This years nominations for the Scene.org Awards have been announced and the 64k intro “Transform” by AteBit has been nominated in the best 64k intro category! Hurrah! I helped with this production by sketching/modelling a 3d graffiti logo for the intro sequence, and it won the 64k intro competition at the Assembly demo party last year in Helsinki, Finland.

It is nice to be nominated again as I was previously nominated for Route 1066 by UkScene Allstars 2 years ago. We will be competing against Ephemera by Approximate which was made by a swedish + English team which is great.. more uk scene power! Power to the people yo! Both Blunderbuss by Fairlight / DirecttoVideo and Frame Ranger by Fairlight, CNCD & Orange are also nominated in multiple categories, coded by Matt Swoboda (Smash/Fairlight) who is also from the UK. All in all, another great year for UK demoscene creatives!

The Scene.org Awards is an annual competition set up and run by demosceners that awards the best productions of the past year. The entries are nominated by a team of jury members who are usually key players in the demo-scene, except for the peoples choice category which are nominated by the public. This year the awards were in trouble because there was a lack of motivation and resources to organise them, but I am glad that atleast for this year they will be happening and I hope they carry on next year too. The future seems uncertain though, due to the Breakpoint demo party where the awards ceremony takes place having its last event this year.

A Full list of nominees can be found here.

Good luck to all involved and lets hope the same tradition shall return next year! Also a BIG thankyou must go to all the dedicated parties involved in the organisation and running of the awards, your effort is greatly appreciated.

I have great news to report – I have acquired a new position in a great company, Voofoo Studios based in Wolverhampton, UK.  After a busy month of searching around in a very saturated market and taking interviews since being given the games industry finger by THQ, I managed to land this offer, which I think is going to be a great opportunity and will provide many exciting challenges for the future. I am employed as a programmer which will involve tasks throughout the whole game process, gameside, core technology, graphics etc.. so I am able to diversify quite a bit.

About Voofoo Studios

Voofoo is a small, relatively new outfit which is going to be a refreshing and interesting change since I have only worked in medium to large teams before with no real creative control over what is going on.

All of the employees are highly talented individuals and I am very excited to be working there with such a talented team.  At present and for the near future Voofoo produce downloadable games on PSN and now have Microsoft backing too to release downloadable games on XBLA.  Their last very sucessful title was Hustle Kings available for download for £6.29 on PSN.  It is a very polished game and has been very well recieved since its release in the last quarter of 2009, I think they really nailed the genre with this title and it sets the standard of any future games produced by the studio – highly polished, to the point and what the punters really want, I smell no bullshit around!

The combination of a great working relationship with Sony and very well written and diverse tech along side very talented artists is why I think this position appealed to me in the first place.  I think the creative drive behind the team is immense and future titles will reflect this.

So, yeh, its been very very busy but I was lucky to find a position that appealed to me quite soon which is one less worry off of my mind, I will just have to get back into the groove again.. Commuting for 4hours in total each day is going to be a big experiment but I am sure that it will be good as there is ample time to boot up the laptop and doing something worthwhile for 2 hours of that journey.

I must say a big thankyou for all the support I have recieved during these stressful times, most of all, all the friends that assisted me in getting interviews at various studios and people that gave me references / linked In recommendations.  It all helped a lot, if not directly to get positions but just as a confidence boost if nothing else.  I also wish everyone who was either made redundant the same time as me and the existing “THQ Digital Warrington” employees that remain good luck for the future, im sure we will cross paths in the not so distant future!

So.. I am curently seeking a new position (core technology or art tools development), feel free to contact me via email if you have any such vacancies.

Cheers,

Neil

For those who do not know about the Sundown demo party held in the UK, then try clicking the link to the website in the links section of this site, the demo party has been running for 5 years now and this years event was run very efficiently and much more smoothly than previous years, the atmosphere was great, big up to the organisers for that.  The event is held over a weekend and various competitions are run just like a traditional demo scene party, both on new and old platforms.

Right, on with the production reviews:

“Ephemera” by Approximate, winning 64k intro from Sundown 2009

The executable can be downloaded from the pouet link here.

This demo is a great example of good procedural texture generation and the rendering tech is really good, these guys have been working on their graphics engine and softsynth for quite a long time and since last years Sundown they really have been coming along really well.  Only real criticism is the lack of direction and flow within the intro, this really needs to be sorted out for future productions as it does not match the rendering quality and niceness of the synth sounds produced.  It is great to see these guys improving every time they release

“Ahh the tape loading era” by AteBit, winning oldskool demo from Sundown 2009

The executable can be downloaded from the pouet link here.

Although I have no knowledge of the technical side of this demo, the concept alone is enough to make it very special indeed.  Streaming demo content while loading has not been seen before, let alone loading off tape on the spectrum, it is also nice that at the end of the tapeloadtro there are a number of Atebit classics to watch which have actually loaded.  Nice one guys!

