with an own exporter for easy modelling without the usual problems, to make work as easy as possible." Check out their website or contact CodeX to check if the offer is still valid.

Mali, a Dutch 2D graphician, is looking for a beginning and very active group, I prefer Dutch and English groups, but others can contact me too to find out IF I'm interested. I'd generally like to do logos for the group, but I can do other forms of art too (textures, pictures etc.). I've been in several groups, so well, I do have some experience and so on... Interested?? Then contact me via email. (Mali)

Slengpung, great online scene photo archive, "is in need of photographers from around the world to keep the scene gallery as updated as possible", writes Arcane. "We need to get the pictures from parties as soon as possible, and to do this we need your help. If you have a digital camera or a scanner, and you attend a lot of parties in your country and/or abroad, then please send me a mail." Only photographers from Norway and Germany are not needed.

Trinity is in need of more skilled, motivated and friendly coders to assist us. We're aiming big and want to get even more serious while still having fun, of course. You can be a long-time scener and even in another group as well, or totally new to the scene but have the knowledge and enthusiasm. Please contact either Morph or Avalanche if you feel interested so we can discuss it further. Also check out our new homepage. Got first in 64k (probably, no one knows), second in 4ch (Avalanche) and third in mch (Stanley) at Birdie 2k. Avalanche's 3d-anim got second at Takeover. Second in mch (Stanley) and third in pixel (Zthee) at Flag. Will release stuff at Evoke, LTP and Bizarre next. (Morph)

Unique. Chemic says only three words: "2D Graphician wanted!" Contact him if interested.


Many people and a dog