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Getting the right music, and the right inspiration

Some years ago, in the almost already forgotten summer of 2003, trace sent me a test of a song he was making. If I remember properly, it was called B04.IT, and featured the characteristic samples one can get using fuzzion's 4k synth. Actually, it reminded me a lot to the music of "insert coin", by fuzzion & threepixels. I think trace did the song for using it in another intro, but it was forgotten.

And some months later he passed me again the song but it was B05.IT then and it had more stuff - almost finished! It had passed through sml's and wizard's ears too. This time I really liked the song and thought that I wanted to do something with it, although I didn't know yet what exactly. So I just converted it to mp3, copied it to the ipod and let it appear whenever the random mode decided. One day while I was in a Circle Line train, entering Moorgate station, the song was playing and I had something like a vision, when I saw the platforms along with the signs, the sensation of movement that fitted with the song and its somehow agressive feeling… and I decided that I would do something related with the tube!

Then almost a whole year was spent developing something to be able to do the demo, as I switched to mac, and also wanted to do demos in a more decent/cleaner way that I was doing until that moment. And finally as I got the tickets for Breakpoint06, I decided that I definitely would do the tube demo for BP06, as I knew that it would rock big time to see it on the bigscreen.

At the beginning I thought of alternating 3d scenes with the 2d animations that I was going to put in there, but since I didn't manage to get a decent port to opengl of neonv2's graphics engine, I just set apart that idea and concentrated on getting the best animations I could get.

How to record in the tube (without looking suspicious)

That part was really funny. I borrowed trace's camera, which is way more discreet than mine, and the 1GB memory stick he got for his PSP, and just headed towards the tube on a nice sunday evening.

Why I chose sunday and not any other day of the week as it would have been more representative of the real stress of the daily commuting it's relatively simple: when there's so many people you would have seen only the first row of people and maybe think that I was taking pictures in a protest march. So that's why it just shows half empty trains and stations.

With that camera it was relatively easy to take pictures as it is quite small and doesn't do any noise when switching it on (in contrast to mine!). So most of the time I just walked as if I was going to take a train, with the camera in my hand - and recording it all!

I also wanted to be discreet not because of the passengers, but because of some news I had heard about people being arrested and their camera confiscated just when they were shooting pictures in tube stations. Just in case they were evil terrorists and were getting information of how the station was. For destroying it according to the plans. You know!

The worst of all was when recording the final part, which is actually how the Central Line trains enter Bank from Liverpool Street. I had to redo that one like three times because it didn't got recorded properly. Either bad angle, not looking good enough (the train stopping at the entering and somehow destroying the speed sensation, etc). So I had to change to the opposite direction and turn back to Liverpool Street again, and cross the fingers so nobody in the control room could notice a girl dressed with a blue electric jacket entering three times the station, and taking the train of the opposite platform three times too.

Imagine if they had asked me:

- What are you doing?
- oh just recording some movies for breakpoint 06 demo compo
- a compo!! it doesn't sound right! it sounds violent
- errrrr….

I also arrived until the ultramodern Canary Wharf station (where some movie was shot, if I'm not wrong) and took lots of pictures there, but they didn't fit at all in the demo. Apart from the "severe delays" pictures, everything else got discarded as it wasn't dynamic enough. It was so empty on a Sunday!! One can't appreciate any movement sensation if there's no reference point, like people, etc. Oh and it was so damn cold in Canary Wharf! I had to put my hat on while taking pictures of the outside…

Most of the moving images are from Victoria and Westminster stations. I missed lots of footage video as I thought that I was recording but actually I hadn't pressed properly the button. So novice!

