Re: Árok 2019 Can someone tell, if some very limited level of nudity allowed or not? If not, then maybe, if yes, then surely. But it will be only a limited slideshow with no music or anim/scroller, so it won't be a real release, just an eye-candy, and the other is just for fun
Just make it to Budapest, I am sure someone will pick you up there. I can help orginizing. If you prefer to travel by train, I can buy you tickets too. Just ping me.
Thanks for the offer! Really appreciate it. Trouble is I am currently doing a theme park tour of France, Germany, Belgium and Holland, back in the UK on the 1st Aug. I'm not going to be up for jumping on a plane after that, trust me! Currently doing some of Germany's finest (Europa Park rocks!).
Re: Árok 2019 Thanks guys! bubis - very kind offer, and duly noted for Arok 2020!! mad - yeah, currently in near Cologne, and that's as close to Berlin as I get. I am definitely up for that beer though - maybe I can swing a 'business' trip to Berlin soon
I just finishing my slideshow, in Wild category. Based on Shane Turner's art, with his special authorization (this will be the very first official digital reproduction of his arts) .
We will have a common release with George too, also in Wild.
This year no PETSCII or HFLI, I have only a lot of ideas and semifinished projects (as always :-) )
Re: Árok 2019 Incredible, for the 2nd trackmo in a row, FIRE, got no greetings at all, our presence and mine in particular is so sparse that anybody forgets about us. The first time, ok could be for mistake, the second in a row it's a choice. Guys you really hate us, or probably you expected more from us, more than supporting the scene in times where we were alone, more than keeping this site daily...hourly updated! Ok jokes off, congrats to all of you for having rocked the party once more, I'm looking forward to watch all the releases and vote!
Re: Árok 2019 ok found the demo, Uncertain Future. Really cool production! Congratulations and huge thanks for this release!!!
SPOILER ALERT!!!!!
I enjoyed everything about it. The music as usual, fits very much. I liked the small hints to other previous hits like Barbie Girl. :) Also when it slows and then goes to full speed.... The effects are awesome, I had to watch the demo again 2 times in a row. Loved the plasma, the letters on the border, etc,etc.... This rocks!!!
EDIT: Would be great if AROK's date would not interfere with major international paties... :-/
About the Demo result. I have no bitter feelings, but I think the platform was more important here than the real demo effects. (I was not involved in any way in the +4 demo production, and most of the day I used a C64 with DOTC :-) so you can say I am biased :-) ):
It is hard to compete with the huge C64 base and romantic feeling of them, but according to my personal view: -The +4 demo has more fluid execution -+4 demo has more interesting story, than "we are old, but we are back" -+4 demo has more effects, like picture morphing, huge picture scroll -The Plus/4 demo had a better music track, huge basses with TED, really immersive experience. I dunno how it is possible, but I was there, I hear it. C64 demo had a nice track too, but I was less influenced by this, than Csabo's tune. -+4 demo had no breakages in the show (during the C64 demo most of us though it is already finished, but it continued. TWO times!). It is about planning and time spent on the finetuning of the trackmo. -To be really honest, at the very end I got tired of the C64 demo, repeating several times the same effect and objects, just changing the background image or object color to show something different. Chequered flag rotation, how many times? Maybe 6 or 7x?
I think the C64 demo was unnecessarily long, sometimes boring, and timing not so properly planned as we saw at Uncertain Future. C64 demo had some nice effects, but much less idea, and much much less effort put in it (despite bigger production team) I tried to be as objective as possible.
You can doublecheck these things yourself, when both videos are on the YT.
My 2c: from my point of view Uncertain Future was the real winner, the final result is just the result of C64 romance. My message? You cannot change voters, they could not be always biased. Especiall not after few beers. We should accept this, and for them the facts are hard things :-)
Larry's videos were also fantastic (huge work, nice optimalization), and the HW behind them is also pure genius!
Just to put in a real comparison: I was curious, if an Amiga 500 could do the similar video playback in any way with an SD card or HDD. 320x200 (240?), full screen, no lag in playback, color faithful to the original (and without a 60020, 60030, 60040 or Vampire card).
