Topic awaiting preservation: Javascript demos at Assembly (Page 1 of 1)

Ladies and gentlemen, the Javascript demo scene has well and truly arrived.

Redbug by Shingebis
Pure Javascript Demo by IKU
Neja by Ribbon + Bomb

Competition results to be announced tomorrow...

The competition was HOT !!
For the record these productions entered in the Browser Demo competition at the Assembly'05. The complete rules are available here. There was also 3 Flash demos, and 1 ShockWave demo.

I've been pleasantly surprised by Shingebis prod. Good work and presentation.

You can watch Neja online. Make sure tu use a Gecko based browser with Flash ( used to replay the MP3 ).

Now the question is how will I manage to wait 18h to discover the results without blowing a fuse ?



(Edited by poi on 07-30-2005 18:43)

You can now watch Redbug online too. (Note: I haven't paid any attention to image preloading, but it seems to work with no problems here, most likely due to the small number and size of images involved, and the fact that most of them fade on slowly.)

Wow. Impressive stuff all around!

___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

Great stuff guys! This is exactly what is needed to proove that JS is just as powerfull as anything else out there!
Shingebis: I tried the online version first (to make sure nothing is cached) and it runs perfectly timed at 56k! (48k at the moment lol)
I love the music too.

Downloading the other ones too and I'm sure they'll be just as great!

I must make my own attempt at a JS demo some time :P

/TwoD

(Edited by TwoD on 07-31-2005 14:29)

Just found this on the Assembly'05 site linked to by poi:

quote:

---

[ Browser demo competition ]

Total of 10 entries were submitted to this competition. Jury qualified 7
entries for the big screen. Non-qualified entries are ranked according to
average jury points. Points for qualified entries ranged from 2.8 to 4.1
(out of maximum of 5.0).

1 5967p Redbug by Shingebis
2 4486p the drop by komplex
3 4390p pure javascript demo by IKU
4 4023p Neja by ribbon + bomb
5 3552p Scene of Life by Inapt & Static
6 3299p I,Mofo by Pyrotech
7 2780p Etsin unelmaa by CND GROUP

n/a 2.1 Skeidas! Tai kuinka lakkasin välittämästä ja rakastuin lonkeroihin by MukaSmarts
n/a 2.0 Flash Asylum by Exca & Poro
n/a 1.1 Tets by ReiLKan / Kuake

Compo organizers:
Antti Kiuru (H7 / Damones)
Ferrix Hovi (ferrix)

Members of the jury:
Hannu Pelkonen (hannu_)
Jalmari Raippalinna (Jalava / Static)
Henri Sarasvirta (Exca)
Petri Sarasvirta (poro_)
Markku Uttula (UTU / DiscoNova)

---

Congrats to all!

/TwoD

Neja segfaults my Firefox, and redbug doesn't run. I guess I'll have to try them when I have access to a Windows machine again (I converted mine all to Linux).

---
Website

I'm just back home. Unfortunately my main luggage is still at Helsinki it seems the airline was late and some luggages have not been loaded in the plane.


Well it's time again to congratulate Shingebis.
On the other, I don't want to sound like a big head, but I don't understand how Neja didn't make to the podium. Sorry I had to say that.

Iron Wallaby: Sorry. I've worked on Neja until 4 minutes before the deadline. Once I had submited it to the competition I went down to the Apple boots of the Assembly and checked it in and figured that I access the Flash movie via document.flashMovieId which FireFox Mac does not seem to support ( though AFAIR it is valid JS ) but when doing it with a document.getElementById( ) the SetVariable method of Flash cries. Whatever I'll make a final version as I'm not happy with the intro, the 3D effects can be optimized further and when the screen is shaking it's anormaly slow.



(Edited by poi on 07-31-2005 22:18)

Argh! Damn airlines - they left my luggage behind on the way to last year's Assembly, so I ended up with no sleeping bag and no Spectrum to show my oldskool entries on...

