Tixyrix by Slipstream [web]
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=== Tixyrix ===
Released at Névoke 2021
Preamble:
Greetings programs.
4 kilobytes of data incoming. Built using Leviathan. All sounds made in 4klang.
End of line.
Amble:
Aldroid here, I wrote this demo for a few reasons. It started off as an exercise
in programming voice synths in 4klang- could I do it? Turns out that yes I
could. There is an old compact speech synth called cspeak where I got the
formant frequencies. The filters in 4klang don't map directly to hz frequencies
so it was more a guidance than a direct port. At some point I managed to make a
passable "yeeeeaaahhh" sound, and then I started thinking about a demo with yes
and no in it. That led me naturally to Tron.
I love Tron, who doesn't? As a kid I always wished that the bit got more focus,
but they are a little one-dimensional I suppose... So here is my brief tribute
to them. They're not exact replicas, I'm not really interested in doing a
perfect clone. I challenged myself to concentrate on the vibe of the movie, and
not to just do regular synthwave a e s t h e t i c. Tron is incredibly
restricted compared to modern CG, the shots are quite often completely fixed
because there was no other way to do the compositing between actors and the
scene, at least without serious jankiness. So I tried to do some of the graphics
in a 2D postprocessing stage, because it seemed more like the layered 3D/2D
compositing approach that the original Tron movie employed. All colourisation
is done in the postprocessing stage, and some colours have a blur property
which was bastardised from the Leviathan example postprocessing. The little
data flare (it's called the bird in the code) depends heavily on it. It didn't
come out perfect but it did force me to make different tradeoffs to usual,
which was fun and influenced the final four bytes, so that was a success.
Anyway, I hope this comes off as a cosy tribute. I made this demo primarily to
learn more stuff, and to express how much I love this oldschool style. I know
I'm not the greatest democoder, but I try to grow, and I am quite proud of the
outcome this time.
Miss you all, let's do hugs sometime <3
Credits:
Music and visuals by Aldroid, art inspired by Tron (1982). Thanks to Mrs Beanbag
for geometric advice and Synaesthesia for audio advice, kb for helping me debug,
and to the #demomaking channel on the Demoscene discord for helping and
tolerating me. The 4k framework used was Leviathan by Prismbeings, the audio was
4klang by gopher, pOWL, freestyle, kb and others.
Some neat Shadertoys that I learned from in order to make this
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MtV3Dy - decrooks
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XsdyDB - mla
https://iquilezles.org - general source of my entire understanding of SDFs
Greets:
All of my scene family, especially YOU who are reading this. Mrs Beanbag,
Synaesthesia, Dragongold, Darya, ReadySaltedCode, Reality404 have all kept me
sane and believing in myself these past few months. Slipstream members old and
new of course. UK Scene Slack and Demoscene Discord. All good cats and dogs. The
very excellent Nevoke organisation team. Rift, CSC, TUHB, Polarity, Logicoma,
Hooy Program, Poo-Brain, Titan, 5711, Farbrausch, Bitshifters, Bitbendaz, SVatG,
The Tea Lovers' Committee, Desire. And Nova, I miss you!
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