Gude Laune! - Evoke 2006 - 2006-08-20 01:03:14

I sat on the train working on my sprite code, and was quite confused as someone behind me answered "Sprite s'il vous plait." to the waiter who was offering him drinks. So this is what first class Thalys is like. Fancy food, electrically adjustable seats, and my power plug didn't work. Then, a woman with several young children entered which started crying as loud as they could immediately, making the last hour of my trip extremely unpleasant. Headphones are a very useful invention. And Neurons: Fire at will by paniq is a great album that makes you forget crying children.

Evoke 2006 would become a great demoparty. A novelty for me was that, for the first time, I went to a demoparty alone. I was looking forward to meeting a friend of mine, Liran Nuna, whom I only knew from IRC so far. He came all the way from his home country, Israel, to Cologne to submit a demo for the Nintendo DS. I had also prepared some DS stuff, but it was far from finished and I doubted I could finish it at the party.

I arrived at the Vulkanhalle and was happy to see some familiar faces and to smell the special spirit that only Evoke has. I was at several other demo parties and they were good, but none had this special "Evoke feeling". Evoke has grown bigger and bigger over last last few years, but it never lost this family-like feeling.

With my two heavy bags, I walked through the very crowded hall and started searching for Titan, who Liran had become member of just recently, but couldn't find them. Then suddenly Juhees stood before me and said "Alone, you'll never be able to finish that demo on time." I was so surprised seeing him here that I immediately dropped to the floor laughing. We stored my stuff in his car, opened two bottles of Club Mate and searched for a place to code in the hall. But as all tables were already full, we had to use one of these high round tables in the bar area - not really optimal coding conditions. Also, as I was quite tired at that time, we decided to postpone the coding to the next day and had some fun on the party IRC.

The next morning, Juhees realized that he had hearing problems, because the day before, he was standing next to a loudspeaker when the announcement jingle was played very loudly to throw everyone out in order to collect the entrance fee. So, unfortunately, he had to leave Evoke before it even started, which was very sad. After he left, I went back to the hall alone and immediately saw a big Titan-sign. I thought "OK, Liran said he was staying with Blasty from the Netherlands. Do these people look dutch? Yeah, close enough" So I asked them: "Umm, excuse me? Are you the Titan guys who work on the DS Demo?" - "Yeah, I'm Blasty and this is LiraNuna." - "Wow, cool! I'm Tob. I'll go grab a seat."

So I spent the rest of the party with the Titan guys, who are all nice and funny people, talented not to forget. Blasty had a black DS Lite, which is seriously a sexy piece of hardware. Liran showed me their demo on it and I must say he didn't break his promises: It is a very fine piece of DS coding that uses the DS's hardware to its limits and also makes some clever use of the two screens. I was sure I couldn't reach that kind of quality for my demo within the short time that was left on the compo, but Liran offered to help me with my entry and so we started coding. The deadline was at five o'clock, and we were kind-of-done at five minutes to five. We had some 3D squares and a sine-scroller. It was nothing big, but it was fun to code, so we just submitted it. And because it was just one effect without music, we just used my digital camera to record a video of it. But then, we had the problem that we didn't have an encoder to convert it to the required formats, so we just forgot about it and had a great time watching the compos.

Later that day, a television team visited the Titans to record some footage for the "Neues" show on 3Sat. This was an excellent opportunity to present DS homebrew on television, so Liran showed them his demo and I showed my tracker.

I was happy to meet las^0ok again, who I knew from Evoke 2004, where we both competed in the 4k intro compo. He told me interesting things about the possibilities that exist for 4k intros in DirectX nowadays, and I told him of the possibilities of DS homebrew.

I also talked to 020200, who was promoting his SCNCLR project at the party, which is kind of a research project where he tries to explore the possibilities of 16x16 pixel graphics. He showed me Smoove, an editor for pixel graphics, that he wrote for the PSP. It is also capable of other resolutions, supports animations, and allows for the composition of tilemaps from the n*m pixel sprites. Being a great fan of lo-res art myself (I love pixels!), I really like that project, and was happy to hear that he has plans to port his application to the DS.

