Party Review Mekka/Symposium 2001 By: Seven -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -=- Friday 13 -=- It's spring, and the scene is slowly gathering speed again. The long-awaited Mekka/Symposium 2001 starts today in Fallingbostel, a good 600 Km from my appartment in Belgium, so I took a day off to get there on time. Hey, it's Friday 13, it brings bad luck if you work today :) Baxter arrives at 11 o'clock, and we load my junk in the car in record time. Next we drive to Antwerp to pick up Djefke and his equipment. He takes two monitors and two keyboards with him, because he promised these to a British scener on #pixel who could only bring the case of his PC. With a lot of effort we manages to fit everything in the car. It reminds me of Block-Out, that old 3D tetris game :) The rest of the 7-hour trip from Belgium over the Netherlands to Germany goes without troubles. We didn't get lost and had no significant accidents, only Baxter grumbled a bit that he had get up sooner than usual, and thus couldn't eat a decent meal before he left. At the Dutch-German border, we were a bit nervous because Baxter had seen on the news yesterday that the Dutch custom officers were confiscating all products of animal origin, due to the foot and mouth disease. They even went so far to confiscate chocolate easter eggs (dunno why, milk or eggs don't transmit it IIRC but maybe the custom officers just like to eat them themselves), and guess what I had hidden in my backpack to celebrate Easter on sunday :/ Luckily the custom officers were lunching and we didn't even had to stop. We talked about the demo that we planned to make at the party. It's been since LTP4 that we wanted to release something, but things always got delayed :( So, now we'll release something just for the heck of it, no matter how unfinished it is. We aim for a ranking in the middle :) When we arrived at the partyplace, the parking was already quite filled. We parked temporary next to the entrance, to facilitate unloading. Walking through the entrance hall, I saw scene-posters from Pain, Buenzli, Haujobb and other groups/mags/parties sticked to the doors and the walls. The main hall was largely filled already, so we quickly paid the entrance fee (70 DM, about 35 Euro) and scanned the hall for three consecutive empty seats. Alas, the few such places were already reserved :/ Since there was plenty of empty space near the entrance, we asked the organisers for a table to set up there. They had one left, a wobbling, sqeaky one, but it didn't break under the weight of our monitors so we were well pleased. We put it next to the info desk, far away from the *large* speakers on the podium. During our installation I already ran into Diver, PS/Calodox and Skyrunner, and the whole place has a really great athmosphere. The main partyplace is a single sporthall, very large, with a ceiling that looks like the bottom of a wooden ship. On one end, there's a podium with a large big screen. Over a hundred chairs are put in front of the podium, and after each compo this part of the floor will become more and more covered with bottles, cups and cans. It was almost dangerous to walk there the last day :) Only after a day I noticed there's a balcony behind the bigscreen which can be reached via two stairs to the left and the right of the bigscreen. A lot of C64 sceners are sitting there, as wel as in the right corner next to the bigscreen. There are numerous banners on the walls, an Amiga scener has brought his own beamer with which he projects stuff on the ceiling, some people have brought christmas lights to decorate their machines... And then there are the fashion statements: the guys from Centric all wear something like a white body-covering desinfection suit with a big orange C on the back, and dust masks. I notice a few really weird hats, and someone (from the group Sundancers Inc. IIRC) wears a T-shirt with the message "Save the scroller!" In the back of the hall everyone could write his groupname/logo/whatever on a large paper banner. By the end of the party, it was completely filled. 18:46: Baxter is cursing at C++, since he's using Java at work and now considers that a much better language. I try to install VC++, which crashes of course, but for the sake of our demo I do not give up in disgust. A bit later my old projects compile again, so I try to convert them to that DemoGL framework Baxter wants to use. On the bigscreen, the timetable is shown, plus useful info like the prices of the cables, CD's and the rest you can buy at the info desk. Another screen is added later: a request for everyone in the hall to sit a bit closer to each other, in order to make room for the other sceners that are still arriving. 21:00 The opening ceremony starts, inspired on the olympic games: Steeler runs to the podium with a self-made Olympic torch (a flashlight with red plastic strips), and "lights" the bigscreen with a fullscreen oldskool fire-effect. The entire crew presents itself on the podium, and then the intro of the C64 game Summer Games is shown. 