“VIA” by Neurotypical, 2nd place in the oldskool demo competition at Sundown 2009

I was really impressed by this because it is the first BBC Micro demo I ever seen!  Again I do not understand the technicalities but it was great on the bigscreen at the party, the demo is basically a video streamer but with a nice tune over the top.  Im sure it is technical enough to get the streamer working on the BBC Micro, maybe I should investigate the platform more because last time I used one was at school so so many years ago

“Spectrumori-On” by HOOY-PROGRAM, 3rd place in the oldskool demo competition at Sundown 2009

Although there is no youtube vid of this demo available at time of posting, you should try and check it out at the pouet link here. This demo is a great journey, heavily based around synchronisation with the music playing, I was totally mesmerised during the competition and the little touch with the objects on screen making out SD09 at the end was great. Thumbs up for Gasman, because he always manages to make something new every time, whether it is on Spectrum, IPOD, Javascript.. always entertains us!

Right, that was a rundown of the top highlights of this years Sundown, hopefully next year will be as entertaining and exciting as this year was. I always feel a bit odd going to demo parties and not producing anything to enter but it was great to just have a few beers and meet up with some old friends. I did enter the ascii/ansi compo, but that was just a bit of fun. Currently I am working on some material for a demo to be released soon and a lot of work on my demotool/engine, recently added shadows and lighting is a bit better now, a whole load of architectural work on the demotool is required which I am working on now.. will report back when there is something more impressive to show

Right, thats it for this time, keep being creative in whatever you do..

PC executable can be downloaded here

Coded by Smash/Fairlight this means the PC 64k Intro and PC Demo compos were won by UK Demoscene entries this year, hurrah!

laters!

This weekend Assembly 2009 summer demoparty took place in Helsinki, Finland. I contributed to a 64k intro which came 1st in the competition. The intro called “Transform” was coded by EvilPaul/AteBit with music from the legendary 4Mat/AteBit (ex-Anarchy in the Amiga days), I made some 3d graffiti for the intro sequence using photoshop & 3d Studio Max based on a sketch I did quite a while ago.

Youtube Video

You can download the Windows executable from here. Feel free to comment on it, I am pretty new to modelling in max so every time I go back to it I have to learn everything over again hehe The production itself was made in a relatively short space of time and not meant to be a hugely serious thing, but it was obviously a crowd pleaser at the event!  The Photoshop path image and a 3d Studio Max render are below.

Cheers!

Oh, and I’d like to recommend the hotel that we stayed in as we had a great time there. We stayed for a whole week and it was just perfect, the price was cheap, the room was clean and spacious, shower was good and we got free breakfast also! It is situated just outside the centre in Plantage which seems like the nicest area of Amsterdam I have seen so far in my travels and also 5-10 minutes walk to waterlooplein. check it out at Hotel Hortus.

Capital City – London! (NEW!)
Manchester Styleee! (NEW!)

A quick update since a few things have been happening lately.. Firstly I would like to promote the event that my lovely girlfriend Glittermouse is participating in this Sunday. She will be creating realtime artwork at the Roadhouse club in Manchester using projected images as reference.. details are in the flyer below and the full event listing is on the Norvun Sunday facebook page.

So if you are interested / intrigued about this get down to the event and support the Mouse!! Also as a bonus the event description says – Free Hot Fruit Loaf is provided!! hurrah!!

Also, I really want to give people some links to some excellent vids I discovered over the past weeks.. They are music videos that are created for the Album “Body Riddle” from Chris Clark.  Subsiquently I have bought the album and a few others by Chris Clark and cannot stop looping them continuously!  Anyway, some links to the vids are below (if they do not appear it is just Youtube being shite! ).

How Awesome!!!

And here is the Album, I would really recommend this to anyone into glitch type music / anything released on Warp Records.

From a technical side of things I am currently working on revamping my DemoTool with lighting and shadows at the moment, I will post previews of this in the coming months, im sure its going to be quite a lengthy process especially when work is always quite busy at the moment with the new game being developed.

Anyways… over and out for this time!

I was looking for a way to create a good set of models to put into my demotool to test some new effects I plan to develop in the coming months.  I thought the best way to test these effects was to create a kind of city which there would be a whole group of different buildings, I needed to have the scene objects occlude others to test shadow mapping effects and maybe try to integrate Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) into my engine with some bold occluding objects.

After a bit of searching the net looking for 3d Studio Max tutorials to create cityscape type models I came across the 3D Studio Max Plugin for creating Greebles, basically it adds random extrusions of geometry, tapered or not tapered to the basic geometry you give it.  It is very similar to the techniques used to make scifi space vehicles / battleships more detailed in films.  I thought this was just up my street, I can create a set of world models very quickly with this method in a matter of minutes and use this world as a testbed for my new effects.

I played about with it at work during lunchtime and here is the quick result, its very basic but it will allow me to test my new effects really well:

I looked around quite a bit more and procedurally generating cityscapes is quite a popular subject as well as there being a whole host of applications that do this kind of stuff, very useful for creating urban environments!  If I create urban environments for a demo in the future though I would choose to use it but only use the models as a basis for a final model as using Greebles alone would be pretty lame, great as a basis for future work though!

Cheers,

Neil