My Optimise'99 Reportback
by Rawhed

Well I'm writing this over a month after the actual compo, so I dunno how much I can remember. But here goes....

A lot of planning went into Optimise this year. We'd originally wanted it to be in 1998, but that just didn't happen. The main reason for Optimise'99 was to try to revive the SA demoscene - as well as have lots of fun :) Viper wanted this compo to be different from previous compos. He wanted it to be more of a PARTY. So when Roelf emailed us about having the party at the Horror Cafe we jumped at it. Up until the day of the compo, only Viper had seen the Horror Cafe, so Maverick and I had no idea of what it was going to be like - except for Viper saying how "cool" it was. :)

I'd been coding our demo - "Kick me and give me coffee"(a name derived from a phone conversion between Deadpoet and I) for about 2 weeks and Deadpoet was coming to stay with me for a week before the compo. He arrived clutching PC box for dear life and had brought all sorts of weird paraphanalia. Deadpoet and I immediately set up a our "production lair" for the next week of composing, drawing and coding sessions. We certainly didn't skimp on supplies. Bottles and bottles of coke were deleted, as well as chips, smarties, fizzers, and of course coffee. I can safely say that after that week we were both feeling a bit weird. We also had two mascots to get us through the work. Ziggy and Inflatable Alien. Ziggy is a tiny tiny psycho teddybear that Deadpoet brought up, and Inflatable Alien is an inflatable alien which I have.

Deadpoet and Rawheds Lab

During this time of fun we did many very weird things - as only two people coffee-high, sleep deprived sceners people can do. Weird videos were made with my videocamera and stored as mpeg...hopefully never to be seen again. We walked around with words like "coffee" and "coder" written in on our forheads. After a while all the tracking, drawing and coding totally got to us(and we'd run out of food) so we ventured outside and decided to spray paint parts of our machines black. Deadpoet did his keyboard and his mouse and I did the chasis of my machine. We underestimated the amount of spraypaint it would take and had to send my cousin Matthew(Maatatachoo) to the shops to get more. It was dark and we were still outside on the grass - Deadpoet trying to do each key individually, eventually giving up and just spraying the whole board. At the end we both had black hands - which we took to Optimise since it was hard to get it all off. I was also sent on a few errands by Viper to get things like cardboard and pens and things for wallsigning. With all the fooling around and stuff we found little it hard to sit down and work but we did eventually.

Deadpoet was working on his songs and graphics, while I was coding our megademo and drawing my art entery(smurfbum). We worked around the clock, until it was the day of the compo. The night before the compo I phoned Maverick on his cellphone. He was at work! He - like us - was frantically working on his enteries at work, and said that he would pick us both up the next day(thanks Mav). We continued to phone eachother through the night to check up how we were getting on. It was quite weird :) Maverick must have left work at about 5am or something. Deadpoet was exhausted and kept collapsing the moment I left him alone. I was trying to get hold of Maverick who was surposed to pick us up. But he was asleep at home! :)

Deadpoet collapsed

Deadpoet had now collapsed on the couch and I was walking around wondering when Maverick would come or if we was going to sleep through Optimise. Luckily he arrived and I woke up Deadpoet and we jammed our stuff into Mavericks car. Yeah we were off to Optimise what fun! Off to Maverick's work we went - picked up his PC, the prizes and the digial camera - doh! they locked it away..argh. Oh well - off we go. Driving through central Joburg, taxis, madmen - but eventually we got there.

I didn't quite know what to expect, but I did notice that the Horror Cafe was right next to SAB, which was a very good sign. In we all went to see what was happening and to say hellos. I was immediately hit by the interior of the Horror Cafe. Everything was GREEN and PURPLE. Wooooo, far out :) Adorning the walls were all these weird monsters and scifi imagery. It was 2 stories and everybody had started setting up their PCs on the top level. Down below there was the project, dancefloor, bar and munchies department. I found out later that underground was a place to sleep with couches, matresses and a shower. I can't remember exactally but the first person I think I met was ColdBlood. Wow, its so cool meeting people IRL. I said hello to a few other people and then we remembered about the tens of thousands of rands of stuff in the car - so we carted that inside before it grew legs. Then, hobbling along came Denthor/Asphyxia! I'd met him once before in Durban, but it was really cool so see that he's made it. He and a buddy were off to seek munchies as apparently there were none inside. Unfortunately Denthor had had a car accident a week before the compo. He'd collided with a cow, and was luckily better-off than the cow. Thus he wasn't able to complete his 128k entery.

Early Optimise scene

When I got there there weren't a lot of people, which was a bit dissapointing. But the party must go on! Maverick and I decided to set up downstairs while Deadpoet set up next to Cyberphreak. After a bit of table moving our machines were ready to rock. After a bit of soundtesting the first "welcome to Optimise'99" announcement was made and everybody cheered. The first surprise compo was also announced - the surprise graphics. We had 30mins to draw any of the weird pics we could see on the walls. While I was drawing my pic a few people came downstairs and we chatted which was cool. After I'd finished my art I went back to coding our megademo. Coding coding coding, then erkkk... harddisk failure.

