soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

It's happened quite a lot of things since the last entry, and I was so busy that I couldn't comply with my promise. So I'll try to be quite quick and summarise as most as possible.

The Airport Idea

We had to spend some hours in the airport (approximately 8) so we thought we had to do something in that time!! Then sitting in one coffee shop, whose name I can't remember, we decided to program something in flash for the wild compo, since we already had some code, but we had to clean it, make it work with each other piece, etc. Basicly we tried to convert the non-OO code we had to an ActionScript2 version of it so we could have classes, instantiate them and all of that, like painting in the screen without deleting everything else and so on. We spend the most of the night finding how to do that since Flash is quite tricky and has hidden thingies you only get to solve after lots of trial-error pairs. But just when the battery of my mighty powerbook was about to die, it just started to work!

Then we went happy and delighted to check in, and it was so good too. We had sequence numbers 1 and 2! Is it a premonition? Who knows!

Euskal place

There's just one word for defining the party installations: H-U-G-E. Luckily Olatz got us a couple of seatings in the fifth row so we don't have to use lenses to look at the not-so-big-from-rear big screen. That way she also saved us to feel like a frying egg thanks to the heat which generate the gamer's computers, since we then were sitting in the scene area.

We have a good amount of non-windows machines around here. There are lots of Macintosh (specially in my row), and what I like specially, there are lots of MorphOs and a couple of Amiga's too. Not that I have talked with their owners but I am fascinated at how they just spend the time browsing Amiga repositories with a weird browser which looks so 90's and makes all the webs to look so 90's as well. And those machines' hardware is not old, so it must be a question of tastes - you like Amiga, you like the retro look, maybe.

People

I spent a good amount of time talking with old friends, which is the main point of the party I think (apart from being astonished with the releases). This year some of the old faces are missing, like network, stravaganza, etc. But we had mat! and ham so we can keep the spirit alive!

The chat with mat! was specially interesting since it kinda surprised me that he shared with me the opinion about the parties organization. Taking into account his vast experience partying, that made me happy :)

And there was also our american friend, blackpawn. Some of you might know him because he did code for MDMA/threepixels (if I recall properly, it was the spikes scene).

Party-optimising

Anyway I let people chatting with themselves and passed to finish our airport-idea, which was called Holy Guadalupe! Don't ask me why but it was trace's idea. And I didn't choose the colours - for once the pink was not my responsibility.

Apart from converting code into classes (a good occasion to learn how to make inheritance work in ActionScript 2), I also could apply my algorithms optimisation knowledge. That part was quite challenging too, since ActionScript with Flash 8 is still quite slow and is even slower on mac's. So while macromedia/adobe decide to create a faster Flash player, we have to optimise our code, which is good stuff anyway.

So, just in case someone is interested… I did a lot of maths, like factorising, grouping multiplications, etc, since the formulae were very clear but not optimal, and sometimes there were things such as for example:

(something*2)*4

so to save one operation I changed it into something*8, saving one operation that way

I also tried to replace all the multiplications with bit shifts where it was possible. Like instead of having something*4 I changed it into something < < 2.

Also sometimes one value was calculated during each iteration of a loop but the value was constant, so those operations were put outside the loop. I also looked for places where to change products into sums, but I couldn't find none. And already the sinus and cosinus tables were precalculated and all that so I wasn't able to optimise anymore (at least at first sight).

Finally the effects gained some speed, specially the plasma, so we were able to double the resolution of that one! =)) And trust me, I really noticed the increase in speed in my mac. I am quite proud of that contribution.

Meanwhile blackpawn and trace were working very hard in their demo. At this very moment I still don't know how is it going to be called, we will see in a next entry! :P

We had a horrible lunch based on a nauseauting tagliatelle with carbonara and lasagna courses. I have never produced such a disgraceful lunch in my whole life, even when I hardly knew how to turn on a microwave. The pasta was overcooked and dry, like if they had just reheated ten times, and the sauce was simply an uniform and unknown disgusting beige oily mass at the bottom of the plastic box where they served that piece of crap. So if anybody reads this, avoid going to the cafeteria 24h!

