Magic:In Focus: Navis of Andromeda Software Development
Interview conducted by Magic of Nah-Kolor
Introduction
Magic:
Hi Navis, I don't think you need any real introduction for this interview. Most sceners, if not all, should have heard about Navis of Andromeda Software Development. However introduce yourself anyway. Also, please point out What you expect from this interview.
Navis:
Indeed, my nickname in the scene is Navis and I am a member of the demogroup with the rather peculiar name Andromeda Software Development or ASD. My role in ASD is to code and occasionally to 3D model. I have been doing this for quite a while now and it is still a challenge and a pleasure to work with my groupmates on our productions. Now, if my memory is serving me right, I think that I have given interviews in the past for this diskmag. (This was an interview in Hugi#31 about Andromeda Software Development itself. -ed) I'm usually asked about the history of ASD or about the production of last megademo or our forthcoming plans. This time I would like to give some insight on the demoscene as I view it, about its people and demos that impressed me or disappointed me most. On side note I can tell you a bit about the exciting changes in my life and that recent trip to Assembly 2007.
Magic:
How do you make a living in real life? What is your occupation? Is it what you 'searched' for doing since you can remember? Is there perhaps a 'dream job' you want to reach out for but most probably never will be doing anyway?
Navis:
It is quite difficult to describe my job but let's say that I am a partner in company providing services and software to the medical market. My role is mainly engineering/programming but also research. We do a bit of graphics (but not much) and image processing, and a lot of work into communications, compression and encryption. This is probably the ideal job for me at the moment, being part of a very small company and having all the responsibilities and rewards that come with it. Another job option is academia, but right now I feel that I have more to offer to the commercial world. I also used to work in the games industry, but got tired of it as I lost interest over the years for many reasons. Nevertheless, I will always remember the years I got involved with computer games with a hint of nostalgia.
Navis and 2007
Magic:
Which sceners do you look up to? Could you also mention, in your opinion, which sceners have made a difference in 2007?
Navis:
I look up to sceners that are mostly in a different field than mine. For example I admire the musical talents of Little Bitchard and Reed (and lots of others), whose tunes I always find entertaining and fitting with the demos the come with. As far as programmers/designers are concerned, there is this certain mr Zden from Satori that I quite admire. He has an uncanny ability to put together productions that look like nothing else in the scene. His sense of timing, balance of colors and gusto in effects is second to none. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to be much around these days.. As far as 2007 is concerned, I welcome back the legends of Andromeda and Cocoon, and looking forward to more surprises from 2008 (Haujobb maybe? or the final hit from Nextempire...).
Magic:
You became a father in 2007. Please introduce 'little Navis' to the demoscene. Perhaps a cliche question but how did it change your personal life and how did it change your demoscene life?
Navis:
Little Navis was born on the same day that Breakpoint 2007 ended. Her name is Stella and she is now a very cute 9 months baby (but then, as a father I would say that... No, actually she really is cute!). Your readers probably will guess how difficult it was to find the time and concentrate in order to write our Assembly 2007 demo 'Lifeforce'; all while helping out with baby-care and house work. Well let's say that when I hear people moaning 'Oh I cannot possibly make this concept into a demo as I really don't have time' knowing that they neither have an everyday job nor have to look after a baby I chuckle. Looking after Stella is naturally a very hard job but also very rewarding: everyday you learn something new as you are watching her grow. On top of that there is the realization of self-fullfillment as a person. In a way, a baby will 'steal' some of your night sleep, a lot of your cash, time and attention. But all that is paid back as you are watching her bonding with you and growing relentlessly. Stella enjoys demos. I constantly feed her with the top of the crop of the old SIDs from C64. Also I can reveal that at the very moment she has watched a new demo that only a handful of people in the world have watched. She seems to like it! On a side note, going back to the day she was born, I can give you a short insight into how it felt. Very strange. Let me explain: On Sunday night we went to the hospital as the labour started. At around 6am I was advised to go home and have some rest. What I did is I went home and waited till the netcafes were open (we had just moved to our new house so I didn't have Internet). At around 8am I turned on to pouet to watch the latest crop of Breakpoint. I saw that there was some noise generated around a very particular demo. "Great, another 828 that will spread a cdc and thumb up madness." And then I watched... I went back to the hospital with a sunken heart. We had a lot to do now to catch up with the big guys, to show at Assembly that we are still in the game. Then Stella was born, but my thought were at Breakpoint. I wrote a cathartic email to the ASD mailing list explaining my feelings and that we had to work really hard to finish project 'lifeforce'. We had to do our best. Eventually, a week after, I came back to my senses and realized that all this peer pressure was getting a bit out of hand. And so 'Debris' was forgotten and I continued my life as a family man. (We did eventually work really hard, but that is a different story).
