Deadpoet and Rawheds Lab
Well I'm writing this over a month after the actual compo, so I dunno how much I can
remember. But here goes....
A lot of planning went into Optimise this year. We'd originally wanted it to be
in 1998, but that just didn't happen. The main reason for Optimise'99 was to try
to revive the SA demoscene - as well as have lots of fun :) Viper wanted this compo
to be different from previous compos. He wanted it to be more of a PARTY. So when
Roelf emailed us about having the party at the Horror Cafe we jumped at it. Up until
the day of the compo, only Viper had seen the Horror Cafe, so Maverick and I had no
idea of what it was going to be like - except for Viper saying how "cool" it was. :)
I'd been coding our demo - "Kick me and give me coffee"(a name derived from a phone
conversion between Deadpoet and I) for about 2 weeks and Deadpoet was coming to stay
with me for a week before the compo. He arrived clutching PC box for dear life and
had brought all sorts of weird paraphanalia. Deadpoet and I immediately set up a
our "production lair" for the next week of composing, drawing and coding sessions.
We certainly didn't skimp on supplies. Bottles and bottles of coke were deleted,
as well as chips, smarties, fizzers, and of course coffee. I can safely say that after
that week we were both feeling a bit weird. We also had two mascots to get us through
the work. Ziggy and Inflatable Alien. Ziggy is a tiny tiny psycho teddybear that Deadpoet
brought up, and Inflatable Alien is an inflatable alien which I have.
During this time of fun we did many very weird things - as only two people coffee-high,
sleep deprived sceners people can do. Weird videos were made with my videocamera
and stored as mpeg...hopefully never to be seen again. We walked around with words
like "coffee" and "coder" written in on our forheads. After a while all the tracking,
drawing and coding totally got to us(and we'd run out of food) so we ventured outside
and decided to spray paint parts of our machines black. Deadpoet did his keyboard
and his mouse and I did the chasis of my machine. We underestimated the amount of
spraypaint it would take and had to send my cousin Matthew(Maatatachoo) to the shops
to get more. It was dark and we were still outside on the grass - Deadpoet trying to do
each key individually, eventually giving up and just spraying the whole board. At the
end we both had black hands - which we took to Optimise since it was hard to get it
all off. I was also sent on a few errands by Viper to get things like cardboard and pens
and things for wallsigning. With all the fooling around and stuff we found little it hard
to sit down and work but we did eventually.
Deadpoet was working on his songs and graphics, while I was coding our megademo
and drawing my art entery(smurfbum). We worked around the clock, until it was the day
of the compo. The night before the compo I phoned Maverick on his cellphone. He was at
work! He - like us - was frantically working on his enteries at work, and said that he
would pick us both up the next day(thanks Mav). We continued to phone eachother through
the night to check up how we were getting on. It was quite weird :) Maverick must have
left work at about 5am or something. Deadpoet was exhausted and kept collapsing the moment
I left him alone. I was trying to get hold of Maverick who was surposed to pick us up.
But he was asleep at home! :)
Deadpoet had now collapsed on the couch and I was walking around wondering when Maverick
would come or if we was going to sleep through Optimise. Luckily he arrived and I
woke up Deadpoet and we jammed our stuff into Mavericks car. Yeah we were off to Optimise
what fun! Off to Maverick's work we went - picked up his PC, the prizes and the
digial camera - doh! they locked it away..argh. Oh well - off we go. Driving
through central Joburg, taxis, madmen - but eventually we got there.
I didn't quite know what to expect, but I did notice that the Horror Cafe was right
next to SAB, which was a very good sign. In we all went to see what was happening
and to say hellos. I was immediately hit by the interior of the Horror Cafe. Everything
was GREEN and PURPLE. Wooooo, far out :) Adorning the walls were all these weird monsters
and scifi imagery. It was 2 stories and everybody had started setting up their PCs on the
top level. Down below there was the project, dancefloor, bar and munchies department.
I found out later that underground was a place to sleep with couches, matresses and a shower.
I can't remember exactally but the first person I think I met was ColdBlood.
Wow, its so cool meeting people IRL. I said hello to a few other people
and then we remembered about the tens of thousands of rands of stuff in the car - so
we carted that inside before it grew legs. Then, hobbling along came Denthor/Asphyxia!
I'd met him once before in Durban, but it was really cool so see that he's made it. He
and a buddy were off to seek munchies as apparently there were none inside. Unfortunately
Denthor had had a car accident a week before the compo. He'd collided with a cow, and was
luckily better-off than the cow. Thus he wasn't able to complete his 128k entery.
When I got there there weren't a lot of people, which was a bit dissapointing. But the
party must go on! Maverick and I decided to set up downstairs while Deadpoet set up
next to Cyberphreak. After a bit of table moving our machines were ready to rock.