Later, I saw some guys in the digitalekultur.ev area playing with DSes (yes, I'm pretty fixed on that device as you might have figured), so I went and joined them. One of their nicks, Steeler, sounded familiar to me, although it didn't quite ring a bell (yes, please excuse my demoscene noobness). Demoparties are always like this: You meet some nice people, and then it turns out you already know what they did, and then you think "What the hell, I'm actually talking to that guy for like ten minutes and he turns out to be a really great coder / party organizer / musician / whatever." Anyways, we played some rounds of Tetris and discussed about DS homebrew. Liran also joined us. It was quite cozy in the dk.ev area. They had a nice sofa and free fruits, and as it was on a higher level, we had a very nice overview of the party.

Finally, it was time for some serious compos. Quantity-wise, the 64k- and Demo-compos were a little disappointing. Both had only four entries, of which one was the Rob-is-jarig running gag demo (or 64k). The Rob is jarig demo was, as always, handed in anonymously - this time under the name "Random Israeli scener (not LiraNuna)", and Liran was quite surprised to see his nick on the bigscreen in the demo compo. The best 64k was seriously impressive. They had an amazing flower-growing effect, perhaps a little like the one in the well-known flower demo by Moppi Productions (that was also ported to the DS, just so you know), but in 3D. The best demo was a very unusual entry in every aspect. It consisted only of words (and some logos), that zoomed in or out. The shaky camera movement and aggressive soundtrack made this production feel very energetic. Unfortunately, the text was in German, so the international audience couldn't understand it. It was done by the group Neuro, and the major part (music and code) were done by paniq. As it turned out, the whole production was written in Python and ran in Linux. I downloaded it to have a look at the source code and was quite surprised that it consisted of nearly 600 files. This was because all the necessary libraries and lots of python bindings for several OpenGL extensions were delivered along with it. Although I think the huge amount of files necessary might scare away sceners away from Linux even more, Neuro sure have proved that you can do impressive demos under Linux as well. Also, I'll certainly have a look at the 3D possibilities in Python.

The console compo had quite a number of impressive entries. There was a full jump'n'run game for the C64, a rocking music disc for Atari ST, an impressive-looking demo on the iPod nano (which has an 80MHz Arm7), a funky PSP-demo including a vector-style game at the end, and of course, Titan's fantastic DS demo, which unfortunately only achieved rank four in the compo. In my opinion, it deserved place one, or at least a place in the top-three, but well, I'm a little biased :-)

I spent the night lying on four chairs in the hall, as I could not bring a sleeping bag or a mattress. It was quite comfortable, and I slept very well after Speckdrumm had stopped their loud music. Some kind soul even gave me his sleeping bag. I don't know who, because I just woke up, felt something lying on my back, realized it was a sleeping bag and happily slipped into it. The next morning, the first Titan members returned to their place. I woke up and was greeted by a guy who I hadn't seen before: "Hello! Everything alright? Had a nice time in my sleeping bag? But it's alright, I didn't sleep anyway." Whoops!

Unfortunately, the prizegiving was delayed, so Liran wasn't able to watch it, because he had to catch his train. It was a funny show. The organizers made fun of the prizes that Microsoft sponsored. "Wow, you win Microsoft Office! Now you can type legally!" Jco won a well-deserved first prize in the OGG compo and gave an excellent live performance of it on the stage. The Linux entries received extra prizes sponsored by Linuxdemos.org. Being a Linux user and having worked on a Linux 4k myself, I support this effort, although I don't think Linux has a chance to become the major platform of the scene. But Linuxdemos.org is good thing, and i hope it will make Linux more popular for demos.

Evoke 2006 was a great party, if not the best demo party I ever visited. Except for the lack of tables, the organization was perfect and the atmosphere was very nice and friendly. In other words, there was lots of "GUDE LAUNE!" (a popular saying that came up at this party). It was a great to finally meet Liran in person. We had loads of fun at the party and met many interesting people. It would have been even better of course if the organizers had been more careful with Juhees' ear.

Anyway, I'll be there next time, no matter what.

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