22:41 Welle Erdball is giving a live performance, loud but very good. It's a German music group which plays rock music with synthesizers, they've made commercial music for the nintendo/gameboy. Avoozl is helping Baxter and me on how we can draw a lot of dots quickly in openGL. Warp, who is sitting next to Avoozl, shows me his entry for the 32K game compo: a strange 2-player mutation of Pacman, based on an ancient C64 game. -=- Saturday 14 -=- 1.25 Crest's demoshow is over. For over two hours, he's been showing a selection of the very best PC demos and intros. I especially liked to see those GUS-only intros like Paper or Clone meets clone, it's been a long time since I've seen them *with* sound (never had a GUS...) Djefke, who is responsible for the public relations in Access Denied, is using his secret weapon: beer. More precisely: Belgian beer. Need we say more? Hoardes of sceners suddenly want to talk with him (Of course, I don't want to imply you're any bit less interesting without beer, Djefke :)) One of them is Phoenix/Hornet from America, nowadays using the handle Feen, who decided to visit MS2k1 just a few days before. Wow, I never expected to meet a Hornet member in real life. My second scene-CD was the Hornet Underground CD, and I've read all issues of Demojournal, so this brings back some memories. 2:54 In the row in front of us, some guys are working on a *very* impressive animated model of a scorpion. It's clearly for a demo, and it's depressing to watch if you still got to figure out the basics of openGL :/ Baxter goes to sleep in his car, since the sleeping area is completely filled. A few minutes later, a guy from the scorpion-demo asks if I've a copy of Visual Studio. I hand him over Baxters CDs, and it turns out they're from Federation Against Nature, the group who made the best raytrace-demo so far: Nature Suxx. In fact, the scorpion is part of the sequel they are making now: Nature Still Suxx! I really like raytracing demos, so I'm more than happy to hear this. 4:18 Night in Fallingbostel, everything is very quiet. I'm trying to get a mandelbrot zoom working. Yeah, I know fractal zoomers were fashionable maybe five years ago, but it's just for in the background of another effect. In the row next to us, Mat!/Ozone is sleeping with his head on his keyboard. His screensaver shows Beavis and Butt-head peering out the monitor, saying "Look! The sucker is asleep!" A self-made paper piggy bank is attached to his Amiga, with a notice "If you have 5000 DM and you don't need them, I accept it... :-) Give me your money and feel better! Mat!/Ozone: I'm REALLY very poor". Now I understand why the party website said about the entrance fee: free for girls and Mat!/Ozone :) 9:00 PS is using Baxters PC to debug a demo he made with someone else, but unfortunately the coder is not at the partyplace. Dake & Fred/Calodox are helping him. I'm typing over some code from a Graphic Gems book, on how to do fast delaunay triangulation. This should somehow help me to do a fast voronoi effect, but unfortunately the book doesn't tell how to convert between them :/ The rest of the hall is *still* very quiet. 10:05 Oh oh, after he woke up, Feen can't find his jacket anymore, and his plane ticket is in it! The orgos ask over the PA if someone has seen it, but no-one reacts :( Since Djefke is now awake, he can keep an eye on the hardware and it's my turn to catch some sleep. 12:22 I'm back awake again (my average sleeping time on a concrete floor seems to be 2 hours), and after eating a bit I talk with Pampy, another american scener, about voronoi cells. The first compo is alternative graphics, meaning raytracing and photoshopped pics, should start at 13.00. Let's hope there are no delays... 14:34 The first compo was one hour delayed, but it was of very high quality. There were 57 entries, out of which 36 entries were preselected. It's hard to choose from 36 pictures when you see them only once for maybe 20 seconds each, but they will be shown a second time tomorrow. During the compo, they played more Welle Erdball music, which is really a fitting soundtrack for a demoparty. 16:12 The Second Reality show has passed; in order following versions of that classic demo were shown: the C64 clone by Smash Design, the wild version Real Reality by Never, the original PC version by Future Crew, and as a bonus Future Crew's Unreal demo, on which Second Reality was the sequel. After this we all go outside to watch the harddisk-throwing compo. There's some discrimination in this compo: the girls who compete can throw with small, modern harddisks, while the guys have to throw big, ancient harddrives that are at least four times as large. Is that fair? An exception is made for Mat!, who is allowed to throw with the girl's harddisk (OK, because there were no more girls who wanted to compete, and maybe because Mat isn't exactly very large). 