Break Space by Thesuper
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C O N F U S I N G T H E C R E D I T S S I N C E 2 0 1 0 \ |
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credits
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music - nq
code - psndcj, sq, introspec
linking sq, introspec
2d graphics - diver, prof4d.
2d animation G.D.
3d graphics - G.D., joozd
3d engine - X-Trade
All of the pictures are copies; original credits and links to
reference images, where available, are listed below.
==============================================================
the story
==============================================================
The roots of this demo go back to the year 2010. One year
after releasing "Aeon" at tUM'2008 tbk/4d were ready to start
a new demo. They requested tracks from two musicians
Yerzmyey and Factor6. Yerzmyey created the track "35" (He was
35 y.o. in February of 2010), and Alan sent us the track
"Gremlia". These tracks were good, but they did not have
enough good ideas and our brainstorming sessions felt a bit
empty.
The working title for a demo was "Hundred". It remained so
for nearly 7 years. During that time tbk4d started and stopped
working many times; created several new effects. They have
lost the goal and their dream to create a new TBK4D demo
slowly faded away. diver apologized to Yerzmyey and Factor6
for not using their tunes for such a long time and the tunes
were eventually released. Our recent wave of activity was
largely sprung by the success of the 3BM Openair parties.
In 2015 we finally came up with a new idea and a new working
title for the "Hundred" project. In addition, thesuper
intended to make a demo for Chaos Constructions 2015 and diver
did 3 pictures for that demo "Atias", "Debian" and "Spoon".
That demo was also cancelled, but it meant that we had a fair
amount of pixelart at the very start.
In essence, "Break Space" is a collaboration between tbk/4d
and skrju, with Life on Mars joining in later to give a
helping hand, all done under the hospitable thesuper label.
The proper work on the project was started in June 2016, with
the intention to release the demo at Chaos Constructions 2016.
All the work took two months of everyday work, and preparation
of the final version required 2 additional weeks.
Most of the scenes and graphics in the demo are influenced by
The Black Lotus and Ephidrena. Some of us have had a strong
compulsion to make the demo with the feeling and atmosphere
similar to the demos on which we have grown up and which we
love so much; we just could not throw the haunting imagery out
of our minds. We really wanted to make a demo that captures
the emotions that we felt watching TBL and EPH demos.
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the demo
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01 Loading Moran Atias
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The loading picture is a copy of a photograph by Conrad Godly
of the Israeli model and actress Moran Atias taken from the
cover of the Italian magazine "Photo". The reference version
of the image can be found at zxart.ee:
http://zxart.ee/eng/authors/d/diver/atias/
The word "Loading..." is taken from the "Ocean Machine" by
TBL. We wanted to make a loading screen that would seem just
like it is from a TBL demo, so we dared to use exactly the
same font as TBL :)
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02 Intro
==============================================================
The intro was coded by sq in July 2016. The original 3D
animation was created by joozd. thesuper logo was made by
diver and sq. Background pictures were converted from the
Zilog logo as well as different transformer insignias
(hi Louie!).
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03 Break Space
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Break Space logo was made by diver. The effect with
shattering letters was coded by sq. Yes, the shattered
version of the logo in the party version of the demo was
generated by a ZX Spectrum code routine. Unfortunately, we
have ran out of memory and it turned out that the packed
picture with shattered logo occupies less space than the
routine that generated it. Therefore, the effect was thrown
out. The shattered logo in the final version of the demo has
been slightly edited by diver.
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04 Weaves
==============================================================
This effect is inspired by a gif animation by David Whyte:
https://beesandbombs.tumblr.com/post/89790794089/weavers
introspec joined the project only 3 weeks before the party and
thought that this was a nice and easy effect to do. It
actually took him more than two weeks to implement and script
this effect in code. It is slightly harder than it looks :)
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05 Fake isometric bump
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At the end of 2012 tbk4d were just obsessed by the idea to
make a demo based on isometric visuals. This effect was
created at that time. The specific idea was to have lights
and shadows that cover only parts of full cube faces. The
effect was coded by psndcj in May 2013. The interesting fact
is that the effect seems to work only in motion and only with
that isometric texture. It does not seem possible to make a
good-looking screenshot for that effect. Some people feel
that this effect is dirty and bad!
