Preview
Party Review
Mekka/Symposium 2001
By: Seven
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-=- Friday 13 -=-
It's spring, and the scene is slowly gathering speed again. The
long-awaited Mekka/Symposium 2001 starts today in Fallingbostel, a good
600 Km from my appartment in Belgium, so I took a day off to get there
on time. Hey, it's Friday 13, it brings bad luck if you work today :)
Baxter arrives at 11 o'clock, and we load my junk in the car in
record time. Next we drive to Antwerp to pick up Djefke and his
equipment. He takes two monitors and two keyboards with him, because he
promised these to a British scener on #pixel who could only bring the
case of his PC. With a lot of effort we manages to fit everything in the
car. It reminds me of Block-Out, that old 3D tetris game :)
The rest of the 7-hour trip from Belgium over the Netherlands to
Germany goes without troubles. We didn't get lost and had no significant
accidents, only Baxter grumbled a bit that he had get up sooner than
usual, and thus couldn't eat a decent meal before he left. At the
Dutch-German border, we were a bit nervous because Baxter had seen on
the news yesterday that the Dutch custom officers were confiscating all
products of animal origin, due to the foot and mouth disease. They even
went so far to confiscate chocolate easter eggs (dunno why, milk or
eggs don't transmit it IIRC but maybe the custom officers just like to
eat them themselves), and guess what I had hidden in my backpack to
celebrate Easter on sunday :/ Luckily the custom officers were lunching
and we didn't even had to stop.
We talked about the demo that we planned to make at the party. It's
been since LTP4 that we wanted to release something, but things always
got delayed :( So, now we'll release something just for the heck of it,
no matter how unfinished it is. We aim for a ranking in the middle :)
When we arrived at the partyplace, the parking was already quite
filled. We parked temporary next to the entrance, to facilitate
unloading. Walking through the entrance hall, I saw scene-posters from
Pain, Buenzli, Haujobb and other groups/mags/parties sticked to the
doors and the walls. The main hall was largely filled already, so we
quickly paid the entrance fee (70 DM, about 35 Euro) and scanned the
hall for three consecutive empty seats. Alas, the few such places were
already reserved :/ Since there was plenty of empty space near the
entrance, we asked the organisers for a table to set up there. They had
one left, a wobbling, sqeaky one, but it didn't break under the weight
of our monitors so we were well pleased. We put it next to the info
desk, far away from the *large* speakers on the podium. During our
installation I already ran into Diver, PS/Calodox and Skyrunner, and the
whole place has a really great athmosphere.
The main partyplace is a single sporthall, very large, with a ceiling
that looks like the bottom of a wooden ship. On one end, there's a
podium with a large big screen. Over a hundred chairs are put in front
of the podium, and after each compo this part of the floor will become
more and more covered with bottles, cups and cans. It was almost
dangerous to walk there the last day :) Only after a day I noticed
there's a balcony behind the bigscreen which can be reached via two
stairs to the left and the right of the bigscreen. A lot of C64 sceners
are sitting there, as wel as in the right corner next to the bigscreen.
There are numerous banners on the walls, an Amiga scener has brought his
own beamer with which he projects stuff on the ceiling, some people have
brought christmas lights to decorate their machines... And then there
are the fashion statements: the guys from Centric all wear something
like a white body-covering desinfection suit with a big orange C on the
back, and dust masks. I notice a few really weird hats, and someone
(from the group Sundancers Inc. IIRC) wears a T-shirt with the message
"Save the scroller!" In the back of the hall everyone could write his
groupname/logo/whatever on a large paper banner. By the end of the
party, it was completely filled.
18:46:
Baxter is cursing at C++, since he's using Java at work and now
considers that a much better language. I try to install VC++, which
crashes of course, but for the sake of our demo I do not give up in
disgust. A bit later my old projects compile again, so I try to convert
them to that DemoGL framework Baxter wants to use.
On the bigscreen, the timetable is shown, plus useful info like the
prices of the cables, CD's and the rest you can buy at the info desk.
Another screen is added later: a request for everyone in the hall to sit
a bit closer to each other, in order to make room for the other sceners
that are still arriving.
21:00
The opening ceremony starts, inspired on the olympic games:
Steeler runs to the podium with a self-made Olympic torch (a flashlight
with red plastic strips), and "lights" the bigscreen with a fullscreen
oldskool fire-effect. The entire crew presents itself on the podium,
and then the intro of the C64 game Summer Games is shown.
