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					  Spell it however you want...



.."Stereo Mike"
..Demo 
..Wired 98 
..Multi-OS Demo Competition
..3rd Place
..A production of the Immortals corporation 1998 (c)

...Full Credits  :

Code        :    Kombat
		 Silvatar
		 Rage

Graphics    :    Codger
		 Falcor_
		 Vector
		 Thor

Music       :    Kaos
		 Dark-Spirit

Two people were not included in the credits due to the fact that they joined
the work very late ( a few days before the party ) and becuase codger who
was incharge of the credits pics was gone and nobody could find the fonts he 
used, sorry Thor and Dark-Spirit.


(kombat)

...Preface :

   Ok, I started working on the demo lots of demo, some time after Movement97.
I didn't intend to enter it into any compo, I just had a few Ideas I wanted
to try out, so I just started throwing them in, after some time when a few
other members of the group saw it and said 'we should do something with this'
I decided to make it more of a demo. The upcoming party was Wired98 in 
Belgium, and I decided to take it there.

   Since I started doing the demo myself, it was very hard for the other 
coders to really get into it, thats why it remained more or less 'my' demo
all along. Silvatar really helped out by coding some of the parts, and Rage,
as usual found time to help out just a day or two before the party, but, no
prob. with that. Since Dark-Spirit is now in the army and doesn't realy have 
alot of time to work on music for demos, I chose a good friend of mine to be 
the musician of this demo, Kaos, better known as Oren Pasvolsky. We had a few 
problems with the music, first of all I was'nt too good in defining what kind 
of style I wanted for the demo, since I usually tell Dark-Spirit (Give me 
something, like rock, or house, and I want it to have good parts, and some 
slow parts, some combination of '303' and 'Rotaliator'...), except for that 
Oren was used to write 'slower' music than the one I have requested, and this 
was his first demo module. Eventually It came out pretty well, I would like 
to thank Dark-Spirit for taking the time to help Oren with the tracking of 
the module.

   Codger, a gfx man from Finland, was suppose to be the main gfx artist for
this production, but, he eventually appeared to be a very lazzy guy (like 99%
of the worldwide scene, I dont blame him) and totaly vanished a week before
the deadline, that's why a complete part of the demo (supposedly the only
massive 3D part) was cut out, and the final credits couldn't be done since
he wasn't there to do it (Sorry about that Dark-Spirit and Thor). Falcor_ our
dear friend from finland drew an excellent picture and finished it (as usuall)
a day or two before I left to Belgium. Except for that he also made a sketch
we intended not to ues but which I eventually did use (the b/w picture of a
man-duck a the demo logo/tunnel part). I am so terribly sorry Falcor_ but I
just could'nt fit the pic into the demo, having to keep the synchronization
good and all that we just couldnt, and I didnt want to just put it in the end,
But I will use it (and Pelle) in our next demo. I would like to thank Thor
who took the time to make us a small landscape for the domino part and doing
some timing with the domino falling (domino objects/keyframing was done in
code), but Daniel you could have been more cooperative, but no prob, ppl liked
the part, althogh It didn't come out like I wanted it to ;) I would also like
to thank my brother Elad (Vector) who stopped talking on irc or playing quake
for making a few very good textures, he will one day be a damn good gfx man ;)


...Some information about the demo :

   The demo, was created as I said before not to 'show off' at a party but
more for internal testing of some capabilities. Ideas, as usual in Immortals
demos, mostly by kombat, and implementation, also mostly by Kombat.
(I don't show off but when I deserve credit don't expect me not to take it ;)
All objects in the demo except for one box, 150 identical fish and a landscape
are generated in code. All keyframing which includes movement, rotation
and any abnormal behaviour of objects/modells/etc is done in real-time by code
using no 3ds keyframing or so. Not only is the movement of the objects
calculated in real time but also the camrea movement is calculated in
real-time.

   One of the most cool things (afaik) in the demo is the usage of random
seeds... you ask 'where', I say everywhere! all the paths, rotations, movement
and so of all the objects in the demo, except for the domino and the coca-cola
cans, are RANDOM, which means everytime you run the demo the fish will move
in different directions, in different speeds, the particle sources between
the two planes will move in different directions, the camera between the
planes will look at other places each and every time you run the demo.
The spheres will come out of the box from other places while the box rotates
in other directions and the camera looks at it from a different place...
well, you get the idea, I find this a very cool technique, and I hope other
people will implement it since its just much more fun watching a demo and
knowing that its going to look just a tadly different, thinking maybe this
time you can get a glance of one of the parts form an other angle you wanted.

