Posted By
Luca
on 2014-08-15
15:21:18
 |  Re: Evoke 2014
After these few days passed since Rocket Science has become a reality for all of us, now it's time for me to put down some of my thoughts about it in a post, and share'em around to compare opinions among us.
I still was on holiday at my parents'city when I've watched Rocket Science for the first time by my phone from the Decca's YouTube channel, few hours after its crushing victory at Evoke 2014.
Honestly, I wasn't been able to believe to what was running on the little screen :o Moreover, YouTube was reporting more than 16' time to the end, yet unbelievable! "Must see this shit on the real iron!" was the only sentence my mind could babble.
A little note aside for Evoke. That German party has got bigger and bigger, and as now, it's one of the most reliable places where you can be sure your work would be eaten judged and fairly evaluated by an experienced audience, whatever you did on whatsoever platform. One thing you can argue from the party pictures is that people smile all the time, they are very happy to be there! And this particular is the heaviest sign to say that, yes, people are enjoying it so much.
Being an almost 2 years task involving few dudes, Rocket Science represents the quantum leap that covers 30 years of distance between the little C16/Plus4 scene and the bigger ones like C64 and Amiga, accomplished by people with busy lives, sons, jobs, wives...and nonetheless with the attitude of loving to code on the Plus/4. Whereas the C64 scene has seen the rise of groups like Offence, taking in fresh new visual effects in super-duper productions, Rocket Science does the same, showing the similar modern quality stuff, and evolving what can be done specifically on the 264 machines instead of humbly follow what the big ones are doing.
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Let the trackmo flow, and let's see what's on the screen, then.
First of all, you've been warned, this demo lies on 40 tracks format disksides. Think about this before transfering it on a real 5.25 disk! It's the 1st scene record: can you cite to me other Plus/4 productions on extended disk?
Screen chars vortex to clean the screen. It's a warning. This talks you about quality, this says:"Finished transitions ahead, expect for more of these". This begins to make the difference.
After a turbo loader, smart usage of glitches and zoom4 graphics, and the first picture by Nero, a hires one.
At this point, a Krill's trackloader (turbo again or not? I guess yeah) should start, but at the moment I have to say this may happen or not: several times, the loader stucks and the whole show crashes. As an example, marcos64 watched the demo more than twice on his C16+64K with no problem. Let's see what will happen in the near future in order to fix this...or not. 
Degauss has composed 5 (5!) TED tunes for this trackmo. The demo flow put the most glitchy ones first, then it melts into the harmonious ones. I love all of them, they fit so well in the respective moments of the demo. I've run the standalone tunes too, and watching the rasterlines on the screen, it seems to me that they don't interrupt at 312/2=156 lines each, as usual, probably in order to preserve the raster when it touches the visible effect, am I right Ingo? 
And yes! Great control of a zoom4 field, nice turtle for a pulse graph and excellent vector starfield. What can be argued since the very beginning is this: there's a storyboard behind the demo. How many Plus/4 demos d'you remember having a story bounds in which it flows? It's a 2nd scene record. In my very limited skills, I slightly approached the same way with Thalassa...and of course there's no room for comparing, do you agree with me?
The Nero Show starts, with a bigger-than-screen MCM pic. His style looks awesome, his contribution covers a gigantic slice of the overall success this demo reached today. Probably, his working process starts with a conversion from higher leveled machines, because here and there you can see some blocky colours. But hey, to be clear:
 
hand on heart, would you really criticize this stuff? No, really? Me neither 
I'll never talk again about transitions, you got what I meant, but e.g. I appreciate so much touches like the blinking of the author's sign after some pics have been loaded.
The text scrolling in that bitmap is so fluid and original, so is the idea of that plasma while loading. Then, the chessboard in a brand new fashion, and that Censor-like color tunnel effect I've seen in the last months quite anywhere, smartly adapted for the different color settings of the Plus/4. Watching it has been like some would say me:"We do ours and theirs too".
Fullscreen FPP, a real FPP, the fight sessions against badlines begin. Note aside: roughly, because of the luma settings, Plus/4 has to fight against 2 badlines per row, C64 has only one. The female face moves into a very big portion of the screen. Timing, we don't fear you.
Floormapping, and the first real extensive and complete two-scenes greetings I've seen, 3rd scene record! Hey, that's me! 
