Can You Say Dezign? By LaesQ / Raww Arse
How many times have you been sat infront of your Speccy watching
the latest demo release (most likely Russian) and thought 'seen
it before', or 'CHANGE THE EFFECT!!!!!'. For myself and a few
others whom I have raised this topic with agree with me - demos
nowadays have no real dezign element.
It seems that the Russian sector of the scene have adopted the
Amiga/PC style of demo. You know the usual full screen effect
followed by another full screen effect followed by... You get
the picture. But with this they seem to have left out the dezign
element.
So what is this dezign element? If you're making a trackmo
(something which can't really exist on Speccy with it's many
different flavours of disk systems - See below for a brief
description), everything (and I mean just about everything!)
should flow easily and seamlessly. And to add to the overall
effect, it should be timed to the music.
I have seen brave attempts to do this in a few Speccy demos of
recent times. But they only seem to be able to lead from one
effect into another and then that's it, back to the usual show
effect - blank - show effect - blank - sequence.
I think the lowest form of effect transforming must be the
common fade in/out. Even that isn't seen in alot of demos of
today. And what happened to all those fancy clears, etc. All it
takes is a simple AND/OR rountine! CLS just doesn't cut it
nowadays! USE YOUR IMAGINATION!
Morphing is another good form of effect transforming. I've seen
morphing of basic shapes (vector style) and even a dancing
person. But no one seems to have seen the real potential behind
morphing, well, not on Speccy at least.
Another thing is the 'When is this effect gonna end?' scenario.
You know what I mean, you're watching a demo and up come some
swirling dots. They swirl and they swirl and they swirl and you
go and make yourself a drink and they're STILL swirling when you
come back! Ok, so you may have spent five years coding those
damn dots, but making someone watch them for five years just
isn't fun! Don't you coders speak with other members of your
group? I'm sure they'll tell you when an effect has been
displayed for long enough.
And stop coping other peoples effects EXACTLY!! Ok, so you found
a new and great way to do it that takes 5 tacts less than the
original one, but it looks EXACTLY the same! Also the average
demo watcher couldn't care less if your effect takes up 70,000
tacts or 70 tacts! It's what it looks like that matters.
Don't think that 'demo' means endless effects either. Take a
leaf out of Agent-X's book and look at Hypersonic II. That
started with a small (funny) story. This seems to be one of very
few that I've seen so far that has a story in it. Some may say
that 'Condomed' had a story to it. Ok, yes it had a story to it.
But the action was still and boring. But it was a foot in the
right direction. And what about the all time classic 'Beruska'?
I still have yet to see another demo of this variety and class.
Have a sense of humour! So many demos nowadays are soooo
serious! I'm surprised half of the Speccy scene hasn't committed
suicide in the past year or two.
Anyway, I hope I've made myself clear and that some other Speccy
groups will read this and learn.
LaesQ / Raww Arse.
Trackmo - Derived from the two words 'track' and 'demo'
- meaning to show a demo by loading tracks of data from a disk.
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