pc demosceners?

Are there any ppl here who are or were member of a PC demoscene group (preferably a famous one), either recently or in the peak-years in the 90's?

Somehow I haven't been following that whole scene anymore for years. I've always felt that the 3d cards killed the demoscene, and that in recent years the elite stepped away, to make place for n00bs who're merely showing 3d scenes, completely made (including camera movements) in 3d studio orso..

Is it very wrong to still like 'Second Reality' or those Orange intros with their oddness? :P

I claimed to be in loads of groups. I even appeared in credits coz they were confused themselves as to who the hell I was.

Good question there could be a few hanging around here and I have been meaning to ask Mustang, IF its true that "Skaven and Marvel" of FutureCrew or now part of Future Mark or if it was just a Rumor?

Also rumored is that the other members became the Bitboys

Sam

No idea about the PC demoscene, but I see that Jesper Kyd fella did alright for himself ;)

I'm glad too, because he's a really nice guy, and it's nice to see good things happening to good people. In fact, a lot of those guys in the Silents were really nice guys, very generous with their time and talent. My mate wrote to one of the Silents ( can't remember his name at the moment ) to ask about this realtime fractal code he'd written which really impressed my mate. He sent him the entire source code for it.

Skaven and Marvel are Remedy people, although Marvel has been working for EA 2-3 years now. Skaven did some work for early 3DMarks because Futuremark was founded by (and is still partly owned by) Remedy and they loaned few people to us until we hired enough people to do things on our own.

Although most FutureCrew people are still in Remedy some are elsewhere too. "Gore" has for example founded Fathammer and just recently new game company called http://www.recoilgames.com

So pretty busy ppl!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Crew

Oh, and I too had (very) short DemoGroup background although the group wasn't famous or long living... but one of our demos got third place in one scene meeting :)

Hmm to me the good old demos days are really only related to the amiga and there to the demos beyond using techno, videos and flashing pictures and a nice typo. I can't get something out of these kind of demos...

I also wasn't impressed by the pc demos, also not by stuff like second reality as clear limitations were missing. On soundcard A it wasn't a problem to play this many sounds whilst it was on soundcard B and so on...

The only thing i really was impressed in a general way was the time were those bloom shaders started off. I love the look they can produce. Although there are some great pc demos around (i remember some nice Assembly invitations) and of course kkrieger is fantastic i'm an old skool lover... :O)

Oh, wait - I got this all wrong. As soon as I saw demo scene, I thought we were talking Amiga.

Yeh, in fact, I have hardly ever seen or run a PC demo.

Has anyone ever witnessed that 64kb intro "Please the Cookie Thing" by Aardbei? I did the softsynth (in ugly^2 c++, which was actually ported qbasic) and the tune for it, back then.. :-)

Some of these lines in that synth were like:

b=sqrt(sqrt(sqrt(sqrt(sqrt(sqrt(sqrt(sqrt(sqrt(a)))))))))

and then like 8 of 'em :D

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=232

Do you have a mp3 of the tune online?

Oggy! World of Noise

The whole sound is generated: choirs, basses, drums, fx, everything. The whole tune was stored in about 13kb orso..

Okay... :O9 It's a shame that you can'tlisten to ogg on OSX out of the box via Quicktime. Anyway there is Cog.

Cool! I've never thought about how to do a softsynth, i just love them due to concept and filesize. How did you build it? What was your intention the synth should be capable of and how do you did the composing afterwards?

qbasic, then I more or less ported it to c++ (don't ask how, that source truly isn't ANYWHERE NEAR comparible with the actual results :P)

In essence it's 6-op FM, one algorithm, and a filter with resonance. After that, things go through a crappy reverb.

The synth is extraordinary ugly tho, there's only a decay as envelope :-) .. if you want attack, then you don't have decay. Why? Because this 'attack' is actually "reverse decay'ed sample" :P

It includes a 16-step sequencer for note & vol. I had a script per sound, all sounds together were loaded into Impulse Tracker, and that's what I made a tune with. Another coder in the end fused all the scripts and the IT tune into a new format.

btw, I dug-up some olde CD's with more generated songs like these, will make some medley orso later this day.

I used to love Amiga demos, never really saw any on the C64. Got some in the early PC days (Doom/486 time) but hald didn't work or needed this soundcard or that so I got kinda frustrated. Nowadays I wouldn't be amazed by much I saw whereas in the old days some spinning cube in a tunnel that maxed out the CPU power was cool.

@CS_TBL

Thanks for the information...ah if only know i had the time i had back those days...

Do you know of any ressources (tutorials, open source, finished code&app) for implementing a simple soft synth? I have the NordLead3 beside of me but i suspect that this one isn't simple at all! ;O)

And yep upload them! I liked your tune. A bit too much drums and action but there also were great parts in it. I loved Heatbeat, Dr. Awesome, Jesper Kyd,...and i will forever dislike the Maniacs of Noise - bah!

By the way a few weeks ago i was in the mood and had an hour before going to bed and whipped up this (don't complain, nothing special, i just wanted this feeling)...guess who did the amiga song?! ;O) http://spielwiese.marune.de/_uni/_tmp/n2px.html

nah not many tutorials around, that's why this synth is such an incredible hackjob.. really, I had 3 coders around me back then, and all were like: O M F G, OOO MMMM GGG... JEEEZ O M G NO NO NO NO! ^_^

Behold! 20 minutes worth of fully precalced sounds! (23MB)

A number of them were made for screensavers, therefor their sometimes visual potential, and sometimes new-age'ish build-up.

