. . . .. ... ....._.._.__..___..__._...... ... .. . . .
_________ ______.____(___)_______ ________
/ ___\___\ | /__( _ __\ ___.____.___/_ __ \
( / _ __\ / \ __/ ) \ / ) \__ \__)
\____( __/ )______( )______/ \ /\________/
. ..._.._\________/_._..._.\____/._......_.\___/\___/.__._.._... .
Bitplane stuff by Satantronic (2001) [Falcon/ST]
Bitplanes were the basics of a lot of old-school effects, if you
watch the demos of the glorious days with a keen eye. New-school
coders swear at them and try to get rid of them (c2p), beginners
curse them for their confusing nature and old-schoolers love them.
What have they been used for. Parallax-Scrollers, transparency and
shadow-effects, motion-blurring and so forth.
Now the people of Satantronic strike again to have their go at
bitplanes. Hold it, wait a second, not quite: The music is from
mOd of Checkpoint. Let me repeat that: mOd of Checkpoint.
But let's get back to this later.
The demo begins with a little picture telling you (in monochrome)
the name of the demo and who did what.
So, what do we have ? We have an almost black screen, just very
barely can you see that there's something hidden. Several little
objects (maybe 32x32 pixels in size) shaped like a star,a disk,
an alien head and a standard Atari exception bomb,
move on screen and if you watch closely you see that these
objects uncover the hidden background, which is presented shortly
afterwards: A greyscale picture of Jookie making faces at the
camera.
Next we have a horizontally scrolling starfield with a monochrome
Satantronic logo statically on screen.
Not for long though, after that we get the instant-headache-inductor
by a bunch of 3 moving colourful patterns, one bitplane each, moving
in different directions resulting in a very chaotic pattern on screen.
Now 2 Aspirins and a little rest later ...
The music is not bad for a musician who is probably not very trained
at doing chipmusic. I have heard worse tunes from people that call
themselves musician, even though it's just a remix of Popcorn and
hence not very original, but - hey, it's definetly the best part of
the demo.
Come again ?
Yes, funny as it sounds, it's the best part of this demo/intro.
The sprite thingy screen is anything but special, the patterns
of movement kind of odd, the movement anything but fluent and the
sprites themselves look like drawn in 2 minutes.
Okay, maybe 3 minutes.
But we talk about 4 little sprites here moving on screen that
are actually only 1 bitplane deep.
The horizontal starfield scroller looks like borrowed from a fake
demo. At least the looks of the logo, the chosen palette and the
movement induce that assumption.
The final effect with the moving patterns just gives me a headache
and rather looks like abusing bitplanes instead of wisely using
them.
So honestly, probably it would be a nice idea of working on a demo
for some time instead of releasing 4 not-really-a-demo-s within 2
weeks. This demo has obviously been done too quickly, it doesn't
display any kind of optimisations in any of the code, the graphics
are basically missing if we refuse to call the Satantronic logo a
graphic - which i intend to do - and what's left is the music -
Like i said, the highlight of the demo.
Please, Satantronic, before releasing something it would be nice
if you maybe had a look at it or probably even two. Nobody expects
an ST-conversion of Don't break the Oath!, Wait! or Hmm... of
you, but maybe it wouldn't be too much to ask for if you could
chose a palette that doesn't suggest my monitor is mixing up
red/green/blue channels or design an effect in a way that it
doesn't induce a headache just by looking at it. No offense
intended. But you should have better skipped releasing this intro.
The Paranoid/Paranoia
Of the Lunatic Asylum
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