The Seeker

I played around with this topic for more than two years. If it wouldn't have been for this year's Intel Demo Competition I probably would have percrastinated for another year. I ran also out of excuses to dq, why to hold back his track any longer.

Because the original pencil sketches were pretty old, I made some early Photoshop scribbles to explain my intented atmosphere to the musician and the programmers.

It was the first time to use an animatronic: a roughly timed and edited version of the storyboard. With this ready, we spent the next couple of weeks on discussing about possible implementation of the effects which became about 10 new operators for Tooll. Pirx paid alot of attention to the swarm physics, doing the final design war really tricky.

Oh my dear - ATI again

Because of performance issues he invested some time into an render analyse feature for Tooll. Optimizing render times soon turned out to be a quiet addictive and important task. To make things even worse, we ran into the typical problems with ATI-cards: Although part of openGl 2 specs they do not support float buffer access in vertex shaders: A feature that was essential for rendering the spline form. We added a CPU based fallback which is quiet slow. The problem with ATI hardware gets even worse, because nobody of our teams likes to work with an ATI card and so we only have Cynics x1700. I wonder if they would provide free samples to programmers to tuned code for their non spec conform hardware.

Final result

Actually I am still pretty happy how seeker turned out. It is by far the match with my original ideas. I could have spent another two months on tuning the scenes and getting out more of the music and the idea. But it was a relieve to finally be free for other topics again. It might be noteworthy, that we could have turned the production into a 64kb intro: all animations, models and textures are procedural. No wonder it compiles to a just 67kb executable with a V2 tune. But then of course, this demo is all about dq's wonderful music.

Competition

The other entries to the competion turned out the be excellent. To me it is by far the best IDC. I especially like the MFX-production. The results will be anounced on Evoke 2008. Of course we will be present.