soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

I was planning on writing this but trace was faster and posted some details on the wrong place - i.e. pouet's bbs, which has generated a lot of sceptic comments to say the least! Anyway here's a brief summary of what Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Ubuntu, suggested past Saturday at Sundown 2006:

He basically offered the demoscene a new exposure channel so that we can get more people interested about it; this new channel would consist in replacing the usual boring boot screens with something a bit more funnier: a little intro!

While it looked quite cool it also was somehow vague and imprecise, as it happens always that someone gets such kind of ideas in new fields. But Mark explained that they weren't going to let developers/demosceners go in the wild, but instead work with them to define and provide a basic framework for exposing the available functionalities during boot. That framework may be extended and improved in the future, using the experience gained in previous versions, as any people with common sense can expect. So first versions would maybe just allow for software rendering but future ones could take care of any available hardware for accelerated graphics, for example.

On the other hand, he obviously agreed that there would be official intros, which would have the look and feel of the pertinent ubuntu distribution, but there would be open room for including lots of other contributions so that every person which installs ubuntu can choose which one does he like more. Even have a random one each time they boot… As he said, it means millions of people are booting ubuntu everyday. That's millions of hits for the demoscene. If this is not a way of promoting it in real geeky environments - and not the usual art & design environments which most coders feel annoyed at the mere thinking of, just stop reading this, go away.

There was also some more talk about how to implement it; the model that I understood they were proposing was simply to ask developers to create something which would get passed from time to time the current loading percentage, so that they could update the demo accordingly, just in case they wanted to show a "timeline" and not only a single nice effect, etc.

And there was also some discussion on how to add more scener content to places like the login screen - like some scenerish effect running in background while the computer is awaiting for a user to log in.

After Mark's presentation, Navis, Smash and xWize were talking for a good while with Mark but I don't know why I felt a sudden shyness attack and preferred to watch them and wonder what were they talking about :D
So maybe if they read this, they can provide us with the ultimate details.

In any case Mark said if anybody is interested, just drop him an email, I think he said mark at ubuntu.com.

I hope this helps a bit on the confusion which has been generated because of not having a record of the chat. I personally find this idea quite interesting, although I am not sure of being able to contribute until some kind of framework is there, but I'll try to keep updated on this topic.

Ok so there has been the oldskool music compo. They didn't show the patterns in screen because they said "it would reveal the song's author". I'm surprised they are still so concerned about namevoting nowadays, after all, we always showed the patterns view in xmplay when playing the multichannel/chiptune entries in ifparty. Anyway, there were quite cool tunes there, and there were also a lot of them, actually! :)

They haven't played the high quality entries yet, although partymeister reveals there's just a few entries in that compo (absolutely opposed to spanish parties, where there's a relation of 1:10 between oldschool and newschool music compos). Maybe they will play them later.

I've been having some interesting conversations with Navis and Smash. Navis was asking about "that girls group" and I told him it was me! hah it was fun, after having been talking with him for a good half an hour. Sigh, I'm not as famous as I thought :P

Now there's nothing happening in the partyplace - people keeps chatting, etc… let's see what's going on later, I saw there's a demo by ASD…, and also Gasman was showing something for spectrum which looked quite funny. Lots of ooohh oooh to come!

Music compo is about to begin but meanwhile I'll describe a bit the party. This is being held in Budleigh Salterton, a small village by the Sea, near Exeter and Devon.

The party place, a kind of local activity center, is quite cosy. It remembers me a lot to Bcnparty's partyplace, the Cassinet d'Hostafrancs, but even more "home like". There's a kitchen where we can serve ourselves with coffee and tea, cereals, etc. The organisers and in general everybody are very kind, offering all sorts of help and attention they can provide, for example, preparing the arrangements for travelling from the train station to the village.

We feel so thankful! :-)

There's also lots of scene activity. We are sitting near some spectrum users, I believe they are from raww, but there is also Bonkers/Tolou with his Amiga, and some more people with Atari's. The best of all is that they really use them, they are watching demos and doing all sorts of stuff with them at any time in the day.

About the usual alcoholic drinks issue, there has not been any problem to date. And even the orgo instructiones were: crack up a beer and enjoy the party, just so you see. Everybody has been behaving, socialising and chatting about this and that. A very relaxed atmosphere.

