Text Mode Demo Competition 9

[LP]

Greets everyone

The time has come for the annual international Text Mode Demo Compo 9. We were honored to make the invitation demo this time, which you can download from TMDC web site. In the previous TMDC 8 compo there were three Delphi entries in the competition (BUCHSTABENSUPPE by Null Ok, Kazkas by Paulius & Linfeng, and InnerFlux made by ourselves).

There are much more prizes this time, so don't hesitate and make a contribution.

TMDC is a pseudo-annual demo-making contest held over the internet. TMDC9 is yet again organized by tAAt ry, registered non-commercial organization in Finland, which aims to promote demo-making culture.

Text mode demos offer unique challenges for the demo maker which play a very insignificant role in other kinds of demo competitions. First of all, resolution and color spaces are rather limited, forcing the demo authors to consider different forms of anti-aliasing and careful adjustment of contrast and color balance.

Additionally the demo authors will not have any hardware-assisted rendering, forcing them to create their own rasterization methods, while giving them a huge amount of CPU power per pixel. Things like per-pixel real-time raytracing are a realistic choice in text mode demos.

Download our invitation demo directly from tAAt site, or from Afterwarp.Net.

Any comments are appreciated, and of course, don't forget to participate!

[WILL]

Hi Yuriy. May I be the first to say excellent demo! :thumbup:

I've 'met' LPChip before but unfortunately never heard his music. He's good.

I've moved this thread over to News forum so that it can be seen on the front page and gain more viewers. [size=9px](Hope you don't mind! I think demoscene events are just as important as game making compos.)[/size]


Please come back and keep us up to date on how the event turns out.

[JernejL]

omg, my guess is, they use opengl in the demo and transform results from framebuffer into console?!? very impressive imo!

[NecroDOME]

Woohoow tAAt ... remember them from the coolest game ever made (and maybe useless est) : Stair Dismount

[LP]

Woohoow tAAt ... remember them from the coolest game ever made (and maybe useless est) : Stair Dismount

I'm not sure how tAAt is related to TMDC though. I know Jari (Sol), who is the organizer, but I don't know whether he is part of tAAt team or not.

omg, my guess is, they use opengl in the demo and transform results from framebuffer into console?!? very impressive imo!

Actually, no. My own software renderer is used to display 3D scenes. The final result is then converted to text (it is a 2-pass filter, but unfortunately there are very few places where it is noticeable). Ironically, I didn't use the 3D script engine I made (for moving models, cameras and lights), so everything has a boring hard-coded rotation.

[size=9px][off-topic][/size] By the way, anyone knows how squad quaternion rotation is calculated? [size=9px][/off-topic][/size]

[WILL]

The whole idea of making text chars look like they're more than one pixel via some kind of ASCII trick blows my mind.

You've gotta explain this to us here one day.

[LP]

The whole idea of making text chars look like they're more than one pixel via some kind of ASCII trick blows my mind.

You've gotta explain this to us here one day.

Will, this is actually a visual trick. For instance, when you put gray character "#" on black background, it gives "overall look" of dark gray. Thus, you can mix characters of 15 color palette to obtain additional "fake" colors. Mapping true-color image to the generated colors using the above method is quite easy. However, when you start "drawing" stuff in text mode, you'll see how bad it looks. :?

Using a good combination of colors for 3D models is the biggest challenge (and that is why you see rings of basic colors in the demo instead of some fancy palette). In our latest ASCII mapper there are a lot of shades of basic colors, but the number of partly saturated non-pure colors is scarce (e.g. yellow + dark-green + gray) because these colors are obtained by mixing primary colors with gray colors (e.g. green -> yellow -> yellow + gray). Basic colors are not mixed between themselves.

Oh and by "mixing" I mean the following: assume you have red background and yellow character color; if you use characters like ".O8", you are getting colors which "smoothly" change from red background to yellow foreground. In our TMDC 8 demo entry Innerflux, we used only characters ".+oO8". With proper antialiasing and color mapping, these characters give a fine round look of objects. In the invitation demo, the second pass filter uses ".:=+i!tvou$395O8HRB" letters (first-pass filter uses the above simple set).

Hope this info will be useful for someone with enough courage to participate in the incoming compo.