home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
-
- Despair
- A New Experience in eye-burning
- by Iguana
-
- DISCLAIMER:
-
- We hope a non-formal legal text will suffice to give you the idea.
-
- We DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EVENTS ARISING FROM THE HANDLING, UNPACKING
- AND/OR EXECUTION OF THIS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING DAMAGES OF ANY KIND
- OR LIABILITIES OR WHATEVER. They key phrase here is ^^^^^^^^^^^.
- THIS SOFTWARE IS (C) COPYRIGHT 1996 by Iguana, AND CAN BE FREELY
- DISTRIBUTED BY ANY MEANS. We won't be able to stop you doing so,
- therefore we don't care.
-
- All trademarks are property of their respective holders, etc, etc.
-
- --- Real info
-
- First of all, a little quote from the Euskal Party Invitation:
-
- "
- The code that makes the invitation is mostly generic, so expect these
- additions for our next productions:
-
- ...
-
- - Some 3d objects which look nice when shaded in truecolor. Hm... maybe
- not, we have a tradition of avoiding vectors where possible, so who
- knows? However, we're running out of 2d ideas.
- "
-
- It seems that we managed to comply with our expectations: Despair does
- not contain any polygon objects. We like 3d-based demos but think that
- they are becoming a factor to stop development of new effects in demos.
- On the other hand, we have ourselves the risk of getting outdated
- by not exploring the possibilities offered by vector-based demos, so
- my guess is that our next production will be heading in that direction.
- We hope we can still get something fun to watch as well as cool in
- terms of vector code. And, of course, with those colors. :)
-
- --- Yeah right, but why?
-
- Again we were faced with the idea of being at the Euskal Party, and not
- working on our computers; and we decided to try something once again.
- We had some previous stuff, and we started putting it together about
- seven hours after arriving at the partyplace. 35 hard hours later we
- had a complete demo ready for the competition, and surprisingly, we
- won. We all think that there were better entries than ours, but well,
- it's people who decides by voting. Respect goes to Exobit, Incognita,
- The Banner, TLOTB/Zoran, Crystal Shade, Requiem, Clone0 and Marathon Man
- for their impressive productions, which have raised the quality of the
- spanish scene to match any international standard. Not only is Iguana
- not alone now in the spanish scene, we certainly aren't the best in our
- country anymore. This fulfills a dream that started more than three
- years ago, a dream in which Spain was not considered a second class
- country when it comes to use and understanding of technology.
-
- This demo has been created on a Pentium 100 class machine with fast
- graphics and GUS soundcard. This is the kind of computer we expect
- it to be run; anything less may force the demo to run slow and jerky.
- Some parts might have been more optimized, but the raytracing and
- the credits part really need this fast machine, so why care about the
- rest? Besides, we like to make things, not to go over and over around
- the same piece of code to tweak its CPU usage. Therefore, we prefer
- to work mostly in C (Watcom C of course) and leave ASM to were it is
- badly needed. This demo has about 10Kb of ASM source, and more than
- 150Kb of C code, to give you an idea. Oh by the way, you will probably
- need 8 megs of memory. We haven't deeply checked this, but as you
- will want to have a Pentium, this should be no problem. We are fairly
- sure that the demo will require you to tweak your system files if you
- want to try with just 4 megs.
-
- Sound is produced by the excellent VTAL Sound System, which supports
- natively the Ultrasound and SoundBlaster ranges of cards. You will
- need a compatible soundcard to enjoy the demo, because there is no
- "no sound" option. Make sure you have your ULTRASND or BLASTER
- environment variables ready for the demo to parse, we don't like
- hardware detection nor boring setup programs.
-
- Some sources from the demo will probably be released some time after
- the demo has been spread. As usual, they will not be directly compilable
- but rather require you to dig into them and understand how they work.
-
- Some facts about Despair:
-
- - The raytracing is real 160x100 motionblurred raytracing. We haven't
- measured the actual number of rays traced each frame, but it may
- be around 2000-6000 rays depending on the actual setup of the
- scene. It has two infinite planes textured with a checkered
- pattern, three solid phong spheres and two negative spheres that
- perform CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry), being able to cut
- pieces of other objects. There's two moving lightsources too.
-
- - The music was composed by Estrayk some time ago on his Amiga. It's
- a 4-channel tune that fits perfectly in this demo style: varied,
- colourful, simply fun. Surprisingly, this tune was going to be
- used in the demo that won the Amiga demo compo: we send eternal
- gratitude to Zaborra for changing the music of their demo, as
- we rely heavily on the music timing and would have been unable
- to change the tune in time for the competition. Zaborra used
- another song by Estrayk and won the Euskal Amiga compo, which tells
- a lot about Estrayk's quality as a demo music composer.
-
- - The endpart is generated in 32-bit truecolor, then drawn to the
- screen in whatever mode the screen can be put on. One layer of
- texture, other layer of RGB plasma, two layers of greetings
- bitmaps and another two layers of text, all rendered with
- variable alpha blending, dithering and antialiasing, make this
- part a real CPU hog. But we think it looks nice. If your video
- card doesn't support 320x200 in hicolor or truecolor modes, we
- recommend that you get UniVESA or Scitech Display Doctor from
- Scitech Software to fully enjoy it.
-
- - You can produce screen captures of the display at any time,
- simply press the PrintScreen key and a numbered PCX picture
- will be saved (or 24-bit TGA for the endpart).