16:59 Oh boy! There's a TV-crew walking around, and they were interviewing an organizer in the row in front of us. When they were finished, the interviewer asked if he could interview me, and I didn't immediately found an excuse to say no :) So five minutes later I was looking at the camera, rather nervous I might add, with my back to my screen ("Can you show something on your screen? Something impressive please?"), answering questions like "Where are you from?", "Why are you in the scene?", "Are you looking for a job here?", "Do you think the newest hardware makes it easier to make a demo?" etc. At least it seems they're genuinly interested in the scene, and don't try to make it look like a freakshow. (Hmm, on second thought, then why did they interview *me*? ). Since I don't have TV at home, let alone cable, I'll ask Skyrunner if he can tape it (program Nano on 3Sat, tuesday) and watch if I'm shown on it. 20:45 Since even coders can't live on bread and orange juice alone, we hop in the car and go on a food hunt. I could really go for some pizza, but the McDonalds are closer, so french fries and hamburgers it is... Unfortunately we missed the 64K amiga intros in the meantime, but someone recorded them on a digital camera and put the avi on the LAN, so I can watch them in thumbnail format. A tad later, the PC 4K intro compo starts. One word: magnificent! After all the parties with none or only a few low-quality entries, it's great to see a compo with 10 entries, several of which are simply groundbraking. My favourite is Juggler, featuring a realtime raytraced juggler, with reflections etc plus music. Then there's Varus, with streams of lights traveling through accelerated 3D environments, also with music, and there are 4K versions of Heaven 7 and Kasparov (with music that's even more boring than the original :))... Wow, wow, wow. Next a virtual newsreader announces several fake demo-related newsitems, quite funny but I don't remember them anymore. Sorry. 21:54 More entertainment from the organizers: a scene-version of the TV-show "Who wants to be a millionaire?" It has the bombastic soundeffects, the three types of jokers (of which the ask-the-public and phone-a-friend jokers are a tiny bit manipulated by the orgos), and questions ranging from "how many channels has a 4-channel module" to "how do you set the border color on a C64 to black ?" (Answer D: poke 54296, 0). It's much better than the real thing. 23:07 Finally it's time for the hand-pixeled graphics! Again a preselection is necessary, but still over 40 high-quality pictures are shown. Voting will be very, very difficult. It's a pity they're not (yet?) available on the website, because I won't be able to remember exactly which name on the voting site matches which picture :/ -=- Sunday 15 -=- 2:28 Djefke's favourite 3D package refuses to install, and hence he can't supply us with the 3D models we wanted to put in our demo. Since the progress on the rest of the demo is very slow, we once again decide to delay it to the next party :( Oh well, at least I have the openGL documentation, so I keep learning at home :/ Baxter, Phoenix and Pampy are watching some pixar movies plus all the Hybris/NEMESIS wild demos from The Party'99 to 2K1. They get better each year, Back To Basics is really hilarious. The C64 music compo is happening now, and people are dancing on the podium. I feel much too tired to do that, so I pull my sleeping bag over my ears and take another nap. 6:08 Awake again. Boy, this feels strange: normally, a demoparty is almost over on sunday morning, but now it's only halfway :) I discuss some things I can't remember anymore with Djefke and Feen, who unfortunately still hasn't got his jacket back. I've a bad feeling it might be stolen, but Feen looks depressed enough already so I keep quiet :/ 8:54 Breakfast time: the organizers are selling fresh sandwiches, and while I'm eating I download the full version of Real Reality (including the "making of" part that was missing on my current copy). Another info-screen has popped up on the bigscreen since some time, it reads: "FEELING DIRTY? The showers are open for (boys/girls) from XX to YY". For a 4-day party, showers are indeed more than just a detail. 11:16 I went outside to catch some fresh air, and was surprised to see everything covered with snow. That's what happens if you spend too much time inside, you lose track of what happens to the world outside :) Some sceners are standing around a fire, keeping it burning despite the snow. PS informs me that Yes and Chandra from Orange Juice are not sure if LTP5 will happen this year. I really, really hope it will, as LTP4 was the best party I visited last year. After a while the cold forces me back inside, cause I'm not wearing a coat. The Amiga 4K compo starts, with some nice productions but nothing as spectacular as the best PC 4K intros. I guess the limited CPU power makes the biggest difference. One entry has no visual effects, but generates 8 (yes, eight) different chiptunes! Unfortunately this takes a good 20 minutes, so my opinion about it balances between awe and boredom. 