What I found as the closes thing in HAMP file (requires the same preencoding of the AVI to an Amiga specific HAM format as Larry files)
"On as stock Amiga 600 it can play back a 320x200 file 12 bits per pixel at 12 frames per second." (Motorola 68000 @ 7.16 MHz, 16bit, 1MB RAM, built-in IDE HDD: 320x200, 12 fps MOS8501 @1.7MHz, 8bit, 64KB RAM: 320x200, 50/60 fps)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOjgvLiEaEU An Amiga1200 +64MB RAM+60030 CPU seems to able to provide a very similar experience, that we saw yesterday from a humble stock +4 (no memory upgrade, no CPU upgrade, just a very advanced storage device, equal to the HDD of the Amiga). And this is shocking!
My conclusion on my party releases: I need to upgrade the HFLI loader routine, as without music (and some small effects) the impression is not that good as it could be. In this form it can't even hold a candle. The hard thing is, that I am not a real coder, but a humble graphician :-)
Frankly speaking, working for a demo project with tough deadlines and high responsibility on demo readiness, also adding additional gfx limitations to the existing ones is not my world. That's why I am more a lone wolf, but certainly it influences reputation and results. I accept this, because my approach means less stress on real life and the void. :-)
Re: Árok 2019 Thanks for the kind words, MMS. Couple of random thoughts from me:
I also want to apologize for not greeting the faithful Italian trailblazers of the Plus/4 scene In the earlier versions of the demo, the DXCYP had the greetings, but we deemed it to be too boring; so it was cut down to 3 sentences. I specifically asked Krona to double-check the greets list, but I reviewed it too (for grammar and spelling), so I should have caught it. Well, in all honesty, we could have worked another week (month... year...) on this product, if it wasn't for siz and Krona's iron will and whip cracking, we would not have made the deadline.
Glad you guys liked the tunes - big respect to all the folks who can compose within the confines of existing trackers! For me... I don't think I ever released a tune in which the player wasn't tweaked at least a little bit. In this one, the most obvious innovation is the experimental SID stuff. The bassdrum is punchier, if you have a SID - but it's not really required to enjoy the sound. Additionally, while programming the volume envelopes for the Datapop part... whew, I was forced to rewrite that a bit to make it more manageable. Friday was spent optimizing the music data to save some bytes - we caught a last minute bug, the 2nd tune was too long and had to be shortened to fit the loading scheme. Eventually one short part of the medley was cut, but it's still pretty cool. I'm probably most proud of the "Induljon a Datapop" and "Hear the datapop (get wicked)!" stuff (to spell that out; the main theme from Datapop was mixed in with those two songs).
The plasma is really cool, the first of its kind. We had some DFLI plasmas before, but they always use some tricks. This one really does all the heavy lifting, each 4x2 pixel area is colored differently at 50 FPS, well, thanks to the interlace, it's each 2x2 pixel area. I really wish we could have fit in at least one other sine + color pattern, to show off what it can do, but unfortunately it didn't fit in the memory.
Anyway, I'm happy with how it turned out, and I'm also very pleased at how much Plus/4 stuff was there. We were represented very well in each compo!
Re: Árok 2019 Congrats for the great demo the 2nd place! I liked all entries the same. Of course i wished, that "Uncertain Future" and all the plus/4 entries win.
Me and my son (10) watched the competitions at Arok 2019 live on youtube. He liked the Laser-Show (F(x) = ) most. (It was really great)
Chronos: Great Magnum entry! I really like the picture. And i am a great fan of the show!
MMS You did a perfect slide show "Neon Night Girls". Your pictures were flawless. You worked so hard and so long on pixeling the pics, i was sure it would be in the TOP 3.
And congrats to MMS our entry "3D Dreams". I was surprised, that they even accepted it or showed it. The idea is 100% from you, you did all the work with coming up with the Title and the putting the decriptions under every pic with that great NASA font and doing the release. I just provided the pictures. So thank you. It was a last minute project, but a great experience. And 7th place is not bad at all ..
Re: Árok 2019 Every release that was available has been put on the site immediately (as in, as soon as it played live). Same with the results - I entered them live, I'm pretty sure our compos page was the first to have the results online. So, I think we did pretty good
Anyway, I was waiting for the picture shows from MMS, which he just emailed me, and those are now online as well. AFAIK, the Last Ninja Preview and "Legyél Te Is Burzsuj" won't be released publicly at this time. I wrote a wrap-up news entry of course (but at this point it's pretty redundant).
