Savage Issue 2 - Votes needed!

[Teho]

As far as I know the usual way to write your nick and handle if you are not a member of a group on the Scene is to write like: Teho/Indy. Indy stands for independent. I had several contacts years ago who wasn't member of any groups. When they filled out votesheets they always signed with Hypothetical Name/Indy.

Yeah, I've been thinking along the same lines. I mean, it'd be good to show where I belong to, and at the same time it'd promote Classicamiga a little. But as important as it is to promote this site, promotion apart from party-invitations is more or less exactly the opposite of what the demoscene is about. So not going to do that. I'll just leave it blank as using the Indy mark suggests I'm active in the scene in some way, which I never was.

Yeah, AMOS definitely isn't the right tool for democoding! But didn't someone try it once though? I think I heard something about that once.

Would be cool to know Assembler, one of the languages I'd want to look at should I sit down and learn programming one day. But in the PC scene, Assembler isn't much used anymore apart from intros if I understand correctly. Many use simpler languages now, as demos are more about design than coding skills and hardware isn't a limitation anymore. Hell, even demomaking tools such as Werkkzeug is getting more and more commonplace. I never actually saw Werkkzeug, but from what I hear all you need is some skill at design and need to magic some piece of music from someone, and you can make a pretty decent looking production without any coding skill whatsoever.

[Harrison]

The demo scene creation tools such as Werkkzeug are quite hard to use. I tried in the past and they are not user friendly at all. They are designed to be functional, not intuitive.

As for the coding language to use, I don't think that really matters as long as a demo is created at the end of it. Assembler was the original language if choice purely because it was a very low level language that could directly address the hardware without needing to use an OS. But these days C++ has taken over as the main coding language for platform specific coding, and is probably one of the best languages to learn if you want to be able to code anything on any platform. Even Workbench was coded using C.

I also think a demo doesn't even need to be platform specific or programming language specific. Flash for example has a fully featured language built in called Actionscript that could easily be used to code a demo, and the end result would be completely portable and platform independent.

I've always thought about trying to create a demo in Flash but my coding skills only stretch as far as Web and Multimedia Development and not to more hardcore coding required for such a project.

But regardless of the coding language used, and the skill of the coder, if the design isn't good it won't be a good demo. The design needs to have as much time spent on it as any of the coding in my view.

[Puni/Void]

Harrison wrote:

Except that DC works with a guy who is into the Amiga and can code demos, from what he has said.

We need to get the guy on board to write us a cool classicamiga demo. I expect others of us could contribute other things towards such a demo. I could easily design some graphics and visual ideas, and I expect everyone has some ideas for cool effects and things that they would like to see in a demo.

That is true. Would be very interesting if he was interested in coding a small intro or demo for us. If he decided to do that, I guess we all could chip in with some ideas, graphics, music and so on. It would be amazingly cool if Classicamiga released a production. Could perhaps be a good way of getting more people to visit the site and the forums as well? Plenty of groups have released such advert-intros/demos in the past - that is something which could be done now with probably the same effect.

There are a ton of stuff I would like to see in such a demo. Although we are living in an era where 3D is the main thing, I think such a demo could be designed a bit more old-school. There are so much one can with the old 2D routines, like scrollers, plasmas, shadebobs, unlimited bobs, glenz vectors, you name it.

Teho wrote:

Yeah, AMOS definitely isn't the right tool for democoding! But didn't someone try it once though? I think I heard something about that once.

The problem with AMOS is that it is too slow. If you run the routines on 060, you can actually get more accepted speeds, but you are still limited to more simpler effects. I've written a few AMOS intros and such myself, but they pretty much suck. They were made just for fun, not for fame and glory. Anyway, if you would like to see some really cool AMOS demos I would recommend those made by the Swedish crew called Traktor. Have a look at Pouet.net and you will find the prods. Quite cool stuff and very well designed. Amazing what they can manage to do with AMOS.

Would be cool to know Assembler, one of the languages I'd want to look at should I sit down and learn programming one day. But in the PC scene, Assembler isn't much used anymore apart from intros if I understand correctly. Many use simpler languages now, as demos are more about design than coding skills and hardware isn't a limitation anymore. Hell, even demomaking tools such as Werkkzeug is getting more and more commonplace. I never actually saw Werkkzeug, but from what I hear all you need is some skill at design and need to magic some piece of music from someone, and you can make a pretty decent looking production without any coding skill whatsoever.

Yes, knowing Assembler would be interesting. I've tried looking into the language, but couldn't figure it out. I'm not the best with numbers, so it all got confusing very quickly. And I agree with what you write about design. Things have moved on and with the powerful PC's of today, there is not really necessary to use Assembler to make decent 3D engines.

[Harrison]

Although some of the 64K PC stuff really pushes coding for the space they have available. But that is nothing compared to some of the 4K PC releases that are full 3D productions with texture mapping. Those 4K releases always amaze me.

[Puni/Void]

Yeah, there are plenty of neat 4KB intros out there. They are amazing, no doubt about that. Have you seen the ones for the Amiga? The ones from the group Ephidrena is particularly good, as they feature stunning music beside the effects. Really good tunes! I think they also released a 4KB musicdisk.. can you believe that? Some other nice Amiga 4KB intros was made by Push Entertainment (earlier known as Extreme). Many of those are smooth even on standard 1200 if I remember correctly.

[Harrison]

I've not explored 4K Amiga intros really. It would be great if you could do a feature for the main site some time in the future exploring the best ones available.

[Puni/Void]

That's a good idea. I'll see what I can do.

[Demon Cleaner]

Did you use "classicamiga", "classicamiga.com"

I used classicamiga.

My friend is a lazy guy, and I already asked him to do something again, but it seems that I can't get him to do it. I asked him 3 times to join the Classicamiga board, this has been some years ago now, but he still didn't.

I'll post his demo again here now, he is only a coder, no musician or gfx man. Thus this demo is coded by him, but not the music (which btw is awful) and the gfx. His coder name is Zyriax, and the demo is called Fooling Around.

I already posted the demo a year ago, but it seems that nobody watched it, so here's your second chance guys