22:41
Welle Erdball is giving a live performance, loud but very good.
It's a German music group which plays rock music with synthesizers,
they've made commercial music for the nintendo/gameboy. Avoozl is
helping Baxter and me on how we can draw a lot of dots quickly in
openGL. Warp, who is sitting next to Avoozl, shows me his entry for the
32K game compo: a strange 2-player mutation of Pacman, based on an
ancient C64 game.
-=- Saturday 14 -=-
1.25
Crest's demoshow is over. For over two hours, he's been showing a
selection of the very best PC demos and intros. I especially liked to
see those GUS-only intros like Paper or Clone meets clone, it's been a
long time since I've seen them *with* sound (never had a GUS...)
Djefke, who is responsible for the public relations in Access Denied,
is using his secret weapon: beer. More precisely: Belgian beer. Need we
say more? Hoardes of sceners suddenly want to talk with him (Of course,
I don't want to imply you're any bit less interesting without beer,
Djefke :)) One of them is Phoenix/Hornet from America, nowadays using
the handle Feen, who decided to visit MS2k1 just a few days before. Wow,
I never expected to meet a Hornet member in real life. My second
scene-CD was the Hornet Underground CD, and I've read all issues of
Demojournal, so this brings back some memories.
2:54
In the row in front of us, some guys are working on a *very*
impressive animated model of a scorpion. It's clearly for a demo, and
it's depressing to watch if you still got to figure out the basics of
openGL :/ Baxter goes to sleep in his car, since the sleeping area is
completely filled. A few minutes later, a guy from the scorpion-demo
asks if I've a copy of Visual Studio. I hand him over Baxters CDs, and
it turns out they're from Federation Against Nature, the group who made
the best raytrace-demo so far: Nature Suxx. In fact, the scorpion is
part of the sequel they are making now: Nature Still Suxx! I really like
raytracing demos, so I'm more than happy to hear this.
4:18
Night in Fallingbostel, everything is very quiet. I'm trying to get a
mandelbrot zoom working. Yeah, I know fractal zoomers were fashionable
maybe five years ago, but it's just for in the background of another
effect.
In the row next to us, Mat!/Ozone is sleeping with his head on his
keyboard. His screensaver shows Beavis and Butt-head peering out the
monitor, saying "Look! The sucker is asleep!" A self-made paper piggy
bank is attached to his Amiga, with a notice "If you have 5000 DM and
you don't need them, I accept it... :-) Give me your money and feel
better! Mat!/Ozone: I'm REALLY very poor". Now I understand why the
party website said about the entrance fee: free for girls and Mat!/Ozone
:)
9:00
PS is using Baxters PC to debug a demo he made with someone else, but
unfortunately the coder is not at the partyplace. Dake & Fred/Calodox
are helping him. I'm typing over some code from a Graphic Gems book, on
how to do fast delaunay triangulation. This should somehow help me to do
a fast voronoi effect, but unfortunately the book doesn't tell how to
convert between them :/ The rest of the hall is *still* very quiet.
10:05
Oh oh, after he woke up, Feen can't find his jacket anymore, and his
plane ticket is in it! The orgos ask over the PA if someone has seen it,
but no-one reacts :(
Since Djefke is now awake, he can keep an eye on the hardware and
it's my turn to catch some sleep.
12:22
I'm back awake again (my average sleeping time on a concrete floor
seems to be 2 hours), and after eating a bit I talk with Pampy, another
american scener, about voronoi cells. The first compo is alternative
graphics, meaning raytracing and photoshopped pics, should start at
13.00. Let's hope there are no delays...
14:34
The first compo was one hour delayed, but it was of very high quality.
There were 57 entries, out of which 36 entries were preselected. It's
hard to choose from 36 pictures when you see them only once for maybe 20
seconds each, but they will be shown a second time tomorrow. During the
compo, they played more Welle Erdball music, which is really a fitting
soundtrack for a demoparty.
16:12
The Second Reality show has passed; in order following versions of
that classic demo were shown: the C64 clone by Smash Design, the wild
version Real Reality by Never, the original PC version by Future Crew,
and as a bonus Future Crew's Unreal demo, on which Second Reality was
the sequel.
After this we all go outside to watch the harddisk-throwing compo.
There's some discrimination in this compo: the girls who compete can
throw with small, modern harddisks, while the guys have to throw big,
ancient harddrives that are at least four times as large. Is that fair?