After a bit of soundtesting the first "welcome to Optimise'99" announcement was made
and everybody cheered. The first surprise compo was also announced - the surprise
graphics. We had 30mins to draw any of the weird pics we could see on the walls. While
I was drawing my pic a few people came downstairs and we chatted which was cool. After
I'd finished my art I went back to coding our megademo. Coding coding coding, then erkkk...
harddisk failure.
I couldn't believe it. When I booted into Win95 all the files were rearranged. Some
400meg .mpeg files which I had on my root D: were now scatted in my start menu! I
jumped to dos and there were fies with random character names and other weird files
registering 4gigs on my 2gig drive! Things were not good. I thought it might be a virus
but while scanning it got to a sector and said something like "Disk Failure". EEEK it
seemed physical. I was very scared as I didn't have a recent back of my work(since I'd
been working on is so frantically as home with Deadpoet). Eventually I just pulled out
my one HD and coded the demo on the other. Things seemed fine after that.
For the rest of the day some other compos were held. I can't remember exactally
which ones. I think the 4channel music and the raytraced graphics. I'd been meeting
other people like Seeker(all the wa from Bloem), NiMH and Cyberphreak and chatting with
them. NiMH's raytraced entery wasn't in shown! I ran to Viper and Strider(Who were
running the projector machine) and we sorted it out quickly. NiMH's raytrace was shown.
I was on the dancefloor watching the enteries and I heard someone say something like
"wow, that doesn't even look rendered - it looks real". NiMH won in the end. Later
that night was the open compo and I was going to enter a little music video I'd been
working on. While Deadpoet was staying with me, I borrows my uncles video camera
and connected it to my tvcard(new toy). I then used some of my figurines + Deadpoet
and made a stop-motion video. It took a lot of time but was REALLY worth it. The one
video has Deadpoet sitting and all these (normally) inanimate objects moving around him.
Its really weird. Unfortunately those videos were on my other harddisk and I tried
to get them but they were dead. With only 30min until the Open compo I resurected a
Worms clone game I'd been working on a few months ago and entered that.
Maverick and I were the only people downstairs and the network cable wasn't long
enough to go downstairs. It was then that I decided to bring my PC upstairs so that I
could connect to the server and upload Worms. Seeker had been badgering me the whole
day to setup next to him, so I obliged. Unfortunely the network idea didn't work, so
I had to give my hardisk to Roelf and then he uploaded it. What a mission. The open
compo was really cool because more people had arrived and it was night time. The open
enteries were all VERY good. 2 MP3's were entered which is a first for a SA demo compo.
Serenity had made a musicvideo which was totally kickass on the bigscreen. Protons
group entered a demo of a game they are working on. We tried to get it to work but it
just wouldn't. Hopefully they'll enter it again next year because it was really
extremely welldone what I saw of it. Then it was time to demo my worms game. I made
the worms do things like jump off cliffs, I demoed the weapons like the remote-control
mission. People were laughing, it was brilliant :)
The cardboard for the wallsigning sat blankly on the wall - I guessed nobody knew what
it was there for, so myself and Lord_Jabberwock put our marks on the wall. People slowly
got the idea and joined in. By the end of the compo there were 3 big sheets full of
art, signatures and funny comments. Travis gave a really cool talk about game development
down by the bar. Everybody listened intently and asked him questions. It a very cool talk.
I took a photo with a flash while he was saying "and I can see...*flash*...erm,
i can't see".hehe. Went downstairs afterwards and had a nice conversation with Caz
about particle systems, and then joined Viper and Strider in the vote counting.
Later on that night we all got drinks and food, and I met other people like Trixter,
Toadflakz and Miktar. Trixter was trying to make an entery for the surprise compo -
to code a maze. For some reason he had a fixation on having a "fractal maze" and spent
the night trying to figure out how to code it. People started to leave for home(faders)
and the people that were left were playing multiplayer games(mostly) or working on their
enteries. The fun started about about 2am when we started running all the cool international
best demos on the bigscreen. We pumped up the sound system and gathered around the bigscreen
for a feast of visual and audio extacy. Viper and Strider were running the demos until I
managed to convice them to let me DJ(Demo Jockey :). The projector machine was
upstairs, with a balcony view of the demos downstairs. I ran demos, then hurried downstairs
to view them BIG and up CLOSE. Then just before the end of each demo I ran back upstairs
to run the next demo. Up and down those stairs I ran, yet I felt no pain because I absolutely
and totally enjoying myself. My god, demos look SO rad when they are BIG and LOUD :)
At about 4am most people had left and there was only a few people left watching demos.
Viper and Maverick were exhausted and went into the basement(followed by Opium and Cyberphreak)
to sleep. Unfortunely for them I was still running up and down the stairs watching demos.