Enigma part, would say simple but looks so cool by design. Why is the ship asymmetric? Weird... Then plasma, under the unleashed power of zoom4. Then again, two nice color transitions. The landscape is a color play, and that's why we haven't tagged it as a landscape effect. Both too nice, anyway.
Bang, the first killer effect: use a twister like a scroll. No, not the same pleasant but rough way Beggars Aren't Choosers did, but that real one as seen in these months, e.g., in the Offence stuff. And with rasters on the back. And oscillating on the X axis. And with the snow Plus/4 bug used as an advantage.
Basically, if I got it, it's like: let's play $FF1A/1B/1F per scanline picking the right slice we need for that character, just like we did for a 6x6 mega scroller where we read a table for any single letter. I can only say <3
The voxel tunnel. We knew only a similar stuff shown in Monopsy 2, and we knew so little about this that we've never created any tag for that effect. Now there's one, for this and that. Say thanks to who? Right.
It's turn disk time. Aaaand yes, 4th scene record: the first prod that automatically loads from the second side once you turn it. It's an obvious feature, say, on C64, since years. Not the same here in the Plus/4 scene.
Ok, let's remove columns 0 and 39, we're ready to $FF07 another marvel from Nero, even though there's some little mismatching inbetween the pics here and there.
The second killer effect! Did I just say "total control of badlines"?. Part of the raster has been used to scroll a megascroller with alternated lines, in order to let the remaining ones FPP as a big tube. I'm totally taken away by this one!
The story flows neat, and it's time for the pretty nice tunnel in zoom4. Here the music fits magical! Another super aural video effect follows while loading.
The third killer effect! Degauss' ancient bump since years (I own some prototypes of it in a folder) reaches its ultimate evolution. He had to sacrifice more than a quarter of the screen to the altar of rastertime in order to couple that plasma (that plasma!) with a zoomer. Ingo is nowadays the absolute dominator of that stuff!
The fourth killer effect! "Hey that's awesome, hey that's so fluid, so smart, looks like Amiga...HEY WAIT A SEC THAT'S INFINITE BOBS!" Genius lies where all the others would mark a known effect as an impassable one, whereas a genius has a vision of a brand new accessible path. You have to watch very close to the screen, in order to be sure that there's no real slimey stuff flooding out of it.
Net and sphere. What's this? Like a rotozoomer? Like a fence? I dunno, I only know it's übercool and it gains framespeed in the same way a cybervector does. And screen effect again, tho.
The core. Oh, the core. I tagged it as voxel rotator, in order to keep it as generic as I can, and ready to include under this definition some different future stuff like voxel rotation for objects and some other bits of nowadays 8bit machines effects. I don't really wanna comment the core, I only wanna watch that, and the same about the XY symmetric stuff.
What machine am I using here? A Super Nintendo? Everything's zooming, even this spaceship's back!
The vector starfield has pulsating stars. Then, the wireframe vectorial landscape running, I wanna die. I wanna die between 5 and 8 frames per move. TED chip is burning.
Oh and what's this floors shit? A x-rotator like 15 years old Booze Design demos? No, it's more like that total parallax thing Oxyron has shown to us...very few months ago! I'm astonished, and fifth killer effect. It seems to be less precise while vertically scrolling the "border" of this infinite "floor", but I guess it's an innate lack of precision given by how the effect has to be performed, and absolutely not a bug.
AAAAAMIGAAAAAA! I can hear the screams in Köln from here, while watching that big and famous ball!
Some additional notes aside:
- once you've reached the Amiga ball ending, you can use the spacebar to play as many bounces digi sfx you want;
- the demo can be run from the 2nd side too, it will work flawlessly;
- mmm... is there a hidden part somewhere?
- currently, Rocket Science is #1 in the Top of the Month charts on Pouët, and, incredibly, it has also got one single thumb down...for the long duration... :o
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Do you know the only bad note I can hear in all this?
The worst thing in all this wonderful case is that Bauknecht and TEK are alone: who can really match their work in terms of perseverance and quality? I would wish for new alliances in the near future, instead of the usual fighting alone again lazyness and real life. This wish of mine doesn't wanna replace completely the single man releases with our own times and modalities, being a contingent pathway to walk thru.
And now, in the very end: congratulations Mad Degauss Nero, you really really are our heroes, we love you all. :*
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