Assembly Thoughts

aancsiid / demoscene outreach group

This was the tenth assembly party, and it drew over 5,000 people to a large hockey arena in Helsinki, Finland. The floor and stands were covered with computers. Many of the oldskool celebrities showed up, and a select number of people gathered in the lounges overlooking the arena. Saunas are quite popular in Finland, and work well in the party environment I found.

A game technology seminar was organized this year, which I am proud to have hosted on behalf of the Demoscene Outreach Group. The speakers included:

3D game engine technology: Tim Sweeney of Epic Games

3D mobile gaming: Robert J. Mical of Fathammer

3D hardware accelerators: Petri Nordlund of Bitboys

3D stereoglasses & GeForce 3: Richard Huddy of nVIDIA

Programming demos on WinCE: Jari Komppa of Fathammer

(This was funded/organized by Fathammer, Assembly Organizers, and Bitboys.)

R.J. Mical is an interesting name to see here. He was a co founder/engineer of the Amiga computer system, which makes him quite a celebrity here among the fans of the older systems. Speaking of which, the oldskool demos were quite impressive (C-64 and the like).

Among other things, Richard Huddy mentioned that we can expect noise generators in graphics hardware soon. This started an interesting discussion on Perlin vs Pink and Brown noise.

Tim Sweeney's presentation did a good job at wow-ing the crowd. Producing art for the next generation of games will be far more difficult than before. The detail allowed in the scene he showed was fantastic.

The technical sessions packed the room we had, getting around 150 people. The talks were actually quite good, and I expect that we'll see even more next year.

The networking with others has been fruitful. One discussion unveiled the 'umbra' project by Hybrid, which I somehow wasn't made aware of last year. The work on visibility is impressive, including large open models with extended lines of sight &c. If you haven't seen it yet, look into it. If you're already familiar with the algorithms, you'll at least enjoy this nice way to visualize what the algorithm is doing.

Max Payne, a game recently released, was talked about, played, and advertised quite a bit here (with due cause). A behind the scenes look at the rendering and collision systems was interesting, but mostly the gameplay and art is simply excellent. It also makes use of 'bullet time' in game, which is a rather interesting new feature for shooters. Basically the player has a limited amount of 'slow motion time' which they can enter while their character dodges bullets and takes down enemies with the feeling from the Matrix movie.

nVidia also brought in 3D shutter glasses which can be attached to anything gForce2 and higher. An update for the drivers turns any application into stereo --- applications are not aware that they are being viewed in stereo. The projection matrices are simply twiddled with, and assuming the application is using meaningful Z values, it works. We tried daisy chaining two of them together, and playing Max Payne, and it worked quite well. Very impressive. The glasses them selves look to be quite cheap, and easy to manufacture. I'll bring a pair home, but I don't know when we can expect to see them in the stores.

Besides Sweeney, Mical, and myself, a few other North Americans showed up, including Paul Bragiel (one of the few American Sceners), some guy from Alaska, and a journalist.

I'm pleased to have met several members of ByteRapers, one of the oldest groups out there, having started in the early 80's and still releasing products. They also showed a 200 byte demo, showing 2D ripple and bump mapping effects over changing text in real time. (200 BYTES! That's not even enough to perform compression.)

The entire Future Crew group was also reunited, for the first time in a few years. I must thank GORE for being very hospitable to me and making this visit a breeze.

A stunning Amiga demo was released by Maturefurk, called Lapsuus. If it had been on a PC it would have been impressive, on the Amiga ... it's simply impossible. It's just not believable... I believe a mpg encoding of it is released with all the other Assembly products, so anyone can take a look.

Many of the demos used software rendering. One demo used a very clean looking cartoon renderer. The overall quality was pretty good. Lots of components of demos were great. The music and design was lacking a little, however.

I'm proud to have represented ThreeState's 64 KB Intro 'Sonnet'. Four seasons are depicted in stunning natural effects. This demo is free from the traditional unmotivated and isolated graphical effects, instead focusing on the carefully choreographed poetry of landscapes from Spring to Winter. ( http://www.threestate.com/ ) It took first place(!)

The Wild compos were impressive as independent film experiments, rivaling most student work I've ever seen done in the US. The winning one came from the group TAAT and was haliarious! It's stop motion lego characters. The animations were decent too, but not as high quality as I saw at Takeover in the Netherlands.

There were only 2 console demos, but the Dreamcast one was really great (the other for Play Station, not bad).

The winning 4k was also quite good, however I missed the others. I also missed the flash compo (the seminars were taking place)... but the winning one looked good, however not great.

There was a Winamp plugin competition as well. This is good to see. The organizers set this up in hopes of making the demo scene more accessible to others. There are several people who develop winamp plugins, and this allows them to submit products too. Some interesting stuff, but as always, no plugin really seems to do a good job syncing to the music (not an easy task). So, in comparison to demos they're a little shallow.

The Assembly party is heavily sponsored. I can compare this party only to the Takeover party, which was also possible only due to corporate sponsorship. Advertisements were shown on the big screen often, with ruthless plugs for several games such as Max Payne, Metal Gear Solid 2, &c. Booths were setup through the corridors, and trinkets were handed out as well. This concept is frowned upon by many sceners, and I have spoken to many who felt it was too much at places like Assembly. My opinion is that the Assembly party organizers have accomplished using the sponsors effectively without damaging the party significantly. For several years the 'Oldskool area' has been a haven away from the thousands of gamers. This year the VIP lounge further helped. The spirit of the scene is properly guarded, and I must say that this level of sponsorship seems beneficial.

Overall, this was a really nice party experience. I flew out to Amsterdam, handed off the trophy to Stevie of ThreeState, relaxed a bit, and now it's time to get to LA for the insanity which is the Siggraph Conference.

aancsiid / demoscene outreach group

(First published on the dog mailinglist - re-published in Hugi with the author's kind permission)