NEF

[Mrwb]

NEF is a demo/intro creation tool.

NEF features a player and an editor. The player is non-vcl, and is currently 18kb packed. The files generated by the editing tool varies from 500bytes to 30kb depending on the demo length and the amount of layers/scenes.
The file contains all drawing information, timing and other stuff.
NEF uses pure OpenGL, with the exception of the editor which uses the GLXDraw and GLXTimer components to show the stuff.

All editing happens in realtime, meaning you can watch any changes as you change them, and you can access everything at once.
The editor includes a texture generator, (which is very very very basic at the moment) and tree scene composing as well as other usefull stuff

NEF is fairly fast, (considering my extremly lame coding) it runs at 2000-3000 FPS when idle, and about 500-800FPS when rendering something. (lowest FPS I've had was 470).

For sound, FMod is used, but I will write my own sound playback code as the project evolves. The main goal sound-wise, is creating a softsynth making it more intro friendly (currently no sound for intros)

I've been working with this for about 6 days now, and it seems as though I'll be working on it for quite some time.

[Paulius]

That's a very nice idea. Hope to see more of it. What doe's NEF stand for?

[Mrwb]

That's a very nice idea. Hope to see more of it. What doe's NEF stand for?

NEF stands for Not Exactly Flash naming stuff isn't my strongest side to say the least..

[WILL]

Very cool indeed. What sorts of uses do you expect this to be able to be used for. And how will these demo like presentations be ran/distributed when releaseable?

[Mrwb]

Very cool indeed. What sorts of uses do you expect this to be able to be used for. And how will these demo like presentations be ran/distributed when releaseable?

I will use it to create demos and intros. (check out http://tomaes.32x.de/text/faq.php if you don't know about the demoscene) The demos will be distrubuted as a player together with the data created by the editor. The demo is then runned by simply executing the player (it will open and run the file automaticly). I'm working on a build system though which will include the editor file in the player .exe.

[WILL]

Oh I know what the demoscene is. I was right into it in the early 90s... and even now with MODules. Thats how I got into in-line ASM with Pascal. Ever hear of Denthor and his infamous tutes? It's the bible of demo effects using Assembly. Couldn't tell you where to find them now since all the good demoscene sites are almost exstinct. Maybe DemoScene.org?

[Alimonster]

Denthor's tutorials are over at Gamedev (but in alphabetical order, rather than numeric order). I've also got the originals sitting on my hard disc, no doubt (plus the C++ conversions by Snowman).

You should also be able to get Denthor's stuff from Hornet's Archives, although it may be a pain to find them.

Btw, good stuff Mrwb! Are you planning to make your own demos with this tool at any point?

[Mrwb]

Btw, good stuff Mrwb! Are you planning to make your own demos with this tool at any point?

Well, I'm trying to organize a demogroup with some friends, and we will probably use the tool to do our demos.
The main idea is that the graphican(s) should be able to do demos without the coders since they could probably create better designed ones.
So when the tool is completed, my role in the group will only be to add stuff to the tool and fix bugs. Thats the main idea anyway

[Mrwb]

Haven't had much time to work with NEF the past days, but I just fixed some bugs in the player. Also, I've created a rather nasty looking demo of the player to show how stuff is distrubuted. It shows some very basic stuff, like text printing, rotating cubes and torus, and a background effect.

Also, keep in mind that I haven't started coding the actuall GFX stuff
yet, so it looks rather nasty

You can get it here: http://home.c2i.net/cmv/Ugly_NEF_Demo.zip (14.9kb)[/url]

[Paulius]

For me it exits on startup without showing any error messages or anything.