The Newscorner
Art packs
Chemical reaction have released several new issues of their "diskmag", an art pack with handpicked ascii, hirez, music and intros, embedded in a diskmag engine. It's worth taking a look at!
Charts
The 16th issue of the re-vived Worldcharts is about to be released. More than 700 people have voted until now!
Planet #4, a Polish-based, international chartsmag, was released 7 months ago; we're still waiting for the fifth issue!
Scene.org is going to honour the best productions from the year 2002. The nominees for Scene.org Awards 2002 have already been released and can be seen at awards.scene.org. Five nominees have been selected for each category: Best demo, intro, effects, graphics, soundtrack, direction, most innovative demo and best new talent. The winners in each category will receive an award statue and a diploma in a big gala held at the Breakpoint demoparty, April 18-21, 2003, in Bingen, Germany.
Competitions
Warp at diskmag.de: "The #demoscene channel on freenode irc is hosting a 4k intro compo with a twist: the 4k size limit is for the SOURCE of your entry. So this is your chance to write the ugliest obfuscated code you ve ever written." Visit 4k.frob.nl for details!
The results and releases of the 4th pseudo-annual Text Mode Demo Competition (TDMC) are available at tAAt.fi/tmdc. For results of Hugi Size Coding Competiton 20 as well as rules for the 21st compo, check the hugi-compo website.
Diskmags
The Atari diskmag Undercover #23 is out. An online edition is located at sirlab.de.
On the Amiga side, there are two new issues of Jurassic Pack (#10 and #11); they're available at the recently opened JP website and are working fine with WinUAE. There's also a totally new diskmag, Saxonia by Powerslave/Void; issue #1 can be downloaded here. Since the articles are stored in plain-text format, you can read them on any platform.
For PC, there are two new issues of Pain magazine, 11/02 and 02/03 - "completely new text render engine and incredibly great art included". Check pain.scene.org
Bad Sector / Nasty Bugs is working on a new PC diskmag called Obscurum; his ideas are outlined at www.obscurum.cjb.net.
Milestones
C64 coders are trying to set new records in intro size. First Jazzman/flugdufel announced the release of the first 256-byte-intro for C64 was released, intros with sizes of 125, 64 and less than 16 bytes followed. Most of them are about fire effects. Jazzman / flugeldufel about his work at Orange Juice: "Physics simulation doesn't take a super computer - take this highly accurate fire simulation. It is carried out and beautifully rendered by a 1 MHz computer. Great effort has been taken to maximize efficiency and minimize memory usage. The whole software package fits in 256 bytes, which means, if the author's not mistaken, a world first on this platform." The intro is available at pouet.net. The same goes for the 64b one - it's here.
Music disks
News from Park Studios: "Chimerical Child brings you his newest and dearest, fresh out of the oven! His debut EP 'Faceless Foreigner' contains 6 tracks with sounds, drums, shapes, and colors you would have never considered possible. Triphop, experimental, call it however you like: this EP will accompany you for a long time! Get it at parkstudios.net" (submitted by Park Studios)
Outreach
The Hungarian, Budapest-based radio station Est FM featured a programme on the demoscene on July 2nd. DFJ / Dinasty and Tomcat / Greenroomappeared in a cultural magazine, talking about the demoscene and broadcasting demo music.
The demoscene also had an appearance at SIGGRAPH 2002 (July 21-26, 2002, San Antonio, Texas). Eight scene demos and intros were shown on the expo floor at the Intel booth: Heaven Seven (Exceed), Pandalization (Frogwize), Energia (Sunflower), Gerbera (Moppi), Boost (Doomsday), Elements (Haujobb), The Product (Farbrausch), Poem to a Horse (Farbrausch). They were with clips from film production studios and games to show off the power of Intel's processors. Intel will do this again at SIGGRAPH 2003.
Japanese TV was covering the demoscene activities at SIGGRAPH 2002. Several demos were presented, and sceners were interviewed for the show Digital Stadium on NHK Japanese public television.
Polygony, the first Utah-based demos group (founded on September 1st, 2002), is making efforts at educating the local creative and programming communities about the demoscene. Among other activities, they've done a short democoding workshop at Birmingham Young University for their ACM Student Chapter, which was quite successful. About 30-35 people attended and learned the basics of how to start coding a graphics demo. For a detailed report, see Polygony's website.