Magic:
Why did Debris give you a sunken heart when you went back to the hospital? What is your opinion of Debris?
Navis:
'Sunken heart' is probably not the right combination of words to use. I merely fell victim to peer pressure, you know, the concept that you have to keep on doing better and better because your audience expects you to do so. When I saw debris I thought that the bar was set too high now and so we have to work extremely hard to catch up. But all those thoughts I had were temporary. I realized after a couple of days that we have to do what we have to do, give it a shot at Assembly and stop thinking about what the others do. If nothing else, the production of extremely satisfying demos can only do good to the scene as a whole. Well done to everyone involved in its production, you keep the spirit alive.
Magic:
When you look back on 2007 we can imagine that when Stella was born it was the highlight of the year. Please tell us what your other highlights were from a personal and demoscene perspective.
Navis:
On a personal level 2007 was very eventful. I received my PhD, got married, left my job, got a new one, moved into a new house, and had Stella all in a period of less than 2 months! I also did quite a bit of travelling (like that splendid trip I had to Vienna, as a part of an demoscene outreach function), and home in Greece in the summer to introduce Stella to the rest of my family there. On top of everything there was, of course, the long summer during which Lifeforce was produced. It was difficult as hell as I had to juggle so many things, but eventually it was worth it.
Magic:
What is your top 6 of demoscene productions, excluding Debris, released in 2007?
Navis:
That takes a bit of thought. Excluding debris, my other favourite productions are, in random order:
Ultimatum to the world: First days of the last war by mfx. Just a simple scene, but what a scene! It has raw power, a goliath of a tank moving over a desert, with anger and haste. Nothing else. It just works so well with the concept too.
Gamma by outracks: By far the best one from Duckers and his gang, this one packs quite a few technical effects and a killer music as usual.
Realtime demo wannabe by maxon: This is the shortfilm presented at Assembly 2007 that features demo effect made offline. Very original and technically top notch. I hadn't heard of these guys before but they must be very talented and observant. I have also to say that pretty much all the shortfilms of the party were very well made and interesting to watch.
Sumotori dreams by Archee: Painfully funny: two drunken sumo wrestlers solving their differences on an obstacle path. This and porrasturvat are the best scene games of all time.
Route 1066 by UKscene allstars: That came as a surprise if you think that Smash was working on another megademo just a month before this was released. I don't know much about the production (who worked with whom) but this demo has cool design, attention to detail and an entertaining soundtrack.
Some other demos could also make the top list, like Noumenon by Andromeda, Media Error by Fairlight and company, Fairytale by Traction and Brainstorm and sokuseki by xplsv, which must be one of the most underrated productions ever. Finally, another production that really caught my attention is called kxxt by wx. It is not amongst the best demos that I've seen this year but it is the most weird combination of effects and flow. I have never seen anything like that before!
Assembly 2007
Magic:
How did you experience Assembly 2007? Can you write down some of your finest memories?
Navis:
I've been to Assembly four times now and each time it has been magical. 2007 was no exception either, although I had less stress that other times. (The stress would come from waiting for the competition and wondering what sort of productions the other groups would bring). The only thing that spoiled slightly (very slightly) was the move of the oldskool area to the main hall. It made it almost impossible to hold a conversation in there and the distance to the main screen was too much if you wanted to look at all the details. Nevertheless Assembly 2007 was enjoyable and I also got a 3rd place for throwing discs around. What more would you need? Other than that a word of advice to future visitors: be careful with how much you drink on the new Boosembly hills. Going up might be easy, but going down, drunk and in the dark might be suicidal!
Magic:
Many sceners have witnessed the interview on asm tv with you, Smash and Reed of Fairlight. I remember that Smash but certainly Reed were kind of drunk while you really wanted to discuss the topic. Please comment this funny situation. How do you look back on this?
Navis:
I was actually rather numb and toned down from the stress of the situation (waiting for the demo compo), so I now remember everything as if it was in a dream. Smash and Reed were certainly a bit tipsy, but that didn't affect their good judgement on the intros which, let's be honest, were not very memorable (although I do remember something about a lego city or something...). However, for the sake of the good spirit of the demoscene, we had to say something nice. But eventually it all disintegrated into chaos, as you have watched in the video. As for the arm-wrestling incident, let me admit that Smash was winning, and only for the assistance of Reed I managed to level things. Maybe Smash must compete in the disc throwing compo next time, he has a promising career in front of him.
LifeForce
Magic:
Could you tell us some nice anecdotes about the making of LifeForce?