Re: Árok 2019 @Csabo: thank you for your continuous support, and sorry for the delay. After return to home, I had urgent issues to be done, like sleeping
@George: thank you! actually this last minute slideshow could be a little similar experience to "compo coding" I've never made. Really enjoyed it
@Scene: please check out these two slideshows. George and me did out best to provide you PP (perfect pixel) products with a lot of effort on the error-free conversion, and detailed editing and common reviw on the slides after that. George's Engine is able to show these Blender edited models to show from any direction, or rotate it (if you have "some" hours). We wanted to speed up this experience a little withthis small slideshow, and the engine (according to my view) has great potentials.
Please do not forget before voting to George's slideshow: all these 3D models (including the filled vector monkey face) are rendered first on a stock Plus/4 in BASIC v3.5, and all the 3D models directly downloaded from NASA, and converted to useable 8-bit 3d model description files by George's converter routine. So it is NOT a conversion of a PC made picture, but an export of the end result from the Plus/4. I think this is a kind of "mission impossible" accomplished by George. I am curious if any similar complex 3D model ever made or shown on C128, C64, Enterprise, or any stock 8 bit machine (not special hardware I mean). I think it could be close to a world record.
We are eager to know, what will be your biased score. Enjoy!
Re: Árok 2019 OFF Actually the Last Ninja I saw on Arok is very simililar stage to the one we could saw as a video on this thread.
I saw some small improvements in gfx, and enemy collision detection. What Ati cannot help, that in his version the sprite need to be multcolor too, while in case of C64 they utilized hires HW sprites for better resolution.
What is really impressive, the speed of the drawing, how you get into a new scene. The original C64 code for this written in FORTH (really close to assembly), but as ATI confirmed, he uses the same elements and drawing method. And this is where it turns into magic! Worth to compare it to the C64 version, +4 from Ati is lightning fast compared to the C64 came from a well known professional SW company (!!!) As he pointed out (and yes, I did not realize myself), that if he would store the full screens in memory, it would not fit. So, it is just blazing fast!
According to my view, the sprite handling is a little too fast, who can move their legs so fast? I suppose a half speed change of the leg animation would solve this. (what I told to Ati too)
Re: Árok 2019 Actual YouTube link to the available Last Ninja Plus/4 preview videos. During the presentation, Ati mentioned that the project hasn't progressed in a long while, so this is what it still looks like.
We have seen a preview of LTIB already - from the deleted files that were recovered from Skyremake. What was presented looked nearly complete and playable, from what I've heard, the authors want to polish it some more.
This SceneSat archive of the entire party should be working (I couldn't start it up though, probably due to bandwidth).
Still waiting for the official results from the Árok organizers for scores and disk images, it's possible that these two will actually be on there.
Re: Árok 2019 The SceneSat problem (and YouTube too) is not related to bandwidth. Probably the organizers made some mistake but other archives work. This is the only one that does not start.
Re: Árok 2019 edit: the view offline link on scenesat seems to be working but you need an m3u8 player to view it (my Chrome for Android does this automatically)
Re: Árok 2019 Hello guys! Keep calm! I will send LN to Csabo, and you can try that. I'm on holiday, here is just an ipad, and this incompatible with my usb pendrive.
The party was great, I met first time with MMS and Epy. There are Edhellon, BSZ, TLC, Erno, too! Oh, and a new member, Verona! Plus4 scene was strong on compos! Congrats to all guys, who released stuffs! I liked Sidnify koncert, that was amazing, and they played my personal favourite song, LN2 level1. Epy had an atari 800xl with sio2sd, we played with Berks 4 and Major Blink. A guy, who played with Rainbow Walker, was a professional gamer, played long that game, we saw the finish screen! We saw on big screen BSZ and Larry's nonplusultra video presentation! @Larry: My dream that, i would like to see a Dream Time without interlace... xD The wild compo: we can see an unique, hand maded cpu, with a little display and with 256 byte memory. It was brutal. And first time on Arok party, there was a Spectrum demo (in 256byte) too.
Big thanx to party organizers, it was a happy weekend!
Re: Árok 2019 Hey! Just to add my congrats for those great entries! Very impressed. I agree that the demo should have really have come first, but the 64 demo was neat in its own right too. Shame I wasn't there to vote!