00:00 - Ballet
01:06 - Aruba (don't ask :P)
01:54 - Ballet 2
02:17 - Fly
02:51 - Vector World 2
03:33 - The X-Whales
04:19 - Inverse Cinematics
05:43 - Andes
07:15 - Coral Reef
09:00 - Deep Sea
10:51 - Volcano, as a bonus, this one's complete, a staggering 9+ minutes, while the tune was raw only 21kb orso.. :P Imagine 3 phases of a tropical island: ease (sleeping volcano), tension (will the volcano awake?), terror (yes it will :P).

Back then there were more people doing softsynths, but afaik everyone focused on trance.. e.g. Rebirth clones. My engine could do everything, from panflutes to choirs, from trance lines to cymbals, from diver-breathing to thunderstorms, from chimes to various snares, from various bassdrums to bells.

*downloading* :O)

me too...

You're good! A lot of Jarre, Vangelis, Software inspired...do you know Klaus Schulze and his Live concert in Poland?

My favorites are: Coral Reef, Vector World 2, The X-Whales

If i ever need a sound would you mind if i ask? :O)

Naturally, I have everything from Vangelis here, even most of the rare bootlegs/OST's/cooperations, so yes.. did you even hear the final chord of Mythodea mov.4 in the final chord of Volcano? :P

Schulze, not really. From synth-stuff in the 90's I moved towards collecting OST's (about 500 now ;P).

In case of requests: ask!

Ah this was a pleasure...have to go now...bye

Jarre is a hero of mine, have all his stuff since I was a kid. Vangelis is neat too of course.

Heh, I remember running these demos on me olde 386SX. They were very impressive to me, at the time. Prolly look total crap now, so I don't think I'll revisit them. :)

Not really. Was most into the C64 and AMiGA scene. Hung out with The Silents for a while before they went PC and left for the US.

They still are. Today they go by the name io interactive tho'.

I always felt it was CounterStrike. That's why I stopped going to Scene events. I sucked at CS.

O_O

So, apart from a firecrackerhand full o' people here, demoscene experience is void. Wouldn't a Blitz demo-competition be cool to do here? Just like any party, but then only using Blitz(3d/+/max)..

Hey CS_TBL: I really liked your synth compilation, it was cool. Lots of recogniseable bits.

^_^

If only you knew how ugly the synth is.. ohwell it's an odd instrument I've learnt to play..

Brings back memories of all the amiga demo's that I bought on floppy disks over the years, before the download era. Lots of cool stuff.

I was part of a mostly unheard of small amiga demo group at one point in time when I was about 18, contributed a small paint program tool to the group but that was about all. It was a pretty stupid group really, not to be too mean ;-)

I had a group called R.I.P, made some demos and stuck our demos/logos on a few disk. Nothing big. Mainly I just coded trancy graphics pusling to music demos in assembly.

Someone mentioned Softsynth? *points to sig*

Ok, it's not a proper softsynth and cheats most of it.

I do have some stuff in the code archives that could be used to create a basic true softsynth, needs a couple of envelopes. I got one working a year or so back but lost the source (forgot to back the folder up before formatting!)

Anyway, its not *that* difficult to do a basic synth, doing it properly is another matter ;)

With a simple softsynth you can do simple sounds. Cymbals, flutes, choirs etc. are a tad overkill for just some oscillator(s) and filter(s). The traditional substractive model is what ppl know however, and it's way overrated. As long as people keep making virtual versions of their bedroom analogue synths then all these softsynths will remain to be the same all the way.
All these substractive models are like what EA's "must be FPS" is for games. "Add a large cutoff knob, otherwise it won't sell"

What's the meaning behind Crystal Score?

..ohwell, .maybe shineyness 'n glitter combined with orchestral scores ^_^. But within a the Dutch TBL division (which is now like 'dead') this was dropped within a week, to make place for a smaller new inherited nick.. ^^

Ahh i've overseen the musical meaning of score...my fault.

Hmm, don't you think that CS is still a bit too garrulous?! ;O)

nah, I'm quite used to it these days, I use it on several forums. Actually you spoilt the crypticness of it, which lead to an abbreviation-feast between me and grey alien :P

aaah, #1 in 2000 and #1 in 2001 .. those were the days.. ^_^
Dance For The Sun
Son of Uluru
(I can't believe no-one edited that filename :P)

But uhm, little more ontopic: would ppl be interested in a blitz democompo?

Oims!

Real Reality

Would be helpful if there was a set of art assets to use: demo+coder's art=yuk.

I would prefer a freestyle demo compo were everything (blitz, dark, unity, torque, ...) is allowed. This way you also could watch some alien content. The main problem on my side simply is the missing time... :O/

I remember years ago, my mate had a thing on the amiga called 'Jesus on E', it had a wicked sound track, it went on for an age, the GFX were impressive, and I think it was only on two floppys!

EDIT: Just found it, wahey, downloading now, wonder what the years have done to it (and my age)

http://www.amigaremix.com/remixes/search/46

Oh, and heres the actual demo, though, its a bit of a racket! lol:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3yQyxQ8cBo

This demo, on two 880k floppys... Amazing stuff! lol, the muppets part hehehehe

Dabz