plasmic by Spoon
This is Plasmic. .sPOOn.'s first PC demo.. we think you'll like it .. really :) It features various effects, oldskool and newskool, but NO 3d scenes at ALL !! that's right... the only vectors used in this demo are in a transition, and they are only 2D :).. we are getting tired of all those 3D studio or Lightwave render engines out there, and want the scene to return to the old objective, the good old kick ass routine based demo's .. come on guys, there MUST be new effects to discover yet.. FD for instance is a nice idea... just keep of off the 3d scenes for a while now thankyou. credits : code : shayera/.sPOOn., Anders Brodersen, Michael Bang, Henrik Bagger music : Dreyer/.sPOOn. pixel gfx : Bifrost, Airwalk/Polka Brothers, Steffen/??? 3D gfx : shayera/.sPOOn.,Colin/Polka Brothers commandline : -save : save soundcard config, so you don't have to reconfig every time you run the demo -big : run demo in a window on a 640*480 display (you still have to support 24 or 32 bit colors !!) First off, a little heartfelt sigh.. : This demo was to have been released at The Party 8, December 1998, but the startup code I used (PMode/DJ) seems to have some problems running on a PII/300 so the demo was dis- qualified.. (waaaaah :( ) now I use CWSDPMI and it had better work, or else....... after TP8 I upgraded my own machine and the demo runs on : Celeron/400, 64MB RAM, Bansheee AGP.. so all should be well now only sadness is : the Banshee is not very fast under DOS.. it seems that using AGP under DOS is not the fastest thing in the world :( .. If someone out there has some good advice about this, then PLEASE contact me (shayera) with your info !!! This demo uses the Allegro graphics library for a lot of things, since this enables the coder to concentrate on the FX, and have a functioning set of routines for allocating and using screens, bitmap and drawing that will work on a lot of different display cards.. plus it would enable us to port the demo to linux in a matter of days. also, allegro has a number of neat things,including it's 'archive files' which enables us to pack together all our pics and stuff in one file (ok.. we use several.. but ..) and not worry about how to read it back in... all transitions on this demo were developed by shayera. routine details : the moveplasma is based in part on the works of Erik Hansen and Jan Møller, as optimized by Michael Bevin in his fxlib 1.1, since his way of rendering was 4 times faster than mine .. his way of rendering the pixels can be optimized further on a pentium MMX but i haven't tried (yet) the 'swirler' is coded by Anders Brodersen, once known as RIP/.sPOOn., and has quite a lot of options, this demo only uses a few of them .. the code has been further optimized by shayera, as would be expected, including porting the lot to allegro.. the zooming and rotating truecolor rayanimation was code by shayera (the truecolor zoom- rotator) and the beautiful anim was rendered by Colin / Polka Brothers way back in 1995 It was intended to be used in an Amiga demo which I, as usual, never finished ;) The anim was made with Lightwave 4.x on an Amiga 3000 .. Amiga is power :) the neontunnel is in part based on a tunnel routine by Michael Bang, but totally redone by shayera, and was, when envisioned, intended to look like an effect from the Amiga demo 'Tint' by The Black Lotus.. however, when I was working i got another idea.. and here it is. The rgbinterference is a good old routine, just with 3 moving circlesets instead of 2 as we used to do on the amiga.. fully coded by shayera, with a one shot blur before running, developed by Henrik Bagger, that smoothes the circles (but also introduces some moire in the pattern) The texslime is a remake of the old SLIQ texslime routine by F. Becker, but re-coded without any 'nasty' inline assembler.. i spent DAYS trying to second guess F. Becker and trying to guess what exactly he was doing, since i don't know ANY X86 assembler... I've seen that Michael Bevin has another version in his fxlib1.1, but this is my own port of the routine (Michael's is 256 cols only.. and VERY hard to re-work for truecolor :) The 'plasmaball' is once again fully shayera's to blame for :) It is