13:37 After reading the Halloween documents (www.opensource.org/halloween) some time ago, I had decided to give Linux a try, but being the cautious type I preferred to have a Linux guru around in case I screwed up. Since Djefke is a hardcore Linux evangelist, now seems to be a good time to take the risk. While I struggle with the Suse installer, LILO and loadlin, the C64 graphics are shown. Feen tells me they have only 16 colors, and the resolution is probably very limited too, but from the back of the hall they look almost as sharp and colorful as the PC graphics :) 16:07 Linux works, to the extend that I can type this in the Midnight Commander, yipee! (This turns out to be a bad idea, as I have to convert the line-endings of the new paragraph when I continue in Notepad). After the C64 graphics compo followed the console demos compo: stuff for the Gameboy Advanced and the Dreamcast etc, about 5 entries in all. All chairs (and other horizontal surfaces in the first part of the hall) are occupied, so I've to watch them from a distance. To fill the gap till the next compo, those wicked orgos have thrown in ChillZone, a live jam-session with synthesizers, guitars and (brace yourselves) digeridoos! For the ignorant: a didgeridoo is an Australian wood-wind instrument that looks like a 2-meter long cigar and sounds like a blowfly with a cold. In addition, everyone who had an instrument was invited to join in. Vickey, Tomcat/Greenroom's girlfriend started to dance on the podium, more people followed her example and by the time the delayed PC 64K intro compo was ready to begin, it had to be delayed even longer because the dancers (and the audience) didn't want to stop :) The 64K intro compo wasn't as spectacular as the 4K intro compo, most of the 17 intros used the same accelerated effects. Art by Farbrausch & Scoopex was something special, it used 3D in child-drawing style (like cartoon-style rendering but with disconnected lines and almost flat colors that cross the lines). Further honorable mentions to Rise for the original progress cube and the impressive cityscape, and for The Milkyway Experience for the nice spacecut effect. As I had trouble to keep concentrated during the compo, I'll sleep during the MP3 compo in order to be fully awake during the demo compos. 18:06 The C64 4K intro compo has started. One features realtime raytracing in textmode, albeit so slow that you can see the individual frames being drawn. Most intros have music too, but what impresses me the most is the large number of entries: over 20! That's twice as much as in the PC compo, for a machine that has only a fraction of the PC's active scene! Of course, there isn't *that* much you can do on a C64 besides programming on it :) 21:57 The demo compos are being delayed due to the large nr of entries. In the meantime, another round of "Who whants to be a scenionaire" is played with Mat!/Ozone as contestant, and later everyone can bring stuff to the orgos to be shown on the bigscreen (such as the inevitable All Your Base animation). 23:10 Still no democompos, but there's an improvized real-time coding compo for the C64: coders have 1 minute the time to program live on the bigscreen simple effects like making the border of the screen flash. Just before the democompos, the classic game Bomberman is played on the bigscreen. Steeler dedicates this game to a friend of him who was a famous hardware designer but died a few weeks ago. For the challenge, the players have to use very big and clumsy control pads. As a result, most levels are won by the player who does *not* blows up himself. And after the Bomberman game, the demo compos start! -=- Monday 16 -=- 3:31 Wow! First 22 amiga demos, then 15 minutes pause, and then 27 PC demos. Man, I'm feeling dizzy! The Amiga demos were almost all very well designed, but the effects are of course not up to par with the PC demos. The Black Lotus made IMHO the best one, Perfect Circle, with a very impressive Mandelbrot rotozoom effect. The PC demos were on average of a lower quality than the amiga ones, and I wouldn't have mind a preselection. Still there were many excellent ones. Propaganda/INF is my favourite one, lots of great effects changing rapidly, perfectly synced to the music (a japanese rock MP3, as usual). Nature Still Sucks also looks really great, although the framerate is on the low side at some parts. Kolor has also made a very nice demo in a cute cartoon-style, Le Petit Prince, which will no doubt end up high in the results. The C64 demos follow, but I can hardly concentrate anymore. I randomly try the URL ftp.party in the explorer, and guess what? The majority of the entries is already available online. I keep one eye on the