utopian's blog

After reading this post on sole's blog, I thought it'd be a good idea to tell some insights about our 195/95/256 intro. This is the kind of things that I usually like hearing from other people, so it might be of some interest for my first "real" post.

First of all, something that many people may not know: this was the first prod where we made some use of a custom intro tool... Wait a minute, a demo group without a tool??? Well, yes :). As iq usually says, we have little time to code, so we dedicate this time to make demos/intros, not tools :P.

The funny thing about it is that we only used the tool for about half an hour during the party (!!). We suddenly realized that we had some "design flaws", basically that the intro had some structures using function pointers, and those functions were hard-coded and being modified all the time... so there was no way to integrate them into the tool at that time. We had to revert to the old manual way of doing things (in fact, iq seemed to be more comfortable with this way), and we only used the tool to get the intro timings.

This was a good way to waste the effort we made since the Breakpoint, were we started designing the tool... But don't worry, I have started a tool redesign, so maybe some time in the future we'll see an rgba prod using it :).

Another interesting (and criticized) point about the intro is the music. Well, everything I can say here is wait and you'll see... Jewoll's version of the demo track was just great. He finished it just two days before the deadline, and I was amazed when I heard it. It was soooo close to the original! By then I thought that Gortu's softsynth was finished, but I found out I was wrong :(.

I'm not really aware of the softsynth inner workings, but all I can say is that it is a very ambitious project. Gortu spent the whole party trying to finish it (his red eyes were the proof), but we ultimately found that a) not all instruments were implemented, and b) some of the implemented instruments were buggy... The intro even crashed in my laptop if I enabled the music.

So maybe you will understand now why the music doesn't sound as it should, and why we had to wait until the very last minute to release the intro, even without knowing if the piano would play at all, or it would destroy the speakers :). It sounded bad, but at least no one was harmed by the sound.

Don't worry, Gortu is working on it, and the final version will have a much improved sound.

Ok, enough for my first post. Time to do something else.