blog.jmp.no

1, 2, 3.. testing.. is this thing still on? Ok, good.

You may or may not have noticed, but I've been a little dormant lately. To be honest, inspiration has been slim to none, the willpower to get out in the shed and do things has been literally absent. The remaining energy to get going is just around the bend, so hang in there.

While we're waiting, let me take you through the latest demo we released for OCS Amiga. This is "Bomb" by Insane:

This demo was made pretty much from scratch in a couple of days, to support the Datastorm party. Good for us, only two demos were submitted to the OCS demo compo, so we nailed the 2nd place.

Since nobody asked, let's walk through the demo and discuss how things were done.

The spinning "INSANE" logo was originally planned as a decrunch part, but during the development of the demo a few things changed. The next part is being decrunched and initialized while the current part is running, but since I had made this part already, I included it anyways. The rotation matrix is all precalculated, so it's basically a line drawing routine you're watching.

The stretcher is a simple liquid effect. I originally wanted the image to flip upside-down, like a coin flip, but didn't have the time to code that, so I ended up with this. I guess it turned out allright, even though a coin-flip would look much better. Oh well, maybe next time.

Fun fact: It didn't quite stick the landing before the screen flash. Notice how it's a little "off."

The twister turned out to be quite the eyecandy. I coded a standard twister routine on a 4 bitplane image, and applied RGB plasma on top of it. The plasma colour scheme is a blend of two gradients: one smooth and one hard/aggressive. The end result is a pretty crazy color scheme which I think looks pretty cool.

Fun fact 1: The background fades to a set of colours predefined in a table. However, I forgot to set more than the two first colours, so what you're seeing are the RGB representations of the assembly opcodes following the table.

Fun fact 2: The effect was too slow to run every 2nd rasterline. Every 3rd line got too ugly, so it alternates between 2 and 3 lines down the screen.

Before the next part I needed a 8-10 second filler part. We decided to do one in the form of a fullscreen logo. To prevent it from being too static, we added the falling bombs in the background.

Now, the zoomer part is the one I'm the most proud of in this demo, but I think the twister part took the edge of it, somehow. This is a 31x31 pixel, (almost) fullscreen, full-color zoom routine that runs 50fps, invented and executed by yours truly. To be honest it's a combination of animation and color cycling, all working in prefect glory to bring the illusion of a growing image.

The end part is dead simple. A 5 bitplane image and an up-scroller in the 6th. The writer runs while the text is scrolled upwards, giving it a "tilted" appearance, if you look carefully.

Hope this was interesting to atleast one of my two readers (hi mom!) and I'll try to pick up some hardware projects again in the near future.