Locations - for the map/tube addicts

So finally my travel consisted in:

• Victoria - Westminster (with the District line)
• Westminster - Canary Wharf (Jubilee Line)
• Canary Wharf - London Bridge (Jubilee Line)
• London Bridge - Bank (Northern Line)
• Bank - Liverpool Street, and Liverpool Street - Bank, three times (Central Line)
• Bank - Oxford Circus (Central Line)
• Oxford Circus - Victoria (Victoria Line)

and not it didn't cost me much money since I just went out the tube itself in Canary Wharf for taking pictures of the skyscrappers :)

Coding horror

Then we have the nightmare the day before the party. I had let until the last moment the step of doing a final test in my pc. (I developed it in mac as I said). Horror happens and it happens more specifically the night before, when tired and almost aslept you get to test your demo in trace's laptop and then discover that everything turns white. ARGH!!!!!!!!! It wasn't even a black screen, it was all completely white. I just said ok … I'm going to release it in the wild compo, I don't care if they don't accept mac entries in the demo compo, I want to sleep. And I absolutely did.

I suppose a real coder would have stayed all night trying to find out which was the bug but as I'm not a real coder I just let the pillow give me some advice. Of course, the next morning I hadn't thought of any solution for the bug yet. I even didn't find anything until for some reason I ran the demo in fullscreen in my mac and WTF!!! it was WHITE!! What was happening there?

Well it was actually quite stupid. I did some very basic filters, reading from the current framebuffer and manipulating the data. But just some filters used one code I saw in one page which said: glRead(GL_FRONT);

I simply had sticked it in my code without noticing any performance difference, so I just let it be there. Buuuuuut that was a very bad and irresponsible idea! Depending on the graphic drivers, the FRONT buffer had something - or not. In my old pc it didn't make a difference, but in trace's it made everything go white. And I don't know why, I hadn't tested the faulty filters in full screen in my mac. Maybe in fullscreen the opengl gets like a different context or something like that (I don't have any clue, I must recognize), and that's why it showed different results when running in a window or in fullscreen.

I proceeded to remove that code from every place where it appeared and voila! it was working perfectly fullscreen on mac! Then Corsario/tlotb offered to help me to compile a win32 version - and hence release the demo in the demo compo.

Forget libc

I used visual studio 6 in my old pc. It worked pretty well - apart from thousands of warnings from the STL, of course. But Corsario had Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005. He said it should be ok. Of course, it wasn't. There was some kind of funky incompatibility with the headers that my project included and what MSVS2003 decided that was ok. Basicly they had deprecated (and removed) libc!

But Corsario managed to identify which of the libraries introduced the libc dependency and replaced it with a compatible and appropiate (for VS) header. And oh it worked quite well! :)

The remaining was simply a question of putting the nice layers that trace gave me in a more or less meaningful order, and syncronize things a bit. Also, trace convinced wizard to do another pattern for the song so it could get a bit more polished. So we had another star in our team!! :D
As you see, it's very easy to do a demo! You should do one too!

As I didn't write anything past year and I've seen that trace has written his own report, I have decided to do the same, and better, if possible! :-D

Experiencing new airports

This was the first time we departed from Heathrow Airport. Past year we went from Stansted Airport, with all the ukscene mates, but we decided to go for the Heathrow option as it was nearer and basicly because going to Stansted is a pain in the a**. And also the tickets were cheaper even with a non low-cost carrier! So we were happily going through the boarding controls in Heathrow and we had the weird surprise of being asked for taking our laptops out of their bag and put them in trays. First question which arises to mind is: why? what do they expect by doing it? Clumsy ideas…

Anyway we passed that control and then went for waiting there. For our displeasure, there weren't too many places in which we could have something like a decent coffee. So we ended buying some Dr. Pepper and chewing gum. Eeew… Then it appeared that our flight was delayed X( …, and as I knew that the bus which had to bring us to breakpoint departed not too late after we arrived in Frankfurt, I just sent a message to sml! (which had to take that bus too) so he could inform people about that fact.

Frankfurt Main stinks (really!)