-
- --- Troubleshooting/Compatibility/Bugs issues:
-
- You can override the SoundBlaster card type with the -type command-line
- parameter. The -bpp [8, 15, 16, 32] parameter will select different
- display color depths for showing the greetings screen. Some of these
- modes have antialiasing and dithering code for embellishing the final
- image, and the -bpp 8 mode should be compatible with *any* video card
- (thanks to jmagic for the basic fakecolor technique), but slower than
- the other modes. We are working on better emulation modes, but video
- card manufacturers should realize that their hardware can do much more
- than simple standard resolutions; they ought to enhance their VESA BIOS
- code.
-
- Most of this demo was developed in a DOS box under Windows 95, so there
- should be no problems with that other than faulty drivers. As mentioned
- before, you will probably want to have 8 megs. Absolutely needed is a
- soundcard, and most probably a Pentium machine to enjoy. We recommend
- a disk cache because we load stuff on the fly, and that may cause
- delays in the synch points (hey Trixter! :)).
-
- The images are brightened on the fly, in order for them to look better
- at the party screen. Also, there's no use of VGA ports anywhere other
- than the fakecolor emulation for the endpart. We have tried the demo
- with the miroMedia View videocard, and found that it works perfectly
- except for some details: when the videomode is changed, the computer
- freezes for one or two seconds, including the music playback. Other
- than that, the card sets video modes to PAL or NTSC refresh rates (50
- or 60 HZ), which may cause problems with code that relies on the video
- refresh rate of known modes, like 320x200 Mode13. The demo doesn't have
- any problems with this because it doesn't synchronize to the screen.
-
- We have noticed too some problems under Win95: when the music is playing
- by GUS and we set the 640x480x256 VESA video mode, the whole DOS session
- crashes. This never happened before with the other video cards. Loading
- UniVESA or playing the sound by the SoundBlaster cures the problem. We
- have traced the crash to happen the second time we call the VESA Get
- Bank function, which is really weird. There's no need for the music
- to actually be playing, merely uploading the intruments to the GUS
- memory causes the crash to appear. Under UniVESA that works perfectly.
- However, UniVESA seems to create its own problems, disabling interrupts
- when it gets called (this somehow reminds me of the previously mentioned
- problems when connecting the card to a TV set). This shows extremely well
- in the endpart, where we have to make three calls to the VESA banking
- function to display each frame (we're not using Linear Frame Buffer). None
- of these problems show up under plain DOS. DOS4G/W or PMODE/W don't make a
- difference.
-
- We will try to trace the problems to a higher detail, but for now we're
- blaming a faulty combination of hardware and Win95 system and drivers.
- We want to emphasize the need for groups to test their work and
- make sure of its robustness; especially when you want to compete at
- a demoparty. It's not nice to see your hard work crash and be ridiculed
- in front of hundreds of people. Trying the demo in hard conditions like
- DOS sessions under Win95, OS/2 or NT is a good way to stress the stability
- of the code.
-
- We have also found a strange problem when using GUS music with DOS 7
- (Win95 command prompt) with EMM386: it bombs in the middle of the demo
- saying we need to enlarge the size of the DMA buffer up to D=64. We have,
- and still the problem exists. Doesn't happen with SB, which is weird
- since the GUS code doesn't use DMA, not even for uploading samples to
- the card. Guesses are going in the direction of a conflict of some alien
- kind between the GUS and the miroVideo. Will have to check extensively
- the miro card setup, but I don't see why should it be using IRQ 11 or
- DMA 5 or even port 240h, so the problem, even if spotted, will probably
- be hard to remove. This hopefully doesn't have anything to do with the
- demo code itself, as I never encountered any kind of problems for some
- months now developing under DOS 7/Win95 (well, *mostly* no problems).
-
- The demo works under WinNT 4 b2, but doesn't generate any sound thru a SB
- AWE32. Nothing else seems to work with the SB in DOS under NT, either.
-
- The screen captures for the raytracer don't save the blurred picture, so
- you'll notice a pixel pattern. On the other hand, the greetings part will
- save the image in truecolor even if it renders to the screen in 256-color
- emulation mode. So, if your card doesn't support 320x200x32bit, save some
- captures to get a feeling how it should look. Or buy a better card like
- any with the S3 Trio64V+ which is fast and wonderful.
-
- Every time you start the demo the first capture is numbered 00. I might
- correct this before release, but it's not so straightforward because of
- the different extensions (PCX and TGA).
-
- There is no way to alter the setup the demo will use. Have your BLASTER
- or ULTRASND environment variables correctly set, which is advisable
- anyway.
-
- --- Full Credits:
-
- PMODE/W 1.22 extender by Tran and Daredevil
- VTAL Sound System 1.02b by JCAB
- WCGSL support library by Jare and JCAB
-
- Design and code by Yann, JCAB and Jare
- Music by Estrayk
- Hand-drawn art by Kronos and COI
- Textures by Jare
- Greetings bitmaps by Poppy
-
- Party support by Noisy Man, OLS, Parasite, Catwalk and Raquel.
- Final testing by Nefron. Thanks to Diego and Gonzo for help.
-
- We are active in the internet if you need to find us.
-
- ---
-
- See you all at the Euskal Party 5, which will the biggest party ever in
- southern Europe. We are confident that the party will find its own
- personality in the general scene, and be an attractive offer for any
- scener.
-
- ---
-
- We dedicate this work to the memory of Lluis P. Garcia. May you enjoy
- our work, wherever you are. We will never forget you.
-
- Jare/Iguana, July 30th, 1996, in Madrid, Spain.
-