An exception is made for Mat!, who is allowed to throw with the girl's
harddisk (OK, because there were no more girls who wanted to compete,
and maybe because Mat isn't exactly very large).
16:59
Oh boy! There's a TV-crew walking around, and they were interviewing
an organizer in the row in front of us. When they were finished, the
interviewer asked if he could interview me, and I didn't immediately
found an excuse to say no :) So five minutes later I was looking at the
camera, rather nervous I might add, with my back to my screen ("Can you
show something on your screen? Something impressive please?"), answering
questions like "Where are you from?", "Why are you in the scene?", "Are
you looking for a job here?", "Do you think the newest hardware makes it
easier to make a demo?" etc. At least it seems they're genuinly
interested in the scene, and don't try to make it look like a freakshow.
(Hmm, on second thought, then why did they interview *me*? <huge grin>).
Since I don't have TV at home, let alone cable, I'll ask Skyrunner if
he can tape it (program Nano on 3Sat, tuesday) and watch if I'm shown on
it.
20:45
Since even coders can't live on bread and orange juice alone, we hop
in the car and go on a food hunt. I could really go for some pizza, but
the McDonalds are closer, so french fries and hamburgers it is...
Unfortunately we missed the 64K amiga intros in the meantime, but
someone recorded them on a digital camera and put the avi on the LAN, so
I can watch them in thumbnail format.
A tad later, the PC 4K intro compo starts. One word: magnificent!
After all the parties with none or only a few low-quality entries, it's
great to see a compo with 10 entries, several of which are simply
groundbraking. My favourite is Juggler, featuring a realtime raytraced
juggler, with reflections etc plus music. Then there's Varus, with
streams of lights traveling through accelerated 3D environments, also
with music, and there are 4K versions of Heaven 7 and Kasparov (with
music that's even more boring than the original :))... Wow, wow, wow.
Next a virtual newsreader announces several fake demo-related
newsitems, quite funny but I don't remember them anymore. Sorry.
21:54
More entertainment from the organizers: a scene-version of the TV-show
"Who wants to be a millionaire?" It has the bombastic soundeffects, the
three types of jokers (of which the ask-the-public and phone-a-friend
jokers are a tiny bit manipulated by the orgos), and questions ranging
from "how many channels has a 4-channel module" to "how do you set the
border color on a C64 to black ?" (Answer D: poke 54296, 0). It's much
better than the real thing.
23:07
Finally it's time for the hand-pixeled graphics! Again a preselection
is necessary, but still over 40 high-quality pictures are shown. Voting
will be very, very difficult. It's a pity they're not (yet?) available
on the website, because I won't be able to remember exactly which name
on the voting site matches which picture :/
-=- Sunday 15 -=-
2:28
Djefke's favourite 3D package refuses to install, and hence he can't
supply us with the 3D models we wanted to put in our demo. Since the
progress on the rest of the demo is very slow, we once again decide to
delay it to the next party :( Oh well, at least I have the openGL
documentation, so I keep learning at home :/
Baxter, Phoenix and Pampy are watching some pixar movies plus all the
Hybris/NEMESIS wild demos from The Party'99 to 2K1. They get better each
year, Back To Basics is really hilarious.
The C64 music compo is happening now, and people are dancing on the
podium. I feel much too tired to do that, so I pull my sleeping bag over
my ears and take another nap.
6:08
Awake again. Boy, this feels strange: normally, a demoparty is almost
over on sunday morning, but now it's only halfway :) I discuss some
things I can't remember anymore with Djefke and Feen, who unfortunately
still hasn't got his jacket back. I've a bad feeling it might be stolen,
but Feen looks depressed enough already so I keep quiet :/
8:54
Breakfast time: the organizers are selling fresh sandwiches, and
while I'm eating I download the full version of Real Reality (including
the "making of" part that was missing on my current copy).
Another info-screen has popped up on the bigscreen since some time,
it reads: "FEELING DIRTY? The showers are open for (boys/girls) from XX
to YY". For a 4-day party, showers are indeed more than just a detail.
11:16
I went outside to catch some fresh air, and was surprised to see
everything covered with snow. That's what happens if you spend too much
time inside, you lose track of what happens to the world outside :) Some
sceners are standing around a fire, keeping it burning despite the snow.
PS informs me that Yes and Chandra from Orange Juice are not sure if
LTP5 will happen this year. I really, really hope it will, as LTP4 was
the best party I visited last year. After a while the cold forces me
back inside, cause I'm not wearing a coat.