I can't understand Neja's placing in the compo either - maybe people somehow missed the fact that it was Javascript, but even so, I think it was the best entry in the competition technically, regardless of platform. Demoparty voters suck.

I guess I'll need to take another look at Firefox on Linux, then... I did try a work-in-progress version on Linux just after I put the MIDI player code in, to check that it would happily run without sound when the Quicktime component wasn't there, and it all seemed fine at that point. (Seeing and hearing it on IE is strongly recommended though.)

\o/ I've received my luggage at 16:30 today. Among other things in it there is the charger ( is it the right word ? I mean the power supply ) of my laptop and my razor. I'll make a pleasure to shave that 6 days beard.

Well, whatever the results, I'm happy to have met some talented people, discovered the Boozembly, and felt the feeling of being at a demoparty again after ~5 years of absence.

shingebis: Doh! I arrived at the airport of Helsinki 15minutes before the plane takes off, and managed to register and board within minutes.
I think we'll have to talk.

Wow, nice work on those demos!

I have to say, in my mind Neja is probably the most impressive technically... I can't believe how smooth some of those effects look. I think out of the 3 JS demos, Neja has some of the most impressive-looking effects though.

On the other hand, Redbug is pretty amazing too, considering the overall size of the demo!

You're right though, I don't understand the placing order... you'd think the JS demos would have all been in the top 3 since working in Flash is sort of... cheating...? They should almost split the compo into JS demos and Flash/Shockwave demos since the two are quite radically different.

Geez, now I'll have to work overtime to make my own JS demo worthwhile!!!

(Edited by Counterpoint on 08-02-2005 19:53)

quote:

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They should almost split the compo into JS demos and Flash/Shockwave demos since the two are quite radically different.

---

Well, that's the way it is ( was? ). Browser technologies ( except Java which is really special ) are all in the same boat in the mind of the people.

As for the placing order, Komplex benefits of a great reputation and I must admit I loved the atmosphere of their prod even though the version showed during the compo felt really empty. It was almost impossible for them to not be on the podium.


I think Shingebis open a door for JS demos last year with MoonCheese, and we ( the authors of the 3 JS demos ) crushed that door real hard this year. The demoscene, and the web savy people in general, who see these prods will look at JS with a different eye now. Maybe one day we'll have a JavaScript demo competition in a demo party.



(Edited by poi on 08-02-2005 22:30)

Actually, I really like the way the competitions are combined at Assembly and I wouldn't change it for the world... I think they get the balance just right between accommodating everyone's work, no matter what form it takes, and not having too many competitions.

Other parties tend to lean too far towards making it an absolutely level playing field, which means that people get left out (such as having a "Flash demo competition" rather than a browser demo compo) or the entries get spread out too thinly across meaningless categories (such as music competitions divided into 4-channel MOD, multichannel MOD, freestyle instrumental MP3, vocal MP3, alternative MP3...). The great thing about Assembly is watching a Vic-20 take on an Amiga 500, or a mobile phone take on a PocketPC, or Javascript take on Flash - and often, win. It might be surprising given the large number of diehard Counterstrike nuts at the party, but people do appreciate the platform differences, and if anything, tend to root for the underdogs.

I mean I'll be happy if one day there will be enough JavaScript entries to have a dedicated demo competition.

Indeed seeing Vic20 or C64 winning over Amiga, or JavaScript winning over Flash and ShockWave is really cool.

You guys never cease to amaze. Awesome work!

A friend of mine (well-versed in javascript) called "BS" when I sent him the Neja URL - I had to correct him, confirming that was indeed JS.

Unfortunately my CPU (P4M 1.6 GHz) couldn't handle most of the animation and the audio sync seemed to be affected by this, so I'll have to watch it at work - but Neja definitely has the effects down; lots of tricks I've been used to seeing in the old DOS-based assembler demos from way back when.

The "grid/field" effect in Redbug is really impressive-looking, I dug the rotation effect there as well (it also ran smoother on this laptop, the audio synced up nicely.)