Doing surprise art downstairs

I couldn't believe it. When I booted into Win95 all the files were rearranged. Some 400meg .mpeg files which I had on my root D: were now scatted in my start menu! I jumped to dos and there were fies with random character names and other weird files registering 4gigs on my 2gig drive! Things were not good. I thought it might be a virus but while scanning it got to a sector and said something like "Disk Failure". EEEK it seemed physical. I was very scared as I didn't have a recent back of my work(since I'd been working on is so frantically as home with Deadpoet). Eventually I just pulled out my one HD and coded the demo on the other. Things seemed fine after that.

For the rest of the day some other compos were held. I can't remember exactally which ones. I think the 4channel music and the raytraced graphics. I'd been meeting other people like Seeker(all the wa from Bloem), NiMH and Cyberphreak and chatting with them. NiMH's raytraced entery wasn't in shown! I ran to Viper and Strider(Who were running the projector machine) and we sorted it out quickly. NiMH's raytrace was shown. I was on the dancefloor watching the enteries and I heard someone say something like "wow, that doesn't even look rendered - it looks real". NiMH won in the end. Later that night was the open compo and I was going to enter a little music video I'd been working on. While Deadpoet was staying with me, I borrows my uncles video camera and connected it to my tvcard(new toy). I then used some of my figurines + Deadpoet and made a stop-motion video. It took a lot of time but was REALLY worth it. The one video has Deadpoet sitting and all these (normally) inanimate objects moving around him. Its really weird. Unfortunately those videos were on my other harddisk and I tried to get them but they were dead. With only 30min until the Open compo I resurected a Worms clone game I'd been working on a few months ago and entered that.

Maverick and I were the only people downstairs and the network cable wasn't long enough to go downstairs. It was then that I decided to bring my PC upstairs so that I could connect to the server and upload Worms. Seeker had been badgering me the whole day to setup next to him, so I obliged. Unfortunely the network idea didn't work, so I had to give my hardisk to Roelf and then he uploaded it. What a mission. The open compo was really cool because more people had arrived and it was night time. The open enteries were all VERY good. 2 MP3's were entered which is a first for a SA demo compo. Serenity had made a musicvideo which was totally kickass on the bigscreen. Protons group entered a demo of a game they are working on. We tried to get it to work but it just wouldn't. Hopefully they'll enter it again next year because it was really extremely welldone what I saw of it. Then it was time to demo my worms game. I made the worms do things like jump off cliffs, I demoed the weapons like the remote-control mission. People were laughing, it was brilliant :)

Wallsigning

The cardboard for the wallsigning sat blankly on the wall - I guessed nobody knew what it was there for, so myself and Lord_Jabberwock put our marks on the wall. People slowly got the idea and joined in. By the end of the compo there were 3 big sheets full of art, signatures and funny comments. Travis gave a really cool talk about game development down by the bar. Everybody listened intently and asked him questions. It a very cool talk. I took a photo with a flash while he was saying "and I can see...*flash*...erm, i can't see".hehe. Went downstairs afterwards and had a nice conversation with Caz about particle systems, and then joined Viper and Strider in the vote counting.

Travis talking

Later on that night we all got drinks and food, and I met other people like Trixter, Toadflakz and Miktar. Trixter was trying to make an entery for the surprise compo - to code a maze. For some reason he had a fixation on having a "fractal maze" and spent the night trying to figure out how to code it. People started to leave for home(faders) and the people that were left were playing multiplayer games(mostly) or working on their enteries. The fun started about about 2am when we started running all the cool international best demos on the bigscreen. We pumped up the sound system and gathered around the bigscreen for a feast of visual and audio extacy. Viper and Strider were running the demos until I managed to convice them to let me DJ(Demo Jockey :). The projector machine was upstairs, with a balcony view of the demos downstairs. I ran demos, then hurried downstairs to view them BIG and up CLOSE. Then just before the end of each demo I ran back upstairs to run the next demo. Up and down those stairs I ran, yet I felt no pain because I absolutely and totally enjoying myself. My god, demos look SO rad when they are BIG and LOUD :)

At about 4am most people had left and there was only a few people left watching demos. Viper and Maverick were exhausted and went into the basement(followed by Opium and Cyberphreak) to sleep. Unfortunely for them I was still running up and down the stairs watching demos. Eventually my fun was stopped when Winblows crashed one of the demos and I had to restart the PC - which had a bios password. Argh! It was Striders box and I didn't want to do anything with it, so sadly I had to stop watching BIG LOUD demos.....and Maverick and Viper finally got some sleep :)