Parties
One of the hottest upcoming events is Breakpoint, a new German party organized by some of the people who were responsible forMekka&Symposium, Evoke, Dialogos and the Underground Conference. It will take place from April 18-24, 2003, in Bingen, Germany. Like at Mekka&Symposium, Steeler will moderate the event, this time with a new co-moderator, XXX/Haujobb. Check out bingen.untergrund.net for more details.
FLaG 2002 was held in Budapest, Hungary, from July 22nd to 24. After the party, the FLaG 2002 website was transformed into a an afterparty site, with results, releases, and lots of photos and reports, in a very original Flash design. It's worth a visit! flag2002.demoscene.hu
Ports
Mrock has ported Bakkslide 7 (64k intro, released as a co-production by hellcore and omnicolor) and Zilog (demo, released by Sunflower) to Win32. These, and other examples of Mrock's skills, are available at www.rociek.com.
Source codes
Great news for starting coders: The source codes of two very popular demos, Square and VIP2, have been released.
Square by Pulse was released at The Party 1997 where it took 5th place. It was originally a DOS-based demo, but Statix ported it to Win32 and released the Win32 sources, available here.
VIP 2 by Popsy Team is probably one of the most lavish party invitations: what was primarily intended to be an advertisment for the Very Important Party 2 in Grenoble, France, placed 1st at TakeOver 2002 and became the long-time leader in international charts. The source code, complete with the Visual Studio .NET workspace, is available here.
Moreover, Just for Fun released the source code of their OpenGL intro "Softworld" (#2 at Synthesis Party 2). It's ready for compilation on Visual Studio 6 SP5 and Visual Studio .NET.
Trackers
A new tracker has been released: Renoise. This is what Celsius wrote at Orange Juice about version 1.0: "Renoise is a brand new highly advanced tracker, based on the Fasttracker 2 GUI, but with MAJOR improvements, bringing it in line with today's professional sound softwares. Renoise is set to become the successor of FT2! Here are some of the Renoise features: DSP, VST, VSTi, Midi and Midisync, Full asio support, Easy to use Fasttracker 2 interface and keyboard shortcuts + tons of new features!" The development is continuing at fast pace, there've been quite a lot of updates meanwhile. You can download the program at www.renoise.com. Also feel free to check out the review in this Hugi issue's music corner!
The project Fast Tracker 3 has been renamed to Sk@ale; a beta version can be found at www.skale.org.
Wanted!
RuSH! changed its status from music group to demoscene group. If you are "quite good" and want to join them, contact Rzs. (submitted by Rzs)
CoolPhaT are still in need of "good to best demo coders (not only cracktro coders). Visit www.coolphat.tk. (submitted by CoaXCable/CP)
Miscellaneous
Madwizards (MAWI), an Amiga group known for its Power PC demos, now goes PC. Among their members and affiliated persons are: Lettique, Jazz (Ex-Haujobb), Spark (Ex-Nah-kolor) and Louie (CNCD, TBL). Read what they're planning at their website. (submitted by Flapjack/MAWI)
Ciccilleju has released a new CD called "Vari pensieri elettronici", featuring electronic experimental music. Price: 5 EUR, including shipping. Ciccilleju makes a special offer for musicians: "If a musician has an own CD, we can do an exchange without paying money." You can listen to all the tracks online with Realplayer and download 4 free MP3 files from the disc here. (submitted by Ciccilleju)
Bacter/Analogik is doing his military service at the Israeli army. We wish him good luck, may he return to the scene soon in a healthy state!
New music by iliks can be found at his music site.
Razta's homepage has opened. "After 9 years it's finally ready." Featuring mostly his music. Flash and a powerful machine are recommended. koti.mbnet.fi/razta2k
If you're interested in the demo group Chaos and a collection of their works, check out chaos89.emuvibes.com. (submitted by Raster/Chaos)
Neonray released a new version of the demo Metropol from Assembly 2002; according to Night, it's been fixed and looks better. (submitted by Night/Neonray)
If you happen to be in possession of some of the works of the Hungarian democrew Ümlaüt, you may be interested in taking part in their hidden-part-searching compos. More info is here.