Hey guys - awesome work... really awesome.

I especially liked the graphic from 2nd Reality, poi... that demo takes me way back to my uni days! To this day it is still one of my all-time favourite PC demos (along with fr-025).

Let's see what CSS3 support can do for the JS demoscene, eh? Although that will be a while off for most browsers to support to a decent-enough extent.

Dan

Wow, those are all amazing. Makes me want to go and learn some JS... Maybe it's time.

Great job to all!

Some really amazing effects there. Wow.

How are you generating colour bitmaps? I can see that you build a header, then the palette and then the actual data, etc.. Any chance of a simple demonstration? Say creating a blank 5*5 bitmap and then colouring a few pixels?

I reckon that some pretty cool looking games could be done with this stuff..

Thanks for the feedback everybody.

I'm working on the final version. Polishing some effects, textures and transitions, and removing some unused bits of code and datas. It's doing well. I even remade the Flash movie used to replay the MP3 and optimized it with FLASM ( now it take the url of the mp3 in argument and takes 179 bytes instead of 376 bytes ).

Scott: That's the kind of reaction I love to summon

BillyRayPreachersSon: CSS3 ? Well there's already the opacity in many browsers. But I think the first CSS3 thing I'll try would be a tunnel thanks to the multiple background images

RobertG: The "secret" is in the rfc 2397. In the Image generation using javascript / and a hint for shingebis thread, we discussed several ways to generate a picture in JavaScript and I gave a link to the ugly texture generator I made in may 2004. If it's not enough I could make a simple demonstration with a blank bitmap.

Unfortunately Opera absolutely wants some base64 datas ( though the ;base64 parameter is optionnal ). It's too slow to do the base64 encoding on fly for more than 3,000 pixels and it's impossible to precompute the base64 encoding of a any 24bits picture, so unless you stick to a limited number of colors you can say ( for the moment ? ) bye bye to Opera. However, you certainly know that in base64 3 bytes takes 4 characters, so you can take advantage of that to precompute the encoding of some RGB triplet into tiny strings of 4 characters.

As for the possible games, to tell the truth I plan(ned) to make a kind of clone of Descent with that rendering technique. Actually you can see the begin of the engine at the end of Neja

Nice work by all! I didn't see it coming...

I've got it now, thanks poi. Changed my old Chip8 emulator to generate bitmaps instead of colouring in a bunch of Div tags.

I have a portal engine (like the build/duke3d engine) I did a while ago which I might modify to use this technique. I don't think I ever got floors working right though (I mean the tops of stairs, it has the sides of the stairs but not the tops...) A quick fix would be limiting the engine so that sectors are always defined by 4 points rather than n points.

I think Descent should be doable Probably just a pain to design maps. I for one miss doing a simple array of 1s and 0s

RobertG: Cool. When you released your Chip8 emulator on JSG I was so puzzled that I made myself one Chip8 emulator too That was fun to code.

At the moment my 3D engine only works with a regular grid where an number tells the id of the texture. It's still in early stages. I'll have to try to implement a BSP to compare the performances. Btw using a BSP would allow me to do anything with the maps, but then it will be a real pain to design them.



(Edited by poi on 08-16-2005 19:20)

Did you come up with a fast way of doing scrolling on super chip8 games?

For my portal engine I made a simple level editor that automatically created defined sectors and portals, although it was only 2D (with a floor height and wall height per sector for stairs and things). I think an easy way to do Descent would be to use portals.

Define sectors as varying sized cubes, with one or more faces being portals.

var Rooms=new Array();
Rooms[0].size = 100; //cube 100*100
Rooms[0].faces = new Array(-1, -1, 1, -1, -1, -1); //wall, wall, portal to Roomnt, wall, etc
Roomsnt.size=50;
etc...

You keep track of which "room" you are in, and have your coordinates relative to the room. Probably alot simpler than a BSP (for visibility anyway) but I think it will do just about the same thing. The faces array for each sector will always tell you what other sectors are visible.