Apart from that and the fact that we were given separated seats and had to ask a guy to exchange his seat, the flight was quite ok, until we tried to get our precious suitcase. Ha! We were stopped of going to the luggage collection and sent to another escalator. Then we went downstairs and thought we were going to die of asphyxia because of the pestilent stink that was dispersed throughout all the area. Everybody was putting their hands in the nose, that disgusting it was. And then we were stopped again by a group of rude policemen which said us a long series of german sentences (which we didn't understand at all, of course) and which was only able to say "NO WAY. TEN MINUTES." when we asked what was happening there. Sml called us again (he did just after we had landed) and informed us that the bus driver was willing to leave. He also said something about uncle-x/mfx wanting to leave as well but I am not sure what happened.
So we finally got our luggage, and also lost the bus and had to take the RegionalBahn, i.e., the train to Mainz and then change there for Bingen. It was pretty easy and fast. And cheap (6 euros in comparison with the bus which was 10 euros). Sorry, I don't really like to travel long distances by bus, it makes me sick. Train is cool, and you don't see rabbits waiting for the train to pass everyday, don't you?

First encounter

We took the opportunity to check in at the hotel, as we had just arrived in Bingen. Then we went towards the bus stop and suddenly found part of the spanish expedition degusting the german beer in a little cafe before the stop: merlucin, sml, pain, bp, stealth, napalm, madgoblin, pere and ufix if I remember correctly. We sat there but didn't want to start drinking (yet).

Finally all of us boarded the bus and registered at the door! Yes, even they hadn't registered yet, as there was such a long queue when they arrived they simply took the bus back to Bingen.

I started greeting people but I just can remember now the people from Bixo (although this time they didn't come to the party driving from Spain… they have got old). Then I went inside and found Slack and Corsario, thanks to a light ray which entered through one window and stopped exactly at Corsario's ultra shaved head. Like a heaven signal…

Beer box

Everybody started buying beer boxes and we weren't going to be less. So trace got one box and we started having some beer. We realized we had forgotten the uk-european socket adaptor, so trace couldn't plug in his laptop and finish the visuals for the Ultrasound gig until we had it! I was going back to the hotel (as the adaptor was in my laptop bag), and then Corsario said he was going to there too, to check if there was any free room. He had seen the party installations and decided he was too old for party-sleeping so…

The Goldenersomething

The recepcionist told us that there weren't places at our hotel, but she made a quick german call and also guided us how to reach the other hotel -the Goldenersomething- (she even accompanied us outside the hotel to explain it better!). Then it came the funny part… the other hotel was managed by a pair of elders, which seemed very nice, but hardly spoke any english. I don't know how but we managed to explain everything with a mix of gestures and english.

So there we came back, with our main missions achieved! A hotel room and a socket adaptor!

First mental gap

I don't remember exactly what happened during this time. I think we continued drinking beer and greeting people. Basicly I didn't feel like doing too much, although I had to finish my demo and I was fearing that I would have to release it in the wild compo, as I hadn't managed to make it work properly on pc (it just showed a white screen). So I went to the org and asked them how could I capture it, just to be safe.

Jeenio was also around there, as well as Sir Garbage Truck, which were still very sorry because they couldn't remember trace's face. Truck was also commenting me something about the importance of females in the scene of southern countries but he didn't finish the sentence and I am still intriged. So if Truck is reading this, it would be nice to know what you meant, if you can remember of course.

Anyway, the Ultrasound gig was about to start, so we went to have the first currywurst in the nice tent (which was less warm than inside the main hall).

There was quite a lot of expectation about the gig. I particularly felt intriged about how trace was going to play the visuals, and which songs they would play. Although I had convinced trace to show me the playlist some hours before, I had forgotten the list quite quickly, so it had no effect at all.

Ultrasound!

There they go, in the middle of nice shoutings from the spanish sceners which were dedicating the following words to Jeenio:

PUTA PUTA PUTA JEENIO ES UNA PUTA

PUTA PUTA, PUTA PUTA PUTAAAAAAAA

He was so moved that I thought he was going to start crying. You could even guess he had wet eyes… (And I have just remembered that he also was the star of the opening ceremony which was a kind of continuation of the invitation demo).