Maverick, Viper, Cyberphreak and Opium sleeping

Only a handful of people stayed awake the whole night, which I think is sad considering its a demo compo and we hardly ever have one. Myself, NiMH, Miktar and Trixter were the only people who stayed awake. Days before the compo Deadpoet and I were talking about making signs that said something like "All those who fall asleep at the demoscene will be subject to deadpoet and rawhed. You have been warned." But the day before the compo, we were so tired ourselves(having not slept) we actually decided not to do that, since it was likely that we would both fall asleep. Deadpoet didn't have anywhere to sleep at the compo and ended up sleeping on the hard floor, then be moved to a spare mattress, then he got kicked off and worked on his music. Roelf was the funniest of all the sleepers. He had walked in about about 4am and setup his sleeping bag right in the middle of the room, inbetween tables and chairs. Everytime someone wanted to walk they had to jump over Roelf and so people were jumping over him the entire night. I had great fun laughing at the sleepers and later on I went downstairs to take a snapshot of Viper and Maverick. Luckily the bar stayed open the whole night! Coke was very expensive, but a necessity for the long hours of coding.

Diskthrowing

The sun started to rise and the corpses slowly arose. All accept Mavericks' which was completely motionless. I woke up Maverick who couldn't believe it was 10:30am already, and a bunch of us left to throw disks and CDs. I can't remember much about the disk throwing, except that we were a very dangerous crowd. It was quite windy and our projectiles were going everywhere. Viper and NiMH were the most impressive for distance - except Viper threw horizontally and NiMH vertically. When we returned more people had arrived, so they went down for diskthrowing part 2. I decided to stay behind and code. Deadpoet and I were working frantically on our megademo and needed nourishment. Due to the heavy consumption of coke the previous night I had no more money left for a pizza. Being the scavengers we are, we managed to acquite pieces of pizza from various people. The pizza was damn good too!

Spent all day coding

I can't remember much of that day as I spent most of it coding our megademo. The music was BOOMing, so we had to use headphones to test Deadpoets demo tune. Time went by, and eventually it was 1hour until the democompo. We weren't going to make it. I had a serious look at our demoplan, and decided that I would cut out a whole lot of sections and basically just try to get a finished decent demo. After an hour of coding it was done. It wasn't as nice as we maybe hoped it would be, but it was certainly decent. The only problem was that I wasn't connected to the network so I couldn't upload it. The 128k and megademo section was starting up, everybody had gone downstairs to watch. It was dark now and I was looking for spare UTP on the floor to plug into my box. I was missing the 128k section and still couldn't find cable. Eventually I did, and guess what...Boom again, my PC died. That same harddisk problem was happening. I couldn't boot into Winblows because some of its files had been damaged. The Megademo section was now about to start so I ripped out my harddrive and plugged it into Roelfs machine to send the files across the network. All his connections were different, but eventually I sorted it out. I was getting pretty upset now because could hear this stunning music around me and could hear "oooh" and "aahhh" from below, and I was missing it. I couldn't boot my harddisk on Roelfs machine either. Eventually Maverick came to have a look but he couldn't get it working either.

The announcment was made that my demo couldn't be shown and that the prize giving would happen in a few minutes. I hadn't seen the megademos or the 128ks. I offer this advice to people: When you come to the compo - make sure your productions are finished and backed up. If mine had been I would have enjoyed the compo a lot more, and I would have got to speak to more people instead of coding.

Although I was dissapointed about what had happened, I quickly got over it and started to enjoy myself again. I went downstairs and met Eclipse/OO which was cool since I'd spoken to him so much on IRC before. The prize giving was held and there was a really cool scene spirit. It was great to see everybody together, and was a great ending to a great compo.

Everyone filtered out eventually and Maverick drove Deadpoet and myself back home. We were all very tired and just wanted to sleep. We got home, dumped out pcs on the floor and crashed. The next morning when I woke up something was scratching my legs. It was sharp and under the duvet. I reached under to see what it was, and pulled out the sharpened CD which had been used for diskthrowing the previous day. A lethal weapon now. Then I remembered that we had to get Deadpoet back to Durban. It was 11:30 and I phoned the bus company - there was a bus leaving at 1:30pm. My and my cousin Anthony drive to the mall to get a ticket while Deadpoet frantically packed all his posessions. Got the ticket and was back by 12:00, then I read on the ticket that the bus leaves at 1pm. I didn't even know where the bus station was. Deadpoet running around, Inflatable Alien pushed out of the way, me looking for a mapbook. Driving fast to destination unknown, we eventually got there. Typical..the bus was 2 hours late.

Sleeping with the diskthrowing CD

I'd like to say a big thankyou to the organisers, all the people who came to Optimise'99, everyone that entered and our sponsors. See you all next year!