   Now, to the most heavly coded parts. First of all the coca-cola, to all
of you who haven't noticed, the coca-cola cans are created in code in REAL
TIME, the vertices are rebuilt each frame according to the current state
of an internal keyframing and specialy coded animation engine. This part
was coded by Silvatar and he deserves all credits for it. Silvatar also
deserves all the credit for the actuall animation that he did in code, the
animation of all the coka-cola part is done in real-time according to many
weird functions silvatar came up with. Just to give abit information, we
remodell the coke cans each frame according to the state of 3 main objectives.
1st is the spine spline, its a spline that defines the Spine (vertical center)
of the coke can, 2nd is the rotation spline which defines how much the can
rotates in different heights, and 3rd is the scale spline which defines how
much the can scales in different heights. Using tricks to actually animate
these 3 splines (not using other splines) silvatar managed to create a smooth
and cool animation of these 2 coke cans, bravo.
   The second 'supposedly heavy' part is the domino part. Since we already did
a domino part in our first demo (Beyond/1995) we sort of knew what we wanted,
well, atleast I did. The idea was to create an improved domino handling
mechanism that will allow creation of massive scenes, and to tell the truth,
the system I created can handle tons of dominos, its was all up to the gfx
men. Anyhows, I wanted to not only do domino paths but also split domino
paths and do domino-rally parts in between the parts, we had some nice ideas
but due to the lack of time (I hope that was the reason) the domino part
didn't come out like I wanted it to, really not. Anyhows the domino collision
and animation mechanism was improved by Rage and Silvatar while I was at
Belgium, They added the ability to have 3 dropping dominos at the same time
which creates a much more realistic feeling.
   The greetings part was suppose to be much cooler but for some odd reason
we couldn't really do what we intended to do, I won't tell you what we
intended doing since we might still do it, but anyhows I still think the part
looks extremely good.
   We have the 'sphere comming out of box' part which I think looks really
cool, not much to say about it, just looks cool.
   Last but not least the 'ending' of the demo, another one of my ideas,
using the 'THX LaserDisk' sample (which taks approximately 1.7MB, sorry for
not having time to preperly compress it). the particle part which spells out
'Stereo Mike, Imr Co.' is actually from a demo I started doing about a year
ago but never relesaed, the part uses very weird motion blurring and
transparecy, so what I did was since the original part was written for an
8bit palletized display, I just took the code and pasted it into the demo,
with a fats 8bit-pal -> 16bit convertor and it ran fast enough so I left it ;)
   Something like 16 hours before the deadline they were showing 303 on the
big screen, I saw the mpegs of the actuall partyplace and said to myself,
"Thats something nice". Then it hit me, a few minutes earlier I met this
german guy who had his video camera with him, I ran over to him, blablabla,
dankeshen, etc, and shot a 15 seconds avi of the partyplace, came out pretty
nice at the end, but since I didn't have my own programs and wanted to display
the mpeg in b/w (just looks nicer) I had to compress the colored avi into
a colored mpeg while displaying a b/w mpeg, thus wasting some space, but I'll
fix that in the final version.

Supplement by Silvatar: Someone forgot to mention the fdt part and greets...
these don't get trivially coded in 10 mins, and I really worked alot on
them, especially the fdt... original idea for the internal (addative flat) 
tunnel  by Eclipse (you should ALL see Magic Biniou, gr8 demo, muzak rulez!),
and a few things at the part with the cube, like the mandel and the
distortion on the cube... and another thing, (sorry Daniel), but I did
all the final domino sync and movement improvements (credits for telling
me it moves like shit go to Rage, I wouldn't have done that otherwise),
it's a real shame we didn't have that massive 3d part, it could really
rock.
well, that sort of sums it up, and btw, coke animation wasn't too much
complicated - and I hardly got C1 continuity on my animation formulas...
(not even that at some points in time)
and btw - the addative scaler in the particle part (yes, we used spriter
for that,isn't it stupid), was written in 15-20 minutes by me, and the
asm-addative-no-jmps-16bit-doublepixel(!!) innerloop was written
by Rage (genious!! it worked at first compilation, u all know how
hard is ADDATIVE on 565 Hicolor), in about 15 minutes, that really rulled...
anyway, the particles in the greets part just move according to a nice
kinematic equation I thought of, involving 'rotor' (cross-prod velocity
and position on [xy]) really nice,
originally I wanted to do a collision detection with the Sierpinski fractal,
I got the algo working in my own 3d-engine, but it didn't when i placed it in
the demo ;( ....
one more thing... when kombat originally started coding the demo, he
had a bug in calculating the orientation quaternion for the fish...
so they looked like they moved all around in such a stupid manner it
rulled...I wanted it to be like that in the demo....btw, kombat also
forgot to credit his dog, Lloyd, for moral support and inspiration
for us all ;)

