Demoscene

tube by xplsv

After having been to Breakpoint 05, I totally wanted to make a demo for Breakpoint 06, and that was way before the "actual size" joke. Even in those days, Breakpoint's screen and sound system were already huge and decidedly better than any other system at any other party I had ever attended.

I had already been working on my new "not-engine" (not joking, internally it was called thisisnotanengine) for several months when I realised that it was little time for Breakpoint and I still hadn't gone pass the very basic effects with my new system. So all the grandeur dreams I had about the superdemo I was going to release at that BP ... well, they had to be postponed and I thought that it was sort of the right time for the tube demo.

I actually had been wishing to make a demo about the tube for a long time, but it was that kind of ideas that you keep on background for a long time, not paying much attention to it. When I finally decided, I was enthusiastic! I don't like to repeat myself, so here is the quite complete making of, including maps and miscellaneous trivia, that I already wrote back in 2006. It details how I recorded the movies that then are shown in the demo and all that.

tube by xplsv

So the demo starts going down the stairs, several times, more or less synchronized with the music. It was a game of hit and miss to synchronize the videos because all the "stretching" was done entering the adjusted frames per second manually. When I read some people dismissing the demo as only video I would smash them in their face, but then they probably can't tell a delicately crafted brick from a very ordinary brick, dismissing both as only a brick!. Bunch of pricks...

I guess in a couple of years this Victoria tube entrance will probably look very retro, since they are planning on redeveloping all the area and expanding the tube and all that, so this will fit with the whole nostalgia theme in the demoscene.

The demo then shows 4 times the same sequence of videos, but each time applying one of the image filters I had devised. I know, I should have made them using shaders, not manually altering each pixel and copying it back to OpenGL as a texture. My bad. I'll promise I'll behave in the future :P

tube by xplsv

It's funny that the guy which is in front of the opening door had noticed I was recording stuff in the train minutes before, and he had just produced a handy small camera and did the same. I wonder if he was thinking about making a tube demo as well!

tube by xplsv

Then there's some distort applied to several images which will look highly familiar to every London commuter (the mighty Mind the Gap, the Severe Delays... oh the joy!).

tube by xplsv

And finally the greetings are a big dot matrix screen floating over a scene which happens to be a recording of the tube entering Bank when coming from Liverpool Station. If you want to live the same experience, just hop on the Central Line at Liverpool Street, and travel Westbound!

Why images and not actual videos?

It has a simple explanation: it's simpler (no pun intended). If I had to load true videos I would have need to find out a library or something that could work in several platforms, but at the same time not use too many megabytes of space. So since I had done a test of playing several images "like a videos" some months ago and I deemed it "good enough", I chose this option.

Code

As usual, the code is in my git repo:
  • Browse it
  • Check it out: git clone git://github.com/sole/demoscene.git Then it is in the releases/xplsv/tube directory

Extra bonus

Here's an additional bonus that maybe you've already watched somewhere else: the demo played live for the first time, at Breakpoint 2006!

It is immediately followed by Stravaganza's Cafre 2, and they totally managed to turn crazy everybody in the party!