the pc version of his good old 24bit effect for the Amiga (yes, on the amiga it ran in full 24bit colors !! not 18bit or something.. but it only ran in 80*64.... ) The rgb plasma is fully developed by shayera, who just looooves rgb effects... it runs in full 24bit colors It is a good oldskool effect, from way back when.. this time just run in 320*200 singlepixeled (yes 1*1 pixel) full truecolor glory.. if only I could do that on my A1200.. *sigh* This demo requires a modern pc ;) with a gfx card capable of displaying a lowres (320*240) mode with 32 bit colors and a linear framebuffer, however, the demo CAN attempt to run in a window on a 640*480 display.. this will however slow it down ! To do so, run the demo with the commandline argument -big The demo will attempt to use first VESA 3.0, then 2.0 for it's display.. if neither of these are found, it will exit and say something rude to you fornot providing it with a decent and modern display environment .... After some updating of my display code, it now runs also in 24 bit modes in either 320*240 or 640*480 resolutions It supports most modern soundcards, through MIDAS 1.1.2 If you want 'nosound' just tell midas to shut up with it's config screen this program runs under both DOS and Win95, however, under Win 95, when the demo is exiting, Win95 will pop up a requester.. just say No :), this has something to do with the way midas treats the timer.. it works fine, but when win95 gets back its timer, it smells a rat, and complains about it :) NOTE : if you copy this demo to a different machine, REMEMBER to delete the file called plasmic.cfg !! this holds the config for your soundcard, and if you run the demo on a different machine without reconfiguring, you MIGHT crash. This config file will however only be created if you tell the demo to do so. It is there for conveniance... This program was developed with : DJGPP2.02/GCC 2.8.2 Allegro 3.11 libjpeg 1.03 by Eric Vannier, modified by shayera libjpeg uses The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG software Midas 1.1.2 by Sahara Surfers UltraEdit-32 5.10a Windows Commander 3.51 Plasmic should run on almost anything from K5/Pentium and up, as long as you have 320*240 in 32 or 24 bit true color (or 640*480, but then it won't look as neat) Plasmic was actually developed on an AMD K5/166 PC, with 32 MB ram, a 2Mb S3 virge gfx card, a SB AWE64 sound card and running under (gasp horror) Windows 95 by Micro$oft.. This machine is actually rather slow. Equal approximately to a pentium 133 in integer, and a P100 in floating point. So you don't HAVE to have a killer setup to code.. but it sure helps .. *sigh* Before coding my next PC demo I hope to have upgraded this considerally.. it is SOOOO hard to make timing when the machine you work on is 2-3 times slower than your target audience's machines... update March 1999 : The coders current setup is : Intel Celeron/400, 64Mb ram, 16Mb Banshee AGP and AWE64.. runnin winblowme 98 This is much nicer to work with than my old K5... (and a LOT faster) Contact Information : if you want to get in touch with shayera for any reason : John Hinge - shayera / .sPOOn. Silkeborgvej 220 B DK-8230 Aabyhoej Denmark shayera@cutey.com tel : +45 4083 9699 or Dreyer : dr_dreyer@hotmail.com Companies : shayera is always available for work offers.. He has good experience in coding on both Amiga (C and 68K assembler) and the PC (C, some perl/java) To top that, he has worked for a year as a systems administrator in Egmont Online, and has a good knowledge of administrating and supporting networks with the following stuff in them : HP Netserver LHPro and LH plus, Bay Network hubs, Cisco 3600 routers Catalyst 100MBit Etherswitch, Cisco PIX Firewall,SGI Indigo & Octane, PC and Mac clients. All that on a 100MBit network linked to the Internet with a 512Kbit frame-relay. On the serverside the software was Microsoft Windows NT4.0SP3, IIS3, MS Exchange 4.5, Sybase SQL server, Apache HTTPD 1.2b8, IRCD2.9.3(Win32). On the Client side the software was : Microsoft Windows 95, Windows NT Client 4.0, MacOS/Finder 7&8, IRIX 6.4. He would be very interested in doing the same for your company!!
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