Trailer Park Demos released the full source code for the Blockparty 2008 Invitation today on their website. The release contains all the improvements to the Trailer Park Demos technology over the past year, including the group’s internal demo editing tool. In other words, this is the source code for an unreleased final version rather than the party version from a year ago. This release is worth checking out, since demo groups do not often share their latest and greatest work with the public. The project compiles under Visual Studio 2005 and uses OpenGL for rendering.
Author Archive
If you follow Blackpawn’s Twitter feed, you probably know that he and the XPLSV crew have been hard at work on the Blockparty 2009 Invitation. If not, you are probably wondering where the invitation is. Well, the wait is over. You can now snag the finished demo on pouet.net, or sit back and enjoy the video capture on capped.tv. Be warned: this demo contains shiney awesomeness.
The Northern Dragons have concluded their Text Mode Demo Competition, and the results are now online at the compo website and on pouet. This is the Northern Dragon’s first year hosting the competition after picking up the torch from tAAt, and the results look excellent! Let’s hear it for the Northern Dragons, and all those who contributed entries to the compo!
During NVScene 2008, the Demoscene.tv staff interviewed a few members of the North American demoscene:
- The Northern Dragons
- s_tec / Trailer Park Demos
Besides these two interviews, Demoscene.tv has good coverage of NVScene itself, including hall fly-bys, interviews with the organizers, footage of the competition screenings, and even some Rob is Jarig dance action.
There will be a mini demoparty on June 15 in the SOMA district of San Francisco. The theme for the party compo is “bowling,” and there is a single wild competition for all entries, including demos, art, music, live performances, or whatever else gets submitted. The party has limited space, so only invited sceners are asked to attend.
The party sounds like good fun, and its neat to see things like this taking place. Plus, the bowling-themed compo should produce some… interesting prods. More information is available at the party website.
Update: If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and haven’t received an invitation yet, get in touch with gd.
Dilve has started an interesting thread on pouet.net. The thread is extremely confusing and makes some exaggerated claims, but it seems like the event consists of a “digital arts festival” followed by a rave. Apparently, the winning entries from the digital arts festival will be featured in the rave. The event takes place in October in Salt Lake City.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I already have travel plans for two demo parties this year, Blockparty and NVision. Traveling to a third seems excessive, especially when it is a “digital arts festival” and not a proper demo party. Phoenix draws an interesting parallel between Dilve’s claims and Crash ’97. The Crash organizers made plans for a huge demo party with thousands of people in a huge sports hall, but only about 50 people showed up in the end. Even if thousands of people show up to the rave, as Dilve claims, he will be lucky to have even a dozen demo sceners attend the art portion. Blockparty 2007 only had about twenty hardcore sceners show up, and the organizers put in a ton of work to make that party a success. The fact is, our scene just isn’t that big, and just finding twenty sceners willing to pay for airline flights and hotel rooms is a massive success by itself.
Remember, too, that Dilve hosted a similar event last year, and nobody from the demoscene showed up. Organizing a proper demoscene event takes tons of work and massive amounts of credibility. Even in the context of a larger event, such as Notacon or NVscene, demosceners expect their own sub-party with their own organizers, competitions, and events. Hosting a generic arts festival and saying “demosceners invited” is not a recipe for success. There is a chance that Dilve will do things correctly this year, but only time will tell. A confusing post full of exaggerated claims is just not not a good way to start.
The Northern Dragons have released a parody invitation for the upcoming NVision demoparty. The demo, released by “NDivia,” invites you to the “GinVision 2008″ demo party. The party features several wonderful competitions, including:
- 4k PC
- 4k GP32X Game
- PSP music dic^Hsk
- GBA 3D wild
- Euroweenie-eating contest
- Monkey Island Speedrun contest
- Acoustic Guitar Hero
- ATI Card throwing / skeet shoot
- Rob is Jarig Dance Marathon
In addition, attendees receive free booze and a Tesla supercomputer! Naturally, the entire invitation, including the imaginary demo party, is a joke. The demo’s author, Guybrush, writes on pouet:
To be totally clear: we <3 nvidia and are looking forward to nvision with incredible excitement, SO much excitement that we’re going crazy having to fabricate details of the compos and events. I think they deserve to be this arrogant towards their competitors… anyway, ALL of the blame for how much this sucks lies completely on us, Garg and Temis had absolutely nothing to do with this. I’m looking forward to CNS completely crushing us with the real invite. Actually I’m kind of scared.
You can see this hilarious trainwreck of a demo on pouet.net. There is also a thread on the pouet bbs.
Note: The real NVScene invite was presented at Breakpoint by Farbrausch and Neuro (I originally thought it would be Conspiracy, but they cooperated on an Evoke invite instead). We’ll link to it when it’s released. -phoenix
Blockparty starts three weeks from today (woot!) at exactly 12:00pm. How do I know that? Because the detailed schedule is now online at the Notacon web site. Check it out! It looks like I’ll be busy running back and forth between the awesome talks they have lined up, and not doing party coding this year. 