The Amiga 4K compo starts, with some nice productions but nothing as
spectacular as the best PC 4K intros. I guess the limited CPU power
makes the biggest difference. One entry has no visual effects, but
generates 8 (yes, eight) different chiptunes! Unfortunately this takes a
good 20 minutes, so my opinion about it balances between awe and
boredom.
13:37
After reading the Halloween documents (www.opensource.org/halloween)
some time ago, I had decided to give Linux a try, but being the cautious
type I preferred to have a Linux guru around in case I screwed up. Since
Djefke is a hardcore Linux evangelist, now seems to be a good time to
take the risk. While I struggle with the Suse installer, LILO and
loadlin, the C64 graphics are shown. Feen tells me they have only 16
colors, and the resolution is probably very limited too, but from the
back of the hall they look almost as sharp and colorful as the PC
graphics :)
16:07
Linux works, to the extend that I can type this in the Midnight
Commander, yipee! (This turns out to be a bad idea, as I have to convert
the line-endings of the new paragraph when I continue in Notepad). After
the C64 graphics compo followed the console demos compo: stuff for the
Gameboy Advanced and the Dreamcast etc, about 5 entries in all. All
chairs (and other horizontal surfaces in the first part of the hall) are
occupied, so I've to watch them from a distance.
To fill the gap till the next compo, those wicked orgos have thrown
in ChillZone, a live jam-session with synthesizers, guitars and (brace
yourselves) digeridoos! For the ignorant: a didgeridoo is an Australian
wood-wind instrument that looks like a 2-meter long cigar and sounds
like a blowfly with a cold. In addition, everyone who had an instrument
was invited to join in. Vickey, Tomcat/Greenroom's girlfriend started to
dance on the podium, more people followed her example and by the time
the delayed PC 64K intro compo was ready to begin, it had to be delayed
even longer because the dancers (and the audience) didn't want to stop
:)
The 64K intro compo wasn't as spectacular as the 4K intro compo, most
of the 17 intros used the same accelerated effects. Art by Farbrausch &
Scoopex was something special, it used 3D in child-drawing style (like
cartoon-style rendering but with disconnected lines and almost flat
colors that cross the lines). Further honorable mentions to Rise for the
original progress cube and the impressive cityscape, and for The
Milkyway Experience for the nice spacecut effect. As I had trouble to
keep concentrated during the compo, I'll sleep during the MP3 compo in
order to be fully awake during the demo compos.
18:06
The C64 4K intro compo has started. One features realtime raytracing
in textmode, albeit so slow that you can see the individual frames being
drawn. Most intros have music too, but what impresses me the most is the
large number of entries: over 20! That's twice as much as in the PC
compo, for a machine that has only a fraction of the PC's active scene!
Of course, there isn't *that* much you can do on a C64 besides
programming on it :)
21:57
The demo compos are being delayed due to the large nr of entries. In
the meantime, another round of "Who whants to be a scenionaire" is
played with Mat!/Ozone as contestant, and later everyone can bring stuff
to the orgos to be shown on the bigscreen (such as the inevitable All
Your Base animation).
23:10
Still no democompos, but there's an improvized real-time coding compo
for the C64: coders have 1 minute the time to program live on the
bigscreen simple effects like making the border of the screen flash.
Just before the democompos, the classic game Bomberman is played on
the bigscreen. Steeler dedicates this game to a friend of him who was a
famous hardware designer but died a few weeks ago. For the challenge,
the players have to use very big and clumsy control pads. As a result,
most levels are won by the player who does *not* blows up himself.
And after the Bomberman game, the demo compos start!
-=- Monday 16 -=-
3:31
Wow! First 22 amiga demos, then 15 minutes pause, and then 27 PC
demos. Man, I'm feeling dizzy! The Amiga demos were almost all very well
designed, but the effects are of course not up to par with the PC demos.
The Black Lotus made IMHO the best one, Perfect Circle, with a very
impressive Mandelbrot rotozoom effect. The PC demos were on average of a
lower quality than the amiga ones, and I wouldn't have mind a
preselection. Still there were many excellent ones. Propaganda/INF is my
favourite one, lots of great effects changing rapidly, perfectly synced
to the music (a japanese rock MP3, as usual). Nature Still Sucks also
looks really great, although the framerate is on the low side at some
parts. Kolor has also made a very nice demo in a cute cartoon-style, Le
Petit Prince, which will no doubt end up high in the results.
