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/ /_____ / /____ / \ .::.. .:: .:: ...:::
___ / // _ \ / / /__<_ -- >.:: .:: .:: .::
/ /_____/< ____>___/_____/ / /______/.::::::.:: .:::::: :::::'
< - / \_/ / /_____/ / ___ ___ ____ /_/___ ______ ____
\_____/ /_______/ /_____/ / _// __>/ / // // __>/ / / /< /
/_/ \___/\__//_/ \___/\____//___>
-- -- -< Demo Reviews from the Error In Line #3 >- -- --
Echos by Evolution, Dead Hackers Society, New Beat (Falcon030)
An Error in Line-party without a swedish Falcon-contribution ?
Unthinkable. Even though DHS concentrated on the ST rather than
the Falcon in 99, they won the Falcon-compo with their Falcon demo.
In 2001, DHS' extremely stylish "Don't break the Oath" competed
hard with Escape's winning "Hmm ..."-demo - and everybody hoped
to see Mind Design's demo as well in 2001.
Well, Mind Design is history, as is Wildfire, and they formed
a new group named Evolution and instantly teamed up with DHS
and New Beat to release a demo named Echos on the "Error in
Line #3", held 2003 in Dresden.
The demo starts with a black and white, very DHS-like "Evo DHS NB"-
logo and the music begins to play by a very drum'n'bass-like
sequence. The screen fades and a blue stripe appears on screen in
which a lot of blobs are rotating in some kind of a plane, each
leaves tracks behind that slowly fade away. This effect is not
kept for very long until the screen fades to scroll in a graphic
of some devil-like face seen from sideways and an environment-
mapped 3D-object, star-shaped, fades in that rotates mildly
around its own center. Following the beat of the music, the
screen flashes and fades again and the 3D-object jumps sideways
once.
This is being fade down after a while, too, to make room for
blobs that are plotted in a 3D-space and rotate around the
imaginary center of this scene as well, again flashing and
fading gently to the music.
The effect vanishes and on-screen appears a cat, overlaying
some blue- and yellow flat-shaded boxes and almost instantly
fading "behind" the blue and yellow boxes. The blue and yellow
boxes actually form the swedish flag and move just around the
viewer once, bouncing up and down very slightly.
Again, the screen is faded down to make room for another of
the 3D-object-effects. This time, it's a semi-transparent
star-shaped object overlaid with the blobs from before in
mild orange and gold colours, rotating around its own center.
A little deja-vu as the blob-effect from the beginning is a
little bit recycles, once again blobs in a 3D-plane are
rotated on screen, resulting in a "galaxy"-like effect
and all of a sudden, blobs start to "go all up to the spirit
in the sky" (or someplace near that), leaving a trace of
their movement that slowly fades, too.
The last screen is again a flat-shaded 3D world, a little
room with 2 bridges and a cube, rotating in thin air, on
a plane. Colours are mainly brown and gold, the background
is a blue that fades to the upper border of the screen. The
viewer is whirled around a few times around the cube, before
that screen fades down, too, making room for a picture of
an exploding planet, of which planar 3D-logos emerge towards
the viewer, forming the words "dhs", "evo" and "nb".
The screen is white when a graphic of a girl with some
psychadelic ornaments around is displayed on the left, while
some kind of an "end-scroller", taking the other half of the
screen, scrolls upwards.
Like any demo, this demo has its strong and its weak points.
The strongest point, in my personal opinion (which is to be
argued) is the music. Not only did Thomas manage to write
a replay-routine for his ace ACE-Tracker which is being
used first time in this demo, in time, he also made up a
soundtrack that is excellent and fits the demo very very
well.
Also, graphics are not bad. The choice of colours is good
as with any Mind Design-production and the around graphics
are good, too, even though they do not match each other
very well.
Besides the galaxy-blob-effect displayed twice, this demo
hardly bears any new and unseen effects, unfortunately. The
3D-object have already been seen in DHS' demos before,
so were the blobs rotating around a fixed center. And flat-
shaded 3D like in the swedish flag or the 3D-scene are
nice to watch and well presented, but bear nothing really
new either.
One weak point of this demo might be that it's slightly
buggy. On appearance of the screen where the cat is displayed
to fade behind the cubes, my (unaccelerated) Falcon stops
the music and screen built-up is corrupted, and when i turn
on the accelerator, the music stays on and the screen is
displayed okay, but the end-music stops in the middle of
a beat.
The weakest point of this demo, however, is its speed.
Without accelerator, the galaxy-blob-effect is already
slowish but the mapped 3D-objects are very slow, which
results in rather bumpy movement. The filled-vector 3D-scenes
are okay in speed, but still look a lot better with an
accelerator.
So this is what makes the demo a little hard to judge. On the
one hand you have an excellent music and well timed light-
and movement effects, on the other hand you have very slow
3D-effects and - without wanting to sound harsh - flat-shaded
3D worlds have been moving on the Falcon's monitor ever since
the glorious times of Eko in 1994. Then again, Thomas'
ACE-replayer definetly steals 100% of the DSP- and surely
some additional CPU-time so that 3D-scenes like Eko presented
are impossible to synchronize with Thomas' excellent sound-
track.
Then again, a demo lives primarily by the effects it shows
and not by the complexity and power of the music-replayer
used. The music is the strongest point of this demo, the
demo itself is rather mediocre as it displays effects seen
before in a rather mediocre speed.
The Paranoid
of Paranoia
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