The gig was great! They were also helped by Zaania which seems to be very worried about something that she did wrongly but I must say that nobody noticed anything. The visuals were very funny too although I imagined that trace might be a bit stressed trying to get some syncronized thing with the rock music, but people liked the result (at least what I heard in my area).

Second mental gap

I think at a certain point appeared Ithaqua, Tekno, Wonder and Shash (Bixo had rented a car so they went and picked him up from the airport). I chatted with lots of people more but I can't really remember anything else, apart from coming back from the party in the minibus and feeling really sick.

BASS! training

Awakening was even worse but nothing that a good shower and breakfast powered by german pastries can't beat.

We went to a weird storage area where the BASS guys were practising, so trace could have an idea of how were going to be the songs. The place was near the river, in Bingen, and seems like it was used also for building all the decoration of the party, as there were lots of that white packaging thing everywhere, silicone, glue, various tools, etc.

They were a bit wasted: Jeenio had slept just one hour, Wonder might have slept something like that… Gargaj had even some wounds in his hands (because of the drumsticks). The bass player (sorry, I can't remember your name) had to leave and so did Jeenio. Then we took the opportunity to play a bit! First wonder gave me the BASS but it really didn't convince me so I convinced Trace to give me the guitar (which was Maali's guitar by the way) and that way I could play the electric guitar for the first time in my life! It was quite cool, even if it had some sort of green dust on it :-|

I think I need to get one guitar or I'll forget definitely all the few chords I knew.

Gastroscene

Once all that finished, we came back to our hotel and waited for the people to arrive, as they were still aslept (i.e. Ithaqua & co). During our wait we were entertained by Wonder and his hat and Julio-Iglesias-goes-skying sunglasses, which everybody had to test. Unfortunately, Merlucin has a tape where all of this is recorded.
And then we went to practise some gastroscene. Seems like the German are allergic to still water and the water comes sparkling from the taps. Or something like that. So we asked for beer when the first sparkling water glass finished. The food was great and it had a great amount of salad which is always very appreciated, specially during a party.

We had lots of discussions about charts and the ability one can gain to dominate the world just by hosting some charts, which was very funny too.

Fighting with Visual Studio 2003, 2005 and a stupid bug

Back to the party, I finally discovered which was the reason for the horrible bug which was preventing me of releasing my demo in the demo compo, and started fixing it on my mac. But I needed one pc to compile it too! Corsario/tlotb said he would help me, so we started trying to compile in windows as well. The problem was that I used visual studio 6 in my home pc, and he had vs2005 and 2003, none of them worked with my code because of some incompatibilities which I would have been unable to fix. But he did! And before the scene.org awards we had a win32 version of our engine. That was great!

Also Ithaqua came with an usb pen and asked if he could borrow someone's computer to upload his demo entry. When we all saw the title (cafre2) we got a bit scared… Somebody even said "This entry is really promising".

The Awards

Well, I suppose all the awards ceremony is recorded and everybody will be able to see what happened, and who were the winners. I will just tell that my back and my bottom suffered a lot, specially on the second part of the awards (after the break).

I also could experience the long queues which were appeared on the girls' toilette during the breaks. We were commenting that as we didn't pay the entrance, we didn't had rights for more toilettes. Well, I would pay if we could have more than just two toilettes for all the girls in the party. (In fact this girls enter for free rule is quite stupid, they should remove it at all).

When the awards finished, I hardly can remember what happened. I just know I had one idea in my mind: finish synchronizing the demo and upload it, and then socialize. But I wasn't able to do anything else that night. Trace just had finished the layers for the demo and he gave me them, and somehow we managed to arrive to the hotel, accompanied by the drunken boys from Zona Neutra, which were experiencing a different way of partying.

Fast demo synchronization

Even if I was quite tired I put the alarm quite early so I woke up, had the usual shower, and managed to finish the synchro for the demo in the hotel (without anyone annoying and asking once and once again have you finished it yet? are you doing something for the demo compo? can i have a look? why don't you put "bla" in the demo?). At around 13h, a pair of hours before the deadline, I went to the bus stop and found that everybody was at the hotel door, including Corsario (which is whose computer I needed in order to check that all was ok!).