sorry i got a bit defensive about the credits, nm

just a few more facts about the demo :

.. The particle scene had 8,000 particles at the party version, but it just
   was'nt enough, so now its 10,000 polys.

.. The Mandelbrot set is rendered in real time, no rotozooming precalculated
   picture.

.. Due to the normal laziness of demo makes, all textures in the demo, except
   for two, were done fastly by a coder, Kombat.

.. hmm, no more special facts, see ya'


...Special Thanks's and Howdy's :

I will do this chronologically, although I'm sure I'll miss a few people.

..First of all thanks goes to my mother for having these tickets for me,
	giving me the opportiunities to visit any country/party I want (no
	I AM NOT A RICH LITTLE KID, the tickets are for free).

..Thanks to all my familly, including elad and lloyd for always supporting me.

..Thanks to Oren Pasvolsky who agreed to do the music for the demo.

..Thanks to Trashey/SmallBrain/Cycat/Masterboy (starting Israely sceners) for
  sitting on my ICQ list and always encouragins me to work on the demo.

..Thanks to Civax for running cfx and writinf cfx-news, Civax, please try
  to make our scene NOT die ;)

..Thanks to Codger for agreeing to do gfx for the demo although not doing most
  of it, and thanks to Falcor_ for always beeing there and drawing cool stuff.

..Thanks or maybe no 10x ;) to Rage for always writing what he had to write
  2 days before the deadline, this time I didn't have time to use the stuff.

..Thanks to Silvatar for choosing the righteous path in the demo scene,
  joining Immortals, doing quality code, and being ready to work 24hrs a day
  on a demo like a brave, non-lazzy, Immortals koder ;)

..Thanks to Psychic for taking an earlier flight inorder to meet me at
  Zaventhm airport and for being with me along all the party, you are one cool
  guy man Pshysh ;)

..Thanks to all the Wired organizing team for letting us sleep the day before
  and the day after the party at the party place, and for organizing such
  a cool party in such high standards. Special thanks goes to Jeff for being
  a cool guy, to Damien for also being a cool (and tall) guy, and last but
  not least warm greets to to PitBull/Imphobia for taking care of us, giving
  me more time to work on my demo, and as many tests as I need on the compo
  machine, and chearing me up whenever needed, reall big thanks man, and
  we'll talk about that ATI stuff ;)

..Thanks to the german group of people who's equipment I've used to capture
  the mpeg of the party place at the first day. Dankeshen, 'Obiteshen',
  Obidezen.

..Thanks to the net-crew for TRYING to give everybody a good network, I guess
  the internal nebui'd win95/98/nt network worked BUT ITS NOT A SMART IDEA
  TRYING TO CONNECT 700 PEOPLE TO THE INTERNET USING ONE 64k ISDN LINE!!!!!

..Lots of thanks to Trex from Israel who without we couldn't have transferred
  the module and updated source code from Israel to the partyplace, thanks
  a million Tzachi.

..Lots of thanks and howdy's go to Scorpik/Pulse and KeyG for being with us
  at the begining of the party, showing us where to get deacent food, and
  especially Scorpik for adding the 2 patters I needed at the end of the demo
  just a few minutes before the deadline ("how much do I have left ?", "10
  minutes", "9", "8"... ;)

..Howdys to all the people I met at the party (and remember I met), jeff,
  damien,other organizers,scorpik,keyg,pitbull,inpoia,smash,fuel guys,cocoon
  guys,and more.

..Thanks to the guys from ATI for giving out so many cards as prizes.