I know that demos are all about innovation and execution, but that Uncertain Future really shone - I just love trying to figure out how the effects are done. Stuff like the scolling credits at the end are easy to miss as a major achievement, until you start to consider what must going on to give that effect. Wow. And thanks for the mention too! Blown away.
Re: Árok 2019 Results are up, including the PRG files for Last Ninja Preview and LTIB. I'll try to contact Verona to see if he wants to release the latter.
Re: Árok 2019 Great productions for C+4. Enjoyed watching them on my Plus4 real machine. I saw the 2 slideshows released at the party and it reminded me to finish another slideshow I work on that includes my Amiga and C+4 pictures, Recolored and converted to C+4.
Will do that this August and actually it's coming soon. Sorry though not releasing it at the party.
My big dream for long time now is to go one day to Arok Summer vacation time is actually always difficult for me to go to parties. I'll keep trying though
-BTW if you go 4 or 5 screens and turn back (make a U to the right and back) you may stuck at the corner of the screen where you start, I could not release myself even with a jump. Maybe the linkage to the previous screen not built up in the other direction.
Re: Árok 2019 Hy! I am the creator of LTIB (Legyél Te Is Burzsuj!), I am Verona of System Syndrome.
The game are ready,complete with two endings and 100% playable. I asked Chronos to not upload the game, because I want to upload the game with the source code, etc. I am a beginner, but if anyone will make use of my code, lets say, for start coding, etc., I want to release that for that purpose. So the game is complete, playable, and soon will be released!
Re: Árok 2019 Thank you Verona! After the weird exploit of Skyremake I wished to see more from you, and I absolutely appreciate the usage of TEDzakker for your releases. Looking forward to the forthcoming release!
Re: Árok 2019 @Luca: Thanks. The Skyremake,anyway, was not a joke, that was a teaser trailer,and, if I just did my game to the deadline,it was intended to load...not Skyremake,but the LTIB. (But a Skyremake game wasn't a bad idea,but my experience of coding...dreams are just dreams now.) BTW,so many years ago, on IRC, if my mind is correct, we (Délest and me) talks a lot about that we go to Árok and you will see our demo presented at there. Sooner or later,eh? My next game will be a funny and crazy one, I hope that I can show that on next Árok!
@Ati: I need some help in the future with software sprites. I decided to make a new game, a very crazy one,but I need some help with sprite making. Not in the gfx, but in the code. My e-mail address is here,in this topic.
As last year,I was the last on scoreboard,so thank you all, I like to be the last one! From here, I can't lose! And now, I put something on that table,our group's name alive,so the journey is juts began! Today, I made some progress with the LTIB's english version. In the meantime, L.Mole said, that he will show my game on his channel,if he so, then I will be very proud of my game!
Re: Árok 2019 Hi Verona, Actually, I really liked Skyremake.I dunno why it became the last one, but was very stylish and cool. Since then, I try to find out, how to contol an external MIDI device (like Yamaha MU-50 or Roland SC-55) from the Plus/4 to play music. :-D
So you gives me motivation. Keep up the good releases. I really like them. The last one looked like a polished C64 game.
Re: Árok 2019 MMS: I don't know too. But that wasn't so shiny, full with effects. And the C64 lovers vote for C64 stuff and they are many, we are few. :) And I can't say, that this was my first work, as a beginner coder. LTIB as a polished C64 game? It has its own category, maybe, if compare to the other LOIM games, like those on PC, I tried to give it some life. You don't know yet, but Johnny can switch mood, he has 3 mood, in the last one, he can speed up game time, disable aids, etc. And with mood change, he has other replies for guessing. But the show time was limited, so in 5 mins... that was all I can show. I thinking about that I can add 'achievements' to the game, like on Xbox, but... I hesitate.
Re: Árok 2019 I think the face changes and the sometimes provocative comment from Johnny generated a real nice atmosphere.
I suppose after such a comment Johnny becomes Johnnyfeelgood BTW your commentary was very funny during the presentation.
When I arrived, the music sounded like a SID. (and there was a big noise around us) Probably because the notes in the music has some ADSR waveforms, and it is not frequent we can hear a TEDZakker tune.
BTW, did you really asked Mr.Istvan Vago's support? (for non-Hungarians: he is a legendary QUIZ leader in Hungary)
In fact, it is not easy to tell a foreigner, what is Burzsuj, and how to pronounce it properly :-)
Árok 2019
