PILEDRIVER by Ümlaüt Design [web]
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Ü M L A Ü T D E S I G N
featuring
MC FANTOM
at Function 2019
Probably the most garish, incosistent, cliched demo that I
ever had the misfortune to embark on creating, because
people have been complaining about wanting this for the last
year or so, so here you go.
Are you not entertained?
Making this was probably the most miserable, isolated
experience I've had in the ~20y scene career, spending about
4-6 hours a day for ~2-3 months every day, while being aware
how disposable the end result ultimately i going to be,
doing the artistically "wrong" thing, and yet, still knowing
that this is the right demo to work on to prove a point. Or
maybe it's the right thing to do artistically and its
purpose is to feel awful. I don't know.
My mentality was always, if you don't have anything new to
say or show, you might as well leave, and this demo is quite
literally nothing new - everything in it you have seen done
before and better - and yet we as the scene seem to be drawn
irresistibly towards what doesn't challenge us, the cozy
nostalgic safety blanket of boingballs and cubes and
drum-and-bass music.
But is that what we want? Experiencing the same thing over
and over until a future generation eventually forgets what
it originally was about, and eventually walks away from the
legacy that we have been cultivating? Don't traditions and
customs need to be challenged to be truly able to be
appreciated? To have an external reference to what makes
them great? Or are we too afraid to realize that their
greatness is strictly pinned to the era they belong to,
and by extension, so is ours? And isn't the whole idea of
the merit of a timeless work we look back on that it was
different, that we were in awe because we have not seen
anything like that before?
Imagine all of that going through your mind as your demotool
crashes for the seventh time in a row in an hour. At least
there was autosave.
(The fact that they shut off gas in this whole apartment
block two months ago for repairs (apparently it's been a
life hazard for a while, hooray) probably didn't help
feeling good about anything; I haven't had a proper hot
water shower since. Yay for water boiler kettles though.)
This is probably the last demo I make with this engine. Back
then I vowed to use a graphics API (DirectX 9 in this case)
until I feel I squeezed the absolute last drop of technical
possibility out of it; given how the shader compiler starts
to stall/crash as soon as flow control is involved, and
I've finally got around playing around with GPU instancing,
plus I've hit the limits of the editor (700+ nodes in GDI),
I think it's time to move on from a 17 year old API to
a 11 year old one.
Massive thanks and respect to MC Fantom for lending his
voice to the tune, especially because he did it roughly
a week after becoming a new dad - big up rudebwoy, lavjaman!
[emoji] [emoji] [emoji]
Runs okay on my 1060 3GB, not so great on my RX580.
Probably helps to have an i7 and a good chunk of RAM.
Uses:
FXAA by Timothy Lottes
ASSIMP
ZLIB
A ton of edgewear to shut the whiners (well, one) up
Thanks to Gary J. Hung for the hardcore kicks.
Gargaj signing off - Friday; September 13, 2019
http://www.umlaut.hu
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