I convinced him to come to the party place and help me checking the demo, instead of going to practise some gastroscene with the spanish guys. So we went there, checked that all was ok and submitted it with the intranet. It was funny to get an entry number #337. If only there had been 1000 prods more before…

Socializiiiiiiiiiing!! _o\ \o/ /o_

To celebrate that we had finished with all, we decided to have lunch. It was also the first time I have ever eaten a pizza with cucumber. Specifically, a spicy pizza with cucumber.

From that moment onwards I just remember wandering around the party chatting with everybody I knew (no I didn't make new friends, I wasn't feeling that socializing :P). The funny part was realising how quickly Maali had learnt the most popular word of the party (PUTA), as he greeted us like that:

Hi Maali!

Puta!

Obviously Corsario was quite surprised. A pity Maali didn't bring his PUTA t-shirt, by the way.

Also Iq/rgba showed us some experiments he had made with shaders and so on. What surprised us more is a little utility he had developed for playing with texture mapping without recompiling, just by changing the formulas used in the mapping. There was a good amount of people looking at that, as the way he managed to achieve quite different effects with just some mathematical factors, and his natural ability to do so, looked quite impressing. I would say it was the didactical moment of the party.

Then I remember being impatient for the demo compo to start. Really! I was willing to see the work of almost one year of thinking and coding in the bigscreen :D And while that moment arrived, we continued talking with lots of people and so on. Was funny.

BASS!!111onethousandonehundredeleven

And there was also the big moment of the BASS concert. I think almost all the spanish scene expedition was there in front of the stage, on the first row, like the Big BASS Fanclub. No one will doubt that the band members were quite pleased of having that devoted audience! They shouted BASS BASS BASS BASS!

It was delirious. And it was even more delirious when they started playing. It was ages since I had to move away from the mass in a concert, as they started to dance like in those heavy metal concerts were each person throws himself against the others and act like ping pong balls. Obviously my sense of self integrity and survival adviced me to get out of there before dissappearing under a mass of BASS fans, and so I did, while recording and taking pictures of all of that, for being able to bribe them later when they were sober. Which reminds me I haven't looked at the pictures yet.

The concert had some stelar appearances by Zania, and the ASD guys (Leviathan and Amusic) also got on the stage when one of their songs was played.

They played even a version of Smells like teen spirit, renamed as Smells like scene spirit, because of this years theme with the scene spirits and so on, which turned to be quite funny. I didn't expect that one! Trace was putting the lyrics for the song in the screen so everybody was able to sing while they continued in their weird savage
dance.

The best of all was that nobody was harmed during the concert. :-O

The democompo!

Finally it was time for the demo compo and for the long queue in the toilette, both at the beginning and in the break of the compo. As our demo hadn't been played in the first part, I thought that they had disqualified it or something like that. Corsario was also worried about that, he said that no demo submitted from his computer had been played yet (as cafre2 was submitted from that computer too) and he was fearing that they weren't uploaded properly. Stressful moments…

But finally, our demo was there and… woh! I never noticed it had such an amount of BASS in the music. That soundsystem is awesome. Luckily seems like some people enjoyed the demo as it was way more changing (and shorter) that most of the look-ma-I-have-a-3d-engine-I-will-bore-you-until-death demos which were played. And just after ours finished, cafre2 was played! omg omg! Tekno was trying to pump the audience as there was a mass of people dancing on one side and a mass of almost aslept people sitting hypnotised in front of the screen. I must say that I understand them, and I also did the same but I had released a demo so I was exempted of dancing (as I was terribly tired)…

Ok, I have no excuse. I'm plainly boring!

Following came the best demos of the compo. I don't know if it's good to have the prods played in quality order, even if it's just the organization tastes, but it usually tends to coincide with the real quality of the demos. Sometimes I think it could be better just to play them as they were submitted so it would be a bit more varied.

