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Jumpgate 10.24 by Fulcrum [web]



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                                  .Credits.
                                  ---------
                      Code, music: Seven
                      tools used:  Crinkler, custom tools

                                .Requirements.
                                --------------
     * Tl;dr: unless you're a purist, run one of the safe versions. They are faster, have better time sync,
     run on AMD as well, use safe crinkler features and contain no horrible hacks. They're just 250 bytes
     larger. If you want your 1Ks to be 1024 bytes, damm kids these day don't respect filesizes grumbl grumble,
     there's the nvidia-only almost-compo version, and some higher quality versions (50% higher stepcount fixes
     most artifacts) in a separate folder.
     * To run perfectly, the almost-compo version (Jumpgate 10.24 by Fulcrum (Final 720 Slow Nvidia only).exe)
       should run at exactly 60 FPS. Otherwise it will run slower or faster than it was designed for. To ensure
       this, you need:
        - A very fast NVidia video card with lots of Pixel Shader 4.0 compatible shader pipelines.
          It was designed to run in 1280*720 mode on a GTX 1080. It's possible that 2000-series
          cards run it abnormally slow (as in, a high-end 2000 runs it slower than a midrange 1000),
          but I don't have one to test it. Sorry for the high hardware requirements but a 1K doesn't
          leave much space for speed-optimisations.... The compo version doesn't work on AMD cards due to
          stupidity on my side (relying on undefined behavior in the spaceship procedure...)
     	  - V-Sync set to Always On in the drivers
     	  - Driver features that limit limits the FPS to 30 should be turned off.
     * 300 MB ram (for the Crinkler decompression)
     * Tested on Windows 7 and 10, might even run on Windows XP
     * 1 kb diskspace

                                  .Thank You
                                  ----------
           - Blueberry and Mentor for Crinkler 2.3
		- Knighty for the Cosmos fractal, again.
		- The Assembly organizers for keeping Assembly alive in this rather bizarre year, and Visy's patience
             with misbehaving intros in particular.
           
                              .About the intro.
                              -----------------
This intro was inspired by the typical spaceships seen on science-fiction covers from the 70s/80s, by Chriss Foss
and others: huge bulky machines with ocean-liner portholes everywhere and nonsensical colored stripes and surfaces,
giving them a very industrial look. I also wanted to re-visit my "Escape through subspace" intro, since space and
fractals are a very pleasing combination, Crinkler has improved again and I learned a few new tricks.

Due to the corona situation I knew Assembly would be postponed, so I wasn't in a hurry. During the summer I dabbled
with procedurally-generated spaceships, but that was it. In the fall I had the idea of ships flying through a warp
gate, so I searched a formula that would fit both ships and a gate. I also wanted to make a static version of
Knightys Cosmos fractal, with only smaller stars, and during my experiments I found a very pleasing geometric-looking
2D fractal which had an inversion when animating one of its parameters. So that got incorparated as a warp effect.

The weekend before Assembly I started working on the direction, and improved my shader minifier a bit more. On
sunday evening I finally bothered to read Pouet thread, and realized the deadline was not on thursday or friday as
usual, but on tuesday noon. I took some days off and started working fulltime on the intro. Hours were spend changing
the random seed, hoping that all 4 ship types looked OK. Then repeat for the gate. Then find some optimisation that
requires a change in the ship formula, and re-start searching anew... Minimal sound was added in the assembler code of
a previous intro, with vague ideas to improve it later but that didn't happen.

When testing on an AMD card, I realized my formula relied on undefined behavor (multiple calls to a random function as
parameters, and the order in which parameters are evaluated isn't defined...) Updating the AMD drivers actually caused
my editor to misbehave, so I had to drop AMD support for the first time in my career, as there wasn't time for a new
search :( . Also, one of the ships had artifacts when seen from certain angles, and rather than searching for new ships,
I added hacks upon hacks to minimize or hide the ugliness, balancing against the framerate. Thanks to the organizers
feedback, the final version has shifted a bit more to speed. In return I had to space out the ships a bit more and move
the camera faster, and the sound now appears just after the first spaceship, but I actually prefer it this way, as a
kind of balance between the "no sound in space" hovering of the first ship and the ambient noise of the large fleet.

All in all I'm happy how the intro turned out, and also to finally have a release in this rather bizarre year.
I hope you like it too!


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                   ::  '   \ Fulcrum memberstatus:       ::
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                   :.   seven.....................code   .:
                    :   coplan...................music   :
                    :   el.blanco................music   : 
                    :   ranger.rick..............music   :
                    :   the.watcher.........code,music   :
                    :   yncke.................graphics   :     
                    :   miss.saigon..............music   :
                    :   kneebiter.................code   :     .
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       .: . .........:          visit us at :           :..../..... . :.
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