bigscreen while I start downloading them, and after the C64 demo compo ends the bigscreen shows several URLs where you can download the entries :) Now you can also exchange your wristband for a voting key, which is necessary to submit the voting form. The orgos take no risks that someone fakes a votekey: mine was "8JHkdW5Qw]A3aPY-w2c-<-Ayhcz>88D", that a full 31 mixed-case characters. Try to type that correctly when you've had less then 10 hours sleep in 3 days! 7:21 Voting is over, already from 6 o'clock. That made a rather small timeframe for people to submit their votes, and since many sceners went to sleep after the compos, they missed the deadline. It was also impossible, in the time given, to relisten/rewatch all the entries for more accurate voting :( Feen and I talk about Hornet and the American demoscene, and I buy a NAIDorabilia CD from him to add to my scene CD collection. Nowadays everyone has a CD burner and broadband internet access, so "official" scene CD's become a rarity... 11:46 The fast intro compo entries are shown, which had to feature an olympic flame, donuts, an advertisement, and some more compulsory subjects. Finally the prize ceremony starts. Instead of the usual third-second-first place announcing, all entries of a compo are shown together. After each name is a growing bar, and the entry whose bar grows the largest has the most results and wins. The tension in the audience rises as one bar after another stops growing :) In the 4K intro compo, the raytraced Juggler wins, followed by Varus. In the 64K compo Art takes the first place, which I personally didn't like that much. The second and third places go to Haujobb's intro and the Rise intro. Le Petit Prince/Kolor wins the democompo, followed by Mozaik/Haujobb and Propaganda/INF. I'm disappointed that Nature Still Suxx reaches only the fifth place, IMHO they deserved a higher ranking. A lot of sceners have started packing and are leaving the place, even before the prize ceremony. When the rows before us are half-empty, Feen and I go take a look at the location where he has last seen his jacket, and lo and behold: we find it under a table tucked behind a cardboard box! Even better, the plane ticket is still in it. So Phoenix isn't stuck here in Fallingbostel, I'm sure that's a load off his shoulders :) 1:30 We start to pack our stuff and swap email addresses with Pampy and Feen. Skyrunner, who has made the music for the winning Juggler 4K, gives me one of the several identical issues of the Go64! magazine he has won. I know the 4K compo doesn't have big money prizes, but that must be one of the most useless prizes ever, especially because last year, he also won several copies of exactly the same issue! After we say goodbye to our friends, we drive off to Belgium. The trip home doesn't go as smooth, we spend two hours in traffic jams. I try to sleep, and later I read that Go64! mag. It's hard to believe they still made papermags for the C64 in 1999! The articles are interesting though: reports from demoscene parties, articles on how to etch your own printed circuits (hint: wear sunscreen to protect against sunburns from the UV lamp, and be careful with those hazardeous chemicals), and how to mask non-maskable interrupts. There's one gem of a quote I just have to share with you, about how the C64 sceners see the PC sceners: (Go64! september 1999, p 12): "Nobody seems to have any artistic skill anymore - graphics are scanned or raytraced, samples are mixed together in the fast tracker to mindless 'Mod' music without any hint of imagination or devotion." There you have it, stop the Mod vs MP3 debate, let's all go back to SID chiptunes :) -=- Back home -=- The next day, someone had converted the Nano program to .avi and had put it on the net already. It was only a 5-minutes item, but they managed to give a decent explanation what the demoscene is, and they showed screenshots from demos and 4Ks and stuff. My interview was cut out, probably for aesthetical reasons :) All in all, Ms2K1 was definately the best party I've visited yet. At first I was a bit dissapointed that we didn't finish our demo, but after the compo it was clear that there were already enough demos, and ours would only have lowered the average quality. Lots of kudos to the organizing, for speaking English, properly announcing delays, providing entertainment inbetween the compos, and much much more. The amount of entries in all compos was very good, more often too high than too low, and the general atmosphere was great. The only improvement I can see is in the voting. The (IMHO) perfect system would be: after each compo, all entries are made available for download, people can vote whenever they want, and votes can be submitted for each compo separately, instead of all at once. Implement that and next year's edition will be really the perfect party. --Seven --------------------------------------------------------------------------------