Evoke 2004

One year has passed since we got to know the demoscene at Evoke Z003. For one year we were counting the days until the next Evoke. This time we wanted to be more active and release something.

So that's how we went to Evoke: Juhees, t0t0 and me (Tob) put our notebooks and some food into my car and drove to cologne which is actually about one hour from where we live. Drake, who was in Aachen at that time, came by train.

The way was very easy to find and the parking situation was very relaxed, so we could park close to the entrance of the party place and unload our stuff there. The location didn't look anything like a demoparty at all. OK, it was next to the very large chimneys of the neighbouring factory thingy, but you wouldn't think that it had so much space inside. So, we entered the building to experience the nice demoscene atmosphere again. The hall was quite large and had room for all of the about 350 visitos with their hardware. We found a nice table near the orga desk with a good view of the bigscreen and Juhees and me unpacked our notebooks there and we started coding. We brought with us a bunch of source code files that should become our first release, namely a 4k intro for Linux with Juhees doing the graphics- and compression stuff and me doing the synth and the player and some tools for creating the music with a normal tracking program. The music by Drake was already finished, but my soundsys had some flaws like cracking etc, so t0t0 and me debugged the synth and did some further size optimizations. The partyplace had nice gimmicks like a pile of pillow-cubes that could be used for chilling and sleeping and were quite cosy according to t0t0. Then, there was a NES with some classic games for everybody to play with , but we did not use it. Even on the toilet near the washbowls, there were Lego bricks that were often used to create words, mostly the groupnames of their creators :-)

And the most prominent toy on this digital playground was the Painstation, which was basically a game of pong for two, but with punishments for mistakes. If you did something wrong, your left hand was either beaten or heated or recieved electric shocks, sometimes even several punishments at once. You get points for being punished and the one with the most points wins. There were highscore table entries with over 200 points, so there must be some freaks who recieved 200 punishments. I played about two rounds with this and stopped after the back of my hand became red and swollen from being beaten so often. But t0t0 and Juhees played much longer until they had blisters from the heat, a swollen back of the hand and pain in the arm from the electric shocks. So, it was a funny night with coding watching sceners suffer and having fun at the same time. The deadline was saturday, 10 o clock, so we coded until then and managed to finish the demo, still having 13 bytes left. And we practically never came over the 4k limit during development, which was due to Juhees' incedible crunching skills. He always finds a place to save some bytes. So we put the prod on a USB stick and gave it to Pandur who was responsible for the realeases. Unfortunately the orgas didn't manage to install Linux on the compo PCs, so we were asked to connect Juhees' notebook to the beamer. But since we were too lazy to do this, we just wrote a windows port in 30 minutes which was not 4k then and needed the SDL.dll but it looked just like the Linux one, so the orgas presented this version at the compo. The deadline was somewhat delayed because of several problems the orgas had to tackle with, but we didn't need the last hour. So, we had time to become more and more nervous about the success of our intro. I was esprecially worried about the sound quality on the soundsystem of Evoke which was about 200 times better than my car radio, that we used for sound debugging. After listening to the several music compos, finally, the 4k compo started just a second before would have peed our pants. There were six entries and our intro was shown second. It was such a relief to see it run smoothly and hear the sound as great as I never heard it before. So, it was a real success. But the greatest thing was the applause after the end of the presentation. It was so great that we made something that excited and impressed people. And it looked quite nice actually :-) There were also some other grat-looking entries, but in my opinion nothing that sounded as nice as our into. Oh, did I mention we called it Sapph-Fire? We thought the name was quite suitable because of all the blue we used and one effect that reminded us of a fireball or something.

After the compo was over we visited a local greek restaurant to eat real geat hot gyros pitas.

At the party again, and with nothing more to code, we fetched out beers and got drunk quickly. OK, not too drunk, just a little. We got to know some other 4k competitors who were all very cool people and who were first-timers, too. We shared our ideas and Juhees tried to convince them to code for Linux. Seeing how others did all the stuff was really interesing and it was fun explaining our own ideas to them and drinking a cuba libre with them and discovering we both envied each others effects. Saturday evening, the other democompos started. There were some prods that had nice ideas. Farbrausch were also in the competition and released a "minus"-demo that was produced without the tool. I asked kb and he said that tools suck now. To be honest, their demo didn't convince me of that :-) But the Ikea-64k (which also won) was really funny. The tUM orgas dominated the alternative platform compo with a really funny fr-08 ripoff for the C64 and the democompo with a demo that had nice visuals. Both were invitations to the tUM party in winter. After the democompo during which I fell asleep several times, Juhees and me had some sleep in my car.

The pricegiving ceremony took place the next day and was extremely exciting. "When will they show the 4ks?" It felt like hours went by during the honoring of the several graphics- and music winners. There was a nice display to show the scores of the prods: Every prod has its paper racing car which started left and tried to reach the right border of the bigscreen. But only one (the first place) made it and the others exploded before reaching their goal. So, when the 4k cars started to race I only watched the 0x80 car and thought "Don't explode! Don't explode!" and it nearly reached the finish line, but two cars came a bit further. Of course there were stupid flames between the soundsys-coder (me) and the graphics-coder (Juhees) about wether the car exploded because of the crappy engine or the oversized sound system. It was pretty close, but we're happy with our rank. It's like we're still not the best, but we're damn good and we can win next time if we work some more. We got 100€, so we practically had free entrance and free food. That's quite nice: Make a good intro and you get Evoke for free. After the pricegiving we packed our stuff and grabbed a döner from the local mobile dönerbude which was selling out and gave away döners for 1€.

Concluding, I have to say, and I think I speak on behalf of my group 0x80, that Evoke 2004 really rocked at least as much as the one last year! I have to mention, though, that there were some problems with the intranet that was down most of the time due to a hacker attack. Also, the promised internet connection didn't come. But the orgas were friendly and really did a great job making the coolest demoparty there is. I'm really looking forward to next Evoke. Expect another ass-kicking 0x80 production. In the meantime, download, watch and comment our demo here!.

See you at Breakpoint!

Tob