Eventually my fun was stopped when Winblows crashed one of the demos and I had to restart
the PC - which had a bios password. Argh! It was Striders box and I didn't want to do
anything with it, so sadly I had to stop watching BIG LOUD demos.....and Maverick and
Viper finally got some sleep :)
Only a handful of people stayed awake the whole night, which I think is sad considering
its a demo compo and we hardly ever have one. Myself, NiMH, Miktar and Trixter were
the only people who stayed awake. Days before the compo Deadpoet and I were talking
about making signs that said something like "All those who fall asleep at the demoscene
will be subject to deadpoet and rawhed. You have been warned." But the day before the
compo, we were so tired ourselves(having not slept) we actually decided not to do that,
since it was likely that we would both fall asleep. Deadpoet didn't have anywhere
to sleep at the compo and ended up sleeping on the hard floor, then be moved to a
spare mattress, then he got kicked off and worked on his music. Roelf was the funniest
of all the sleepers. He had walked in about about 4am and setup his sleeping bag right
in the middle of the room, inbetween tables and chairs. Everytime someone wanted to
walk they had to jump over Roelf and so people were jumping over him the entire night.
I had great fun laughing at the sleepers and later on I went downstairs to take a
snapshot of Viper and Maverick. Luckily the bar stayed open the whole night! Coke
was very expensive, but a necessity for the long hours of coding.
The sun started to rise and the corpses slowly arose. All accept Mavericks' which was
completely motionless. I woke up Maverick who couldn't believe it was 10:30am already,
and a bunch of us left to throw disks and CDs. I can't remember much about the disk
throwing, except that we were a very dangerous crowd. It was quite windy and our
projectiles were going everywhere. Viper and NiMH were the most impressive for distance -
except Viper threw horizontally and NiMH vertically. When we returned more people had
arrived, so they went down for diskthrowing part 2. I decided to stay behind and code.
Deadpoet and I were working frantically on our megademo and needed nourishment. Due
to the heavy consumption of coke the previous night I had no more money left for a pizza.
Being the scavengers we are, we managed to acquite pieces of pizza from various people.
The pizza was damn good too!
I can't remember much of that day as I spent most of it coding our megademo. The music
was BOOMing, so we had to use headphones to test Deadpoets demo tune. Time went by,
and eventually it was 1hour until the democompo. We weren't going to make it. I had a
serious look at our demoplan, and decided that I would cut out a whole lot of sections and
basically just try to get a finished decent demo. After an hour of coding it was done.
It wasn't as nice as we maybe hoped it would be, but it was certainly decent. The only
problem was that I wasn't connected to the network so I couldn't upload it. The 128k
and megademo section was starting up, everybody had gone downstairs to watch. It was
dark now and I was looking for spare UTP on the floor to plug into my box. I was
missing the 128k section and still couldn't find cable. Eventually I did, and guess
what...Boom again, my PC died. That same harddisk problem was happening. I couldn't
boot into Winblows because some of its files had been damaged. The Megademo section was
now about to start so I ripped out my harddrive and plugged it into Roelfs machine to
send the files across the network. All his connections were different, but eventually
I sorted it out. I was getting pretty upset now because could hear this stunning music
around me and could hear "oooh" and "aahhh" from below, and I was missing it. I couldn't
boot my harddisk on Roelfs machine either. Eventually Maverick came to have a look but
he couldn't get it working either.
The announcment was made that my demo couldn't be shown and that the prize giving would
happen in a few minutes. I hadn't seen the megademos or the 128ks. I offer this advice
to people: When you come to the compo - make sure your productions are finished and backed
up. If mine had been I would have enjoyed the compo a lot more, and I would have got to
speak to more people instead of coding.
Although I was dissapointed about what had happened, I quickly got over it and started
to enjoy myself again. I went downstairs and met Eclipse/OO which was cool since I'd
spoken to him so much on IRC before. The prize giving was held and there was a really
cool scene spirit. It was great to see everybody together, and was a great ending to
a great compo.
Everyone filtered out eventually and Maverick drove Deadpoet and myself back home. We were all very tired and just wanted to sleep. We got home, dumped out pcs on the floor and crashed. The next morning when I woke up something was scratching my legs. It was sharp and under the duvet. I reached under to see what it was, and pulled out the sharpened CD which had been used for diskthrowing the previous day. A lethal weapon now. Then I remembered that we had to get Deadpoet back to Durban. It was 11:30 and I phoned the bus company - there was a bus leaving at 1:30pm. My and my cousin Anthony drive to the mall to get a ticket while Deadpoet frantically packed all his posessions. Got the ticket and was back by 12:00, then I read on the ticket that the bus leaves at 1pm. I didn't even know where the bus station was. Deadpoet running around, Inflatable Alien pushed out of the way, me looking for a mapbook. Driving fast to destination unknown, we eventually got there. Typical..the bus was 2 hours late.
I'd like to say a big thankyou to the organisers, all the people who came to Optimise'99, everyone that entered and our sponsors. See you all next year!