The C64 demos follow, but I can hardly concentrate anymore. I
randomly try the URL ftp.party in the explorer, and guess what? The
majority of the entries is already available online. I keep one eye on
the bigscreen while I start downloading them, and after the C64 demo
compo ends the bigscreen shows several URLs where you can download the
entries :) Now you can also exchange your wristband for a voting key,
which is necessary to submit the voting form. The orgos take no risks
that someone fakes a votekey: mine was
"8JHkdW5Qw]A3aPY-w2c-<-Ayhcz>88D", that a full 31 mixed-case characters.
Try to type that correctly when you've had less then 10 hours sleep in 3
days!
7:21
Voting is over, already from 6 o'clock. That made a rather small
timeframe for people to submit their votes, and since many sceners went
to sleep after the compos, they missed the deadline. It was also
impossible, in the time given, to relisten/rewatch all the entries for
more accurate voting :(
Feen and I talk about Hornet and the American demoscene, and I buy a
NAIDorabilia CD from him to add to my scene CD collection. Nowadays
everyone has a CD burner and broadband internet access, so "official"
scene CD's become a rarity...
11:46
The fast intro compo entries are shown, which had to feature an
olympic flame, donuts, an advertisement, and some more compulsory
subjects. Finally the prize ceremony starts. Instead of the usual
third-second-first place announcing, all entries of a compo are shown
together. After each name is a growing bar, and the entry whose bar
grows the largest has the most results and wins. The tension in the
audience rises as one bar after another stops growing :)
In the 4K intro compo, the raytraced Juggler wins, followed by Varus.
In the 64K compo Art takes the first place, which I personally didn't
like that much. The second and third places go to Haujobb's intro and
the Rise intro. Le Petit Prince/Kolor wins the democompo, followed by
Mozaik/Haujobb and Propaganda/INF. I'm disappointed that Nature Still
Suxx reaches only the fifth place, IMHO they deserved a higher ranking.
A lot of sceners have started packing and are leaving the place, even
before the prize ceremony. When the rows before us are half-empty, Feen
and I go take a look at the location where he has last seen his jacket,
and lo and behold: we find it under a table tucked behind a cardboard
box! Even better, the plane ticket is still in it. So Phoenix isn't
stuck here in Fallingbostel, I'm sure that's a load off his shoulders :)
1:30
We start to pack our stuff and swap email addresses with Pampy and
Feen. Skyrunner, who has made the music for the winning Juggler 4K,
gives me one of the several identical issues of the Go64! magazine he
has won. I know the 4K compo doesn't have big money prizes, but that
must be one of the most useless prizes ever, especially because last
year, he also won several copies of exactly the same issue!
After we say goodbye to our friends, we drive off to Belgium. The
trip home doesn't go as smooth, we spend two hours in traffic jams. I
try to sleep, and later I read that Go64! mag. It's hard to believe
they still made papermags for the C64 in 1999! The articles are
interesting though: reports from demoscene parties, articles on how to
etch your own printed circuits (hint: wear sunscreen to protect against
sunburns from the UV lamp, and be careful with those hazardeous
chemicals), and how to mask non-maskable interrupts. There's one gem of
a quote I just have to share with you, about how the C64 sceners see the
PC sceners: (Go64! september 1999, p 12):
"Nobody seems to have any artistic skill anymore - graphics are
scanned or raytraced, samples are mixed together in the fast tracker to
mindless 'Mod' music without any hint of imagination or devotion."
There you have it, stop the Mod vs MP3 debate, let's all go back to
SID chiptunes :)
-=- Back home -=-
The next day, someone had converted the Nano program to .avi and had
put it on the net already. It was only a 5-minutes item, but they
managed to give a decent explanation what the demoscene is, and they
showed screenshots from demos and 4Ks and stuff. My interview was cut
out, probably for aesthetical reasons :)
All in all, Ms2K1 was definately the best party I've visited yet. At
first I was a bit dissapointed that we didn't finish our demo, but after
the compo it was clear that there were already enough demos, and ours
would only have lowered the average quality. Lots of kudos to the
organizing, for speaking English, properly announcing delays, providing
entertainment inbetween the compos, and much much more. The amount of
entries in all compos was very good, more often too high than too low,
and the general atmosphere was great. The only improvement I can see is
in the voting. The (IMHO) perfect system would be: after each compo, all
entries are made available for download, people can vote whenever they
want, and votes can be submitted for each compo separately, instead of
all at once. Implement that and next year's edition will be really the
perfect party.
--Seven
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------