The good old demoscene

The last week I was assigned some homework for a subject called Advanced Rendering.

What I have to do is find a tunnel effect from the demo scene that I like and comment it.

Well, after watching TONS of demos, some of them as old as 1994, which required a bit of black sorcery such as Dosbox or Wine. A lot of great stuff came across, like this state-of-the-art metaballs tunnel featuring equipotential surfaces and advanced lighting.

This is kickass stuff, but since we were asked to avoid repeating the same demo and this is highly findable I wanted to dig (a lot) deeper into the demoscene.

During my journey I watched a lot of impressive old school stuff for that era such as pixel shading in the Amiga or Full Scene Post Processing FX in early 1998.

But none of them were really catching my eye until I found We Cell, by Kewlers (2004). Here’s the video:

The demo itself is brilliant for that era, but let’s go to the tunnel part at 1:03

It might look like some sort of polygonal mesh, but it isn’t. Unlike classic tunnel effects, everything you see is made of 2D sprites.

The walls of the tunnel are basically cleverly positioned sprites. Their brightness and size decreases with their distance to the camera. The lighting here looks static.

There’s also a Depth Of Field effect which plays with a Gaussian Blur depending on the distance of each sprite to the camera. As we ride the tunnel we see little spheres that approach the camera. These are also sprites.

If you download the demo and open de “data” subdirectory there you’ll find all the sprites as JPG files. They’re not dynamically generated.

All trough the tunnel we can see a HUD with some text at the top left corner and some sort of irregular frame wrapping the scene (the HUD can be also seen in the “data” dir). Along with the HUD, a bunch of translucent cells ascending or falling can also be seen in the left half of the screen as well.

Both the HUD, bubbles and camera are sequenced and animated with the music, what gives a live organic and rich environment worth watching.

Even more impressive is the fact that they used NO SHADERS at all! so everything must be software computed. I guess that CPU-intensive effects like the DOF (Depth Of Field) must be written in raw assembler as usual in the demoscene.

I had run the demo a couple of times to see if the tunnel shape is dynamically generated or it’s already precomputed and it looks like it’s dynamic.

There’s another tunnel at 4:25 but it uses the very same tricks and techniques.

Here’s the info about the demo:

Release date: August 2004

Party: Assembly 2004

Platform: Windows

Exe size: 5.5 Mb (download link at scene.org)

I have no info about the graphics API or the Workflow tools used here, but it looks like pure C/ASM + OpenGL.

Now let’s talk about this demo and its creators:

Kewlers was a finnish-based demogroup. Their legacy, their slogan “Kewlers doesn’t suck at all”, and their productions marked an era of newschool productions with oldschool soul.

We cell is a demo presented to the Assembly ’04 that got the fifth position. Kewlers did never win the first price in any of the four Assembly parties they participated in with productions such as Variform, we cell, 1995 and “a significant deformation near the cranium”. But they got 6 scene.org awards in 3 different years. None of them for “we cell” which was nominated for 4 categories: Best demo, Best effects, Best soundtrack and Public choice.

In a world of pixel shaders, Curly Brace, the main coder wanted to innovate by making a great production without using those new hardware possibilities that everyone was then using. He archieved magnificent scenes without a polygon or a shader (just sprites, particles, and software effects).

In the other hand we have the music of Little Bitchard, one of the most versatile and prolific musicians of the recent story.

Kewlers brought the best of the oldschool to newschool, the code innovation, simplicity and direct impact.

Unfortunately after their following great demo, 1995, in 2006 they quitted the demoscene.

Last active members:

– Actor Doblan (musician, graphic artist)

– Albert Huffman (coder)

– Curly Brace (coder, 3D artist)

– DashNo (graphic artist)

– Fred Funk (musician, graphic artist)

– Little Bitchard (musician)

– Math Daemon (coder)

– Mel Funktion (musician)

– Scootr Lovr (coder, 3D artist)

(sources: escena.org, wikipedia)

I remember the old times when I used to watch demos on my 486DX2@66Mhz !!