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06 Color bars
==============================================================
The effect was done by psndcj in June 2013. Our idea was to
make colorful vertical bars with perspective layers in plain
standard 6912 mode, where each layer must be of a different
color. The inspiration for the idea came from a similar part
of "7th Reality" demo by Digital Reality.
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07 Mondrian
==============================================================
Mondrian art has been animated before on many occasions, see
e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSCmWnIoRpI but we were
inspired by the .gif animation with the Mondrian-styled game
of pong created by user "Custard" in March 2010 as part of the
b3ta.com board's Make Art More Awesome challenge:
http://www.kmhcreative.com/2016/01/28/mondripong/
The engine to animate Mondrian-looking frames was coded by
psndcj in July 2016. The actual animation was hand-drawn by
G.D. and then converted to the engine format by sq, using an
ingenious combination of a specially-made converter and his
own hands. The animation has 256 frames, where every square
in every frame had to be cut separately. All 256 frames were
packed into 3Kb.
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08 Fifteens
==============================================================
This effect was coded by sq in a couple of days; the idea came
suddenly and was implemented shortly afterwards. This part is
somewhere in between a transition and a proper independent
effect.
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09 Debian (girl with the wind)
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This whole part started with the picture. We wanted to create
an effect in which the picture would take the central spot,
rather than being some random female facepic at the side of
screen. First, we made a leaves flying on the wind behind the
girl. Each of 4 leaves animations were converted from the
"Leaves and Wind" animation by Freedom Fairies:
http://www.freedomfairies.com/special-effects.html#Lew
Sprite motion was coded by sq in one night. Hair animation was
drawn from scratch by G.D. "Debian" picture is a copy of one
of the Linux Debian wallpapers, which itself is based on a CC
photo by vaoni_stock (http://vaoni-stock.deviantart.com/).
Our actual reference image and the steps are available at:
http://zxart.ee/eng/authors/d/diver/debian/
==============================================================
10 Isometric worm
==============================================================
This effect was completely done by psndcj in May 2013. In 2016
we only needed to generate new trajectories for the worm.
We've got no idea where the inspiration for it came from.
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11 Magen Fractal
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Yes, this is just a packed animation of the Magen David
fractal, taken as yet another .gif file from the internet:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Magen_David_fractal_animation.gif
The point was to take it and squeeze 122 screens full of
pixels into a small size. Our result is 10 512 bytes, which is
a 1.25% of the initial size of the sequence (122*6912 bytes).
We also made the border switch the colour at the right moments
in time to make the effect look better. This part was
completely coded in August 2011 by psndcj and did not need to
be changed at all.
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12 Cubes
==============================================================
There are many .gif animations in this style; the draft effect
was coded by psndcj in July 2016 but it nearly did not make it
into the demo because it seemed a bit boring. The spiral
profile and the animated chunk sprite were added by introspec
at the last day before the deadline, the colour schemes were
designed by diver. The transition added in the final version
of the demo is also by introspec.
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13 Spoon (Do you bleed?)
==============================================================
This picture is a copy of "Dessert" by Cristiano Siqueira:
http://www.crisvector.com/portfolio/archive/
The steps are available at:
http://zxart.ee/eng/authors/d/diver/spoon/.
This scene actually features two more visual references. The
first of them is the font used to write "Do you bleed?". It
is taken from famous ZX Spectrum demo picture "Extremely?" by
Teeray/Extreme (also used in the "Refresh" demo by Extreme).
This is our way to show respect to Teeray's talent, an attempt
to make the writing look familiar and at the same time the
test how many people can recognize it without reading this
.nfo file? The second reference is the phrase "Tell me, do
you bleed? You will" itself. It is taken from the recent film
"Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice".