After the democompo everybody continued talking and being friendlier than ever, as always happens. The demoscene.tv guys made an interview to a drunk shash which I think is willing to see it to be able to remember what he said! :D

Basicly after all the excitement of that day/evening, the remaining of the night consisted in struggling to be awake while speaking with people. I specially can remember a conversation with mnemonix in which he tried to convince me to go to bcnparty, and release a demo, so that there's more competition in the demo compo. (As I don't think that I'm going to bcn this year, maybe you can do it for me and release more productions there, so mnemonix feels he's got competitors!)

Monday monday…

After leaving the hotel for the last time, we went to the party to see the prize giving ceremony. Which was quite confusing, sincerely. Starting with that decision of showing slides which didn't had nothing to do with the actual works, and continuing with the stupid idea of calling everybody up to stage at the same time. Funny when they ask "is that you? which prize did you win? are you really you?"

Is it that difficult to give prizes one by one? :-|

This ceremony dissapoints me.

Also I had to break one of my best new habits of this year and had to drink a coke. I hadn't drunk a whole bottle of coke (not even a single can) for almost four months and I had to do so because they didn't had real still water. You asked for still water, the guy at the infodesk promised it was still water, the bottle's label said "still water" but hell no! It was midly sparkling water, which I think is more disgusting than completely sparkling water.

Could please somebody explain me why? 8-|

Bye bye

Finally we left the partyplace, not too late as our bus was departing at 14h. Then we had a nice gastroscene stop in one italian restaurant, and finally a horrible nightmare thanks to the incompetence of Lufthansa plus the stupid security procedures which the US have exported worldwide and that lead you to have to pass like three times the normal controls, with lots of stupid details like having to take your laptop out of your bag, doing a control when the corridor ends, etc, etc.

Trace has explained it more shortly in his blog and I don't feel like writing it all. In short: LUFTHANSA SUCKS, and FRANKFURT MAIN STINKS. Avoid them for your mental safety!
I was so pleased when we arrived back home and everything seemed so normal and logical that I even felt the need to do another demo!

So all in all a very cool and motivating party. Then is when I don't want to go to any other party anymore, as no one will beat it (well, pmp will do, certainly).

And thanks to all for reading until here!

Yes, I do! Really!
You know what?

MSN Messenger and other instant messaging applications + bored people = scene is dead.

I'm following iq's wise philosophy lately and I'm not connecting to MSN at all these days. Just checking the e-mail each 2 hours or more (if I remember to do so), and using my time more efficiently, without being annoyed by people which ignore the BUSY status, etc.

Also there's just approximately 11 days left to Breakpoint! Suddenly, good fortune came back to my life and I managed to compile my code in windows and run the demo I'm preparing for the party. Looks like it's going to bring loads of fun.

And now… back to xcode in a quiet, non-interrupted environment ;-)

So there is little time to breakpoint06 and there's lots of expectations around it. Will it be the party which reactivates the scene definitely? Or is it really dead?

At least there are lots of people coming this year. Most of the spanish expedition which made it to breakpoint05 is said to repeat, along with new people like ayame or madgoblin (although I am not really sure if that is a good idea… anyway). SuperVIP's which didn't appear in parties some time ago, like Statix/Bluespoon, are going there too.

Also I have been asking famous people and all of them are preparing their productions for breakpoint. Some of them are working on it since tUM05!

I will try and release something there as I said in my 2006 to do list. I have been thinking and meditating about that issue and I believe I have some good ideas. It can be a good opportunity to test the system that trace and me designed and built, and see if it answers the Great Question: is it useful and productive or not? Unfortunately I'll have to create a pc version for showing in the bigscreen, as they are not accepting mac entries anymore, but I'll provide a Mac Os X version, most probably an universal binary so people with the new intel powered machines will be able to see the demo as well. And if not, go and buy a G4!

=_=
mañana más… o algo… =_=