..Finally thanks to the Italian guy from London (I think) who showed us the
  way to the #1 bus station and waiting without untill the bus came, thanks
  alot man, I cought the flight ;)

..An extra special warm thanks for all the Wired attendors who voted (and for
  those who didn't) for our demo, special thanks to everybody for cheering
  so damn loud when Jeff called me to the stage. Thanks to everybody who
  took the time to find me at the partyplace and personally tell me he liked
  the demo, and special thanks to the gfx man form Cocoon who took the time
  on the stage using the big speakers to thank us (Immortals) for a great demo
  Thats demo-making-spirit man ;)

I think thats it, most likely I've forgotten 40% of the people I should have
greeted but life sux, here is my usual greeted people, I love you guys

Rage,Adept,Borzom,CyberEagle,Thor,Dark-Spirit,Sound-Virus,DJ-Crazy,Silvatar,
Falcor_,Civax,Turk182,T3a,Scroll-Lock,Yoav from YOE,Face,Riff-Raff,Shudder,
Atomic,Diffuse,Nick-S,Gambit,Drool,SmallBrain,Kaos,Turk182,Krembo,Vector,Kaos,
Cycat, Nimrod, Trashey, Masterboy, All Israeli Demo groups : Boost Up :)
Mali,Submissive,Scholar,Kalms,MAD,Pascal,Doj,Vastator,Statix,Mrz,Lnx,Ravian
Sqrt,Wog,Tonic,Skal,Karl,Deathscar,Tobiasf,Xyz,Ex,Blackaxe,Xls,Beta,FVision,
Codger,Hattara(3dpower:),Steffo,Dice,Vic,cremax,mri,Sol,Nitro,Unreal,Scorpik,
KeyG,PitBull,Darkness,Psychic

If I won't be too lazy you will be able to get some more info and links at
imrt.home.ml.org, and if you liked to demo please take the time to tell us
anything you think about it, we very much appreachiate feedback from people.

...A few words about the other demos :

I must add a few things cocernign the quality of the demos in wired, the
voting and all of that. This part is not going to be nice I'm gonna say
exactly what I think like I normally do ;)

First of all I need to say that I liked the first demo by Cocoon, and that I
mostly agree with the voters for choosing it first place, it had very good
music, very good graphics, very bad code to my regret, the demo crashed
several times, that I can understand but It went very slow on a p166 and also
on a p200, and it didn't do much to get to such slow speed. Anyhows the design
of the demo was totaly neat, the guy who thought of everythin should be well
credited, I especially liked the beginign with the 3d scene and the 2 sprites
changing everytime the beat changed. Just fix up that engine and think of
more than just effects for your demos and you are one hell of a demogroup :)

From now on this gets ugly. Ok, no offence anybody, you can always get better,
and please dont blame me or dislike me later, try to be objective. all the
rest of the demos at wired, were really, ahem, not good. The only two demos,
except for cocoons and mine's, that I think were worth the voting were the one
by Fuel and the one by Blabla. I chose the words 'worth voting' very carefully,
I won't speak about the fuel demo since it doens't matter. what I will talk
about is the blabla demo. Once again guys dont take this to the heart this is
just something I need to say. The demo was very, like, bad. the engine was
very, like, bad. I still dont know if it was 8bit/true-color becuase the colors
were all the same and terrible, the camera movement was slow/annoying. The
textures were terrible and the lack of mipmapping was screaming. The only
nice thing were the reflections but that sort of summs it up, the scenes were
extremely bad/boring. I dont want to make you mad guys, if you've got this far
it wouldnt be hard for you guys to make a good demo, you have the talent and
capabilities, but someone tell me, how did this demo come 2nd. Its just that
eventually we all did alot of work to come out with this demo which I think
that is mortly very good, original, nice to look at, hell even the ppl at
wired cheered very loud (louder than wired speakers) 3 times during our demo,
this didn't even happen for the Cocoon demo (the parts were the sheep falling
down, the domino, and the thx laserdisk sample). And watching my demo getting
after such a demo as the one that got 2nd place, makes me fell, I don't want
to say cheated, or that I think something stinks here, I dont think ppl go
that low, but I would sure like to know what caused the voters to vote for
this demo, just for curiosity, maybe i can do the same next time...

till then

farewell

Ohad Eder Pressman
Kombat/Immortals
tel   : 972-9-774-2244
email : eder@bigfoot.com
web   : imrt.home.ml.org

time  : 14:23 (Belgium Time, 15:23 Israel time) 20/07/1998
place : somewhere over germany in an el-al 757 airplane on my way back home.

Signed !
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