OUT
BY LINEOUT
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Almost day-to-day one year after delivering his huge DELTA demo, Earx and
his folks are back with a smaller tho technically flawless demo simply called
OUT. I wonder if next demo will be called LINE or something else then :)
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More seriously this short demo runs on all standard Falcons and is also
supposedly happy with accelerated birds as no one has seemed to complain about
compatability issues. If you still own and use a bare 4Mb Falcon, you'll be
happy to see it's not useless yet, dunno if FPU is even required here. The demo
also runs either with RGB or VGA as the usual config panel offers various
choices.
Being a lamer who has connected his Falcon to a 70cm tele, I went for RGB
and didn't have to wait long before a very colorful LINEOUT logo by hyper
active gfxman C-rem popped up. Can't tell if it's 256 colors or TC but it fully
uses the wide range of colors offered mixing a purple dithering logo on a
golden texture background. Then weird teknoing sound by D-Force is launched
beating up to the fx appearance.
It all really starts with a flight over a wireframe city, not looking bad
at all though it's mostly made of white lines with darker shades to bring
depth to the whole set. Our short trip ends facing a wireframe OUT logo and
soon enough an heavily antialized rotozoomer gives us credits, a bit confusing
at first as I tended to read "credits" instead of C-rem as the first name.
It uses a nicely designed greenish texture.
Screen goes black for very little time before separate parts of skyscrapers
suddenly flank the screen. Then we go for the first "woh!" effect, namely a big
envmapped object, the shape of a cross but with irregular sticks, all of this
spinning around in total smoothness. It even grows bigger or smaller with some
beats of the music, call it the HMM inspiration :) First time I think that we
can enjoy such wonder with a 256c (or TC again ?) bg picture !
Next are coming two green envmapped (or simply textured) rubber bars,
twisting in a spiral wave while a bunch of white particles make their way in
between. Really nice and somehow makes me think of simplified DNA branch. Not
quite new tho as similar screen could be seen in DELTA if I'm not wrong :)
The following rotozoom is of a new gender too as it seems to zoom on a
never ending motive that remains quite unclear due to heavy blurring layer.
Looks great but to be honest I preferred the not-so-blurred version of the
preview Earx had sent me weeks earlier.
Earx calls the next fx "3D kaleidoscope" and though I'm not too sure why,
coders out there will surely understand his point. All I see is a field of
great looking envmapped stars, moving around in extreme smoothness too and
merging when they come in contact with each others. Indeed there seems to be
some mirror effect in this screen, maybe what he calls kaleidoscope ? Still it
shows -if needed- that Earx is a wiz coder who managed to get the guts of our
bird over heated with greatly optimized code !
We turn back to our greenish texture from the credits for a last spin and
the show ends on an #Atariscne logo with light coming from the bg and creating
rays here and there (raycaster thing is the right name I guess). Nice looking
but I'm pretty sure such logo was already seen in one of their latest prods,
can't be sure if it was DELTA tho. With a clashing, it's all over and you get
back to GEM, a bit less than 2 minutes and 30 seconds after it started.
Last words :
If some people were not quite convinced by DELTA (what seems nonsense to
me since it's so huge and nice looking) then I am pretty sure that they now are
convinced that Earx has walked another step forward and can now pretend to be a
top coder, the way No or Charon are. The overall feeling is a bit mixed tho :
the msx isn't bad but a bit harsh, remembering of DELTA's part two soundtrack.
The demo also combines greyish screens like the city and very colorful stuff
but it's no problem indeed. As I still have the preview on my harddrive I could
complain a bit about the storyline as I tend to prefer the preview where the
city flight is much shorter for a start but reappears here and there later in
the show. Then again, it's a matter or personal taste and won't lower the many
qualities of this production. Compared to DELTA this is of course a very short
trip and I hope that next time LINEOUT can find the right balance between 20
minutes and 2 minutes of demonstration as you surely want to see more of this !
In case you haven't understood my point yet, you * MUST * get it as there's no
hardware special requirement needed to enjoy this piece of art. Well done Earx
and fellows ! Now I cannot wait to see if the guys of Escape are ready to face
the challenge, but answers may await us at the next Easter party organized by
LINEOUT ?
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