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14 ROTL
==============================================================
"Rings of the Lord" was prototyped during the creation process
of our demo "Aeon" in the fall of 2008. diver made a sketch of
the color rings with the black holes in some of the sectors.
tbk4d tried to implement this part a couple of times in the
past but failed. In July 2016 diver and sq finally planned
this part in the right way and sq have successfully coded the
rings engine. Ideally, we hoped that rings will have
individually controllable speeds etc, but that was the first
effect coded by sq after a very long break from asm coding, so
our code ended up being quite resistible to adding any new
features. Maybe, some time soon we will see someone developing
this effect further. The actual work took us about 2 weeks or
so.
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15 Greets
==============================================================
The greets were coded by sq in a just a few quick hours.
Greets and logo font is original and was designed by diver and
sq in July 2016.
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16 Glass Boy
==============================================================
"Glass" is a copy of the photo "What Happened" by Juan Antonio
Torrent Almela:
http://www.freeimages.com/photo/what-happened-1-1436152
The drawing steps are available at:
http://zxart.ee/eng/authors/p/prof4d/glass2/
This picture was made by prof4d in 2013. It was a slightly
changed for the demo in August 2016 (you can see the original
in the Chaos Constructions graphics compo). The idea of this
effect came about in 2013, but it was fleshed out only in
2016. The code for this effect was written by psndcj in August
2016.
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17 Metro
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The idea with abstract objects flying in the real environments
came about from Ephidrena's demo "J'_" and also the video "My
Kingdom" of the Future Sound of London. The train sprites were
sketched using imagery from "Fake Elektronic Lightshow" by
Ephidrena as the reference. The part was sketched by diver,
coded and scripted by sq and then slightly tweaked for the
final version by introspec.
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18 Venus de Milo
==============================================================
We wanted for quite some time to make a slowly moving scene
with a classic statue as 3D model with proper lighting. This
scene is implemented using the X-Trade 3D engine. Lowpoly
model of the Venus was made by G.D., 2D background was made by
diver and whole part was put together by sq. The idea of this
effect came from the "Perfect Circle" by TBL (the scene with
the black tree) and also from the Rift by TBL (the part with
the statue).
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19 Angel
==============================================================
"Angel Wings" is a copy of "Spiral Angel Wrap" by Henning
Ludvigsen, aka Bridgeclaw. We did not actually know that the
picture belonged to a demoscene artist. The original idea of
the picture was to draw in the border, and due to the ZX
Spectrum restrictions, only special kinds of images can look
good while being drawn in the border. So, diver googled for
something like "angel, spreading wings" and selected about 20
reference images, of which Bridgeclaw's picture was chosen as
the best reference for our demo. It was the most mysteriously
looking (the girl has closed eyes, which is the very common to
the demoscene graphics), so maybe that is why diver felt that
the picture was most suitable. Of course, the angle of the
wings made it quite suitable for drawing it on the ZX Spectrum
border. The source image and the drawing steps are available
at: http://zxart.ee/eng/authors/d/diver/angel-wings/
introspec had to refactor his old(ish) border-drawing codebase
for the demo, this is why he run out of time before the party
and had to insert the image into the demo just as is, without
any transition and with support only for Pentagon-compatibles
(all other models are just di:halt-ed). The transition added
to the final version is somewhat cheeky, but seems to work
pretty well in the end.
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a bit more info
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All 2D pixel art was made by diver, except "Glass"made by
prof4d and some converted parts mentioned above.
The music was written by nq under a strong guidance by sq. The
principal references were the soundtracks for "Rift" and
"Starstruck" TBL demos by Blaizer (Olof Gustafsson). The fake
speech samples idea was borrowed from the recent Factor6
tracks: "Tailwind OST" and "Don't Punish My Sync Claire" from
Revision'2016.[ back to the prod ]