Navis:
I have tried hard to forget the long days and nights that I spent working on Lifeforce. As a matter of fact, the whole process was very
tightly scheduled and progress was made with extreme efficiency leaving thus little time for extraordinary events to take place.
What I can tell you, that I haven't mentioned before maybe, is where I got the inspiration for some of the parts of the demo
(although, as I said, I don't feel very confortable talking about past productions). The beginning (the part with the head opening)
was obviously derived from the last scene of iconoclast. At some point I had added the slaves that (in iconoclast) were pulling the statue
but decided against using them again as it was too dark to see them anyway. I got the inspiration for the following scene with the
horizontal pan with the trees moving through the ground from one of my long walks
through the meadows here in Oxford. There is a large field next to where I live that is on a slight slope and walking past it creates the illusion of trees and buildings appearing and growing through the horizon. The rainbow chasing part was there to demonstrate my latest spline building 'engine' which works in a similar fashion to the 'logo' language - move ahead, turn 80 degrees, move some more etc. The same concept is used in other parts of the demo (i.e. greetings). Moving to the part with the submerged tree into the red-orange liquid: this is easy. Anyone who has seen the Carlsberg commercial can instantly recognize the inspiration! The scenes that follow (man climbing, heart, hand with watch) are placed to showcase ambient occlusion, which I discovered rather recently (better late than never!) and it is a piece of cake with wings3d and blender. The citizens of East Oxford might also recognize the bell tower too, since it was modelled after the local mosque. Moving into the scene with the man in the bath, that was clearly inspired by the bathroom in my own house. As a matter of fact, in the early iterations the floor was polished wood with reflection but it was left out as it was a bit too slow. Finally, the very last underwater scene was copied from the real-life experiences from swimming in Greece. I've been practicing my underwater diving every summer since I can remember myself.
Magic:
I read that you created LifeForce without any demotool? Do you plan to keep creating ASD prods this way? Or are you creating a demotool for yourself now also?
Navis:
That is true, Lifeforce (as documented in the readme.txt) was made with the help of a very small set of routines (shader setup, texture loader, 3DS loader, that sort of things) and then with a lot of hardcoding (there isn't even a wrapper for the simplest graphics pipeline commands like cameras, clearing of buffers, geometry etc., it is all straight opengl commands, the kind of thing you would have, I suppose, in a 4k intro). That is what I do in every demo so far, and planning to do in the future. As such there is no scope for creating a demotool, modeller (thank god for Wings3D, the most amazing freeware program ever) or anything for content creation. Never felt the need, and hopefully never will. And I'll give you a simple reason for that: Making the demotool, a demotool so good that would potentially recreate all ASD demos so far, would be an enormous task - probably far more difficult than hardcoding them in the first place. And tedious too. I really don't want to spend 1-2 years writing tools when I could make 4-5 good demos during the same period. This view is shared by the rest of ASD even though that means that sometimes they are unable to get very involved with the creation/direction of a given demo since there is no 'editor' to use, only my ramblings in the form of obscure code.
In conclusion
Magic:
You have been active on the demoscene for a long time now. From a personal point of view, how do you see the demoscene anno domini 2008?
Navis:
I think 2008 will be very similar to 2007: there will be lots of good quality productions presented at either Breakpoint or Assembly. From the old groups I can forecast a comeback of Cocoon, maybe at Breakpoint. I'm expecting to see what the Black Lotus will do. Will they try Assembly one more time? Another group I would like to see producing and presenting at major party is Orb. They have now the perfect recipe for all those people waiting for a perfectly put together "nostalgic/oldskool" megademo. Other than that, I have nothing else to say. Each year has been very unpredictable to say the least!
Magic:
You have won The Gathering and Assembly but never Breakpoint. What's next for Andromeda Software Development? Would you, for example, try to win Breakpoint in the future?
Navis:
I think our goal is to make 3 demos this year and then I have to take a break for my military service. There is no Assembly this year but we'll all catch up at Breakpoint. To answer your question about winning Breakpoint: probably not. Assembly is a good enough platform to release big productions, and you also get the biggest cup on the circuit for trying your best!
Magic:
We have now reached the last question of this interview. Thank you for participating! Do you have anything to say before we close down?
Navis:
Just one thing, without wanting to sound patronising or anything: make demos only if you enjoy making them and resist peer pressure; and work hard - the only key to success.
Links related to this interview
Official Andromeda Software Development website
Pouet.net LifeForce Link
New Engineering Spin-Out captures Sir William Jones Statue
(from LifeForce, check out the video capture aswell)
LifeForce review
Assembly 2007 party report
Magic & Navis