CENTAURI
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Hi Atari fellows ! At the Stnicc 2000 party, I met Mc Laser the famous musician
of TSCC. He is the kind of guy you always meet in European parties :o) I really
don't know where he finds his motivation ! He talked about their forthcoming
demo called " centaury " and I must admit I didn't believe what I heard : they
were working on a new production and wanted to compete for the St competition.
Unfortunately, they didn't manage to finish it on time and since December, no
news has been heard from them. Few weeks ago, I found " centaury " on the DHS
site and (sorry for that) I thought it was a joke ! The size was about 30 kb !
Shouldn't it be a big production which would fill a full disk ?
At the beginning, the monitor shows a blue screen (it remembers something....
The Windows 98 deep blue screen ?) Not at all, it is the famous Commodore 64
screen ! The sid sound music (made by Mc Laser) begins at this time. A mapped
tunnel appears and it is fast ! The texture seems to be a fractal texture but
I'm not a coder so I can be wrong. I saw there was a mistake in the texture
because there is a black stain right in the middle of the white part of the
texture.... What did the graphist do ? The only thing I'm sure of is that this
tunnel displays 2*2 pixels screen. The logo TSCC at the top of the tunnel is
not very cool... too much pixelized :o( The intro runs on a single 8 mhz Stf
and even if I'm not a coder and I can imagine it is (a bit :o) difficult to do
a real 1*1 mapped tunnel.
After this cool piece of code, a bumpmapped centaury logo appears : again in
2*2 :o( and I think it is a bit precalculated because the movement is always
the same... what a pity ! The third effect is a sort of phong object and it
rocks ! It is a bit slow and in 2*2 (as usual). What a pity, the colours are
so ugly :o( the picture at the right of the scrren looks very good but hey guy
choose other colours please !
note of sts : this pic was grabbed from the net and few colours may be changed
The programmer was obliged to use those colours for his object and finally, it
was not so good : it would have been better if Gizmo would have painted a logo
with scaled or better-chosen colours... The end of this little production is a
poor looking text with a moving dark blue object (1 colour) in the background
... So what ? Where is the rest ? Hum.... I'm a bit disappointed about it, I
though I could find some pictures from Mod and original ideas ! I think this
little production is a bit short because of the demotivation of the coders
involved in it...
According to me, they decided to release it because one little production is
better than no production at all. Nevertheless, it is a good intro but I hope
TSCC will do better in the future (I have no doubt on it).
EdO from Sector One (France) for the Alive magazine issue 2 (03/30/2001)
Contact : edo@atari.org - http://sectorone.atari.org
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