There's only one minor flaw, they are relying on the partymeister tentation too much, and most of the time the big screen is just used for showing the timetable, etc. They played some demos (from Demo or Die DVD's) some hours ago but would be nice to see more…

Anyway, I'm going to see what are people doing while trace finishes his last weird experiment (I have to find out who's playing hardcore music … I feel the subwoofer from here) :D

Hmmm … finally managed to get internet working. They have just shown the graphics for the oldskool compo, using the original machines!

There have been three entries, which is pretty amazing for nowadays standards :P

I loved the one called Water of wild agony, the title is amazing, and even if it's 128 colours it has some reminiscences of EGA color palette, don't know why…

This midday the founder of Ubuntu, Mark (!), came to the party and proposed a new demo category: creating a short intro for being shown while the system is booting, for promoting the demoscene at the same time than we stop boring the user with a plain progress bar. Reactions to this have been mixed, and people are still shocked and doubtful about it.
Smash and Navis are discussing about experiments and generating data. Meanwhile trace is modelling very weird objects with a program whose name I still don't know - and then applies weird materials to it. Experimental is the word of this demo compo, I presume.

More to come later… I have to upload my mp3 entry!

After some months dedicated to little and unimportant businesses, such as getting a fantastic tan which left as soon as it arrived, and finding a new job, I finally half-made my mind about the future of thisisnotanengine. For whoever which do not know what is it, it was our answer to the supercomplicated demosystems around there which are more focused in 3d stuff than in sequencing. It started simple, with a flash sequencer, but with the addition of blackpawn to the team it has grown big and powerful into a binary mega sequencer - but still simple and easy!

The main idea is very erm… simple… we have something similar to MIDI files but for sequencing a demo. The sequencer (the demo studio) helps you build the sequence, but you can also build it yourself, since it is an XML file. In fact, I did it like that for tube demo, but it's not something you would recommend to everybody. That XML contains a list of resources and a list of when the resources are used, along with usual things as modifiers, parameters, etc. And it can be read by any "engine", which does not neccessarily have to implement everything defined by the XML - it simply ignores what it does not understand. This allows you to sequence with a platform and produce a result for another platform. For example, Holy guadalupe! is a flash demo but it was sequenced with the demo editor which runs in windows.

While I was making "tube", trace and blackpawn were working on the demosystem, and they had to make certain changes to the definition of the XML file. I just decided to left the implementation of these changes in my version of the code "for later", since I knew they would take me quite a lot of time to implement.

Although the current version of my player is more decent than the first one (used for vslpx), it is still far from being clean. I just didn't feel like modifying the parser/loader in C++ again, so I decided it was a good moment to start experimenting with (tadaaaaa) python! (I don't know much python yet, though, but seems that its learning curve behaves quite well, one day you're writing 1+1 programs and next day you are writing the next big Web 3.0 project).

The main idea is to build a library in C++ which will implement the graphics and sound code, and leave the remaining to python, connecting everything with some kind of bindings like the ones provided by Boost.Python or SWIG. But keeping things simple. Even if I started using STL, some things still get horribly complicated in C++ but would be much easier with Python, and the inverse. And I tend to get paralysed when I see code which is excessively complicated (specially if it could be simpler), so that's not good.

Another goal of this is to stop depending on any IDE for compiling. That is, even if I'll use XCode for writing the code and all of that, I am trying to avoid using it for managing the project settings. My aim is to use Make for these tasks, since configuring a project with XCode's interface does not provide as much visibility as a makefile does. It could also help me with other goal, which is to get rid of Visual Studio in Windows. I want to investigate which free and modern compiler can be used, specially if it does not annoy me with false STL warnings. Also I presume that using the same or similar compiler (barring platform differences) would help me with the crossplatform development.

By the way, now that we have a fully working computer with decent graphic cards and ubuntu installed, I will probably try to get a linux version as well. From my experience it is relatively easy to get my code working in different systems, now that I have learnt not to use proprietary functions, so it shouldn't take too much time.

I am still in the research phase. I first started with Edwin Jakobs homepage (who is a very famous dutch scener), where he related his experiencies with C++ and Python in order to build pom pom, their scriptable engine. From there I began testing SWIG in order to get a simple test library which could be able to open a window with a certain background color (specified from python) and play a sound file (also specified from python). But I haven't managed to get to that yet… I'm running into lots of problems mainly because of my horrible ignorance of building anything else apart from a simple console application and the funky differences between usual GCC conventions and Apple's implementation of GCC - but I'll find out the solutions somehow!

More to follow… but meanwhile if you have any experience in building dynamic libraries for mac or in doing exactly what I am trying to achieve, I'll love to know about it!