And after that we finally finished the wild compo entry (thanks also to the org which delayed the deadline an hour and a half) and submitted it. It quite surprised us to find so many entries already there, all of them using like 80mb, 400mb and even almost one gb, and ours was less than two megabytes. Amazing. Bloodrinker (the scene orgo) was already horrified after having prepared the [supposedly] high quality compo and anticipated a long agony for all the listeners/viewers. He was indeed so right :((

To the compos

So as I also predicted, the mp3 compo was full of boring tracks, most of them exceeding the recommended three minutes length. Preselection is reclaiming a place in this compo, as it is in the wild compo. There was the usual bunch of superboring videos of gamers exhibiting themselves, and of course one with a starwars fight, with the laser swords and all of that. B-O-R-I-N-G. Oh and I'm still a bit annoyed with one which ripped some scenes from this guay and another demo by purple studios, somehow presenting it as it was their own production. That is lame.
The animation compo was the usual too, there was nothing which really managed to surprise me… |-)

After that I thought they were going to play some demos as the timetable said but I think the orgo was so depressed that he had almost lost all faith in the scene so he was just aiming for a bed and a long sleep to forget about this nightmare compo. So I went to sleep and that's all for yesterday.

Now I'm going to upload our wild entry to pouet before some dumb-ass does it.

Ahh, seems like Madgoblin will put images to the reports. That is, he's prepared his webcams to be streaming from the party. See madgoblin's Zonan Ciego-Cam for two iSights streaming continuously (excepting while he's asleep and with his new computer).

I can't wait to see his new MacBookPro - he finally surrounded to the PRO version of the mac family and let aside the childish white iBooks :P

Oh and now is 28ºC, this is heaven. I can think better now. Gotta have quick breakfast and finish it all before lunch for sure!!

Stay tuned!

After having failed the gastroscene mission in Valencia (i.e. to get to that famous japanese restaurant near Corsario's place, with all tlotb members) due to a sudden sickness I got, the summer 2006 tour is reaching another hot spot: euskal party 14!

I didn't attend it past year and I felt quite uninformed about what was happening in the party, even if everybody was promising they were going to give a good use to their brand new blogs. So I decided to blog about it this year in almost real time so everybody gets an idea of what kind of information us, the outsiders, are waiting for :P

To be honest I am not yet in the party, I'm still in London and won't arrive there until Sunday. So this is just for commenting a bit the previous movements which prelude the event. Rumours are flowing quickly between the attendants about who's going to release what and all of that. And what the rumour has not, people try to confirm by IM:

Are you coming to the party? Are you releasing a demo? You know I know there's going to be N intros…? Oh but I can't tell you who told me that…

What I have been let known is:

• there may be at least one 64k
• around four 4k
• around 3 demos

And what I presume that will also happen:

• There will be a massive amount of mp3's as usual (for the high quality compo). The authors won't be aware of the new voting rules and will forget to vote so their songs will be disqualified
• There's going to be 4 chiptunes, maybe 5 if I finish mine :P
• There will be 9 multichannel songs (mine is already counted in)
• Wild compo is going to suck terribly with the exception of a couple of works. Expect the usual Ho-Hey Mum! We are going to the party travel videos, Star Wars/Matrix/Duke Nukem home-made remakes, etc.
• Something similar will happen with 3d animation where a couple of brilliant works will let us breathless during some minutes. The remainings will make us shout with anger against 3dstudio coders!! (I am being harsh, indeed I am!)

So let's say we are in the party mood (more or less), that stressful and frantic period in which everything seems hard but possible:

A demo? Oh yeah we can do effects for filling three more minutes in just four hours, just give us some more redbull and we will even do a couple 4k's

Or…

… yeaah I have finished my chiptune and my multichannel, now I just have to shrink them to fit in the compo rules, I hope I can reduce the multichannel since I used 32 bit stereo samples which have a HUGE power but sometimes are a bit delicate to handle, and when I finish I'll maybe do another version of the high quality, and where's my redbull by the way?

Obviously after having been laid in bed for the most of this week -against my will, must be clear in this :(( - I still have to finish things for tomorrow and will have to send them to bloodrinker, the demoscene orgo this year. All before the deadlines, the lovely deadlines…
So the plan for tomorrow is: finish things, send them to bloodrinker, then try to pack everything and go to the airport again where I'll meet trace which comes from Seville. It's amazing that it's cheaper to fly from Seville to London and back to Bilbao than taking a direct fly with Iberia. With companies like that, their competitors may be swimming in pools with gold coins!

More to come…

Otherwise I can't explain this spam attack. Herotyc was reporting something like that in his blog - I am not sure if it's related, but I have also received more than ten spam messages which have made it out of the spam detector. Akismet.com is offline, so something weird is happening here.

Yay…! The last thing I'm willing to do with this heat (London: 32 C degrees) is to go through lots of comments to decide whether they are spam or not X(

Pues eso, los tlotb nos juntaremos el martes que viene, día 18 de julio, para cenar y asistir a la grabación de Salsa Scener en directo :P.

Si alguien se quiere apuntar, que avise.

Ni el lugar, ni el dresscode están decididos aún, aunque tenemos una sugerencia bastante oriental por parte de Corsario. Tranquis, que no hay que ir en kimono…