AntIQ 2002 report
Place: Pécs, Hungary
Time: August 23, 2002 - August 25, 2002
Organizers: Dinasty & Co.
Compos:
Music: 4 channel, Multichannel, MP3
C64: Music, graphic, demo
Graphic: Pixel, True-color, Ray-trace
Demo: 4K, 64K, Demo, Wild
Others: Webdesign compo
Website: http://www.antiq.hu
Since nothing really interested happened during our nice 9-hour-long journey from Debrecen to PTcs (except for me leaving the train to buy a drink, and scraming back before the train leaves without me, and except the fact that I had taken an exam in themorning (passed)), I think I'll start by the arrival. As we (me an Vercy) had totally no idea where the place was, we started to follow the sound. It worked out, we found the place, huge graffiti banner outside, and except for a few people, nobody familiar. Except for FcR, who was busy talking so I had to almost yell in his ear to make him detect me.
Let's enter. We bought our tickets (nice hole to avoid stabbing it through with the safetypin), got a free flyer from one of the sponsors (whee), and we faced the first question: Upstairs or downstairs. You must know that the Nevelési Központ (Educational Center) is a two-story building, the upper level containing the theatre, now used as the compo hall, the lower level was now used as the party-area. So we took the stairs downwards, and were suprised to see quite a nice amount of people hitting the keyboards/mice. Let's look around. Those were gamers. Those too. Yeah, they were also gaming allright... Some more gamers... Duh... Luckily we found the DD guys hidden in a tiny corner of the hall, accompanied by Zoom and Gem, working on their intro. Quick handshakes, and let's rest a bit. We found a nice and relatively deserted place in the even lower part of the building, and was sad to see the unfortunate fact that 75-80% of the party people is gaming. Not just playing to pass the time, ga-ming. I also looked for Krokko, who said he'd be able to find when following the SID-sound. Well, the C64 musics were actually not playing, but I managed to find him, while he was watching something on his PC, which looked quite familiar to an FPS. He quickly pressed Space to show that it was only a movie clip. We agreed to have a talk outside the building (it was a nice weather actually), so I grabbed a beer at the buffet (which had the specialty of having a food+drinks menu on the right side of the booth, and a hardware sale flyer on the left, which was a tad confusing because you read something like "Pizza - X Ft., Drinks - Y Ft." on one of the papers and "Network Hub - Z Ft." on the other), and we headed outside, where he explained how cool a C64 was, simply because some people, like the Smash Designs, Resource, Breeze or Crest could simply display things on the screen which was totally incredible for someone who knew that the machine only had a clock-speed around 1Mhz, and only 64K's of RAM.
Meanwhile Ebola and Zeed also arrived, followed by Vercy, who stormed the local grocery store and bought some 5 bottles of mineral water. BoyC announced that their intro was ready, and I said "Hey! Wanna see ours?". After all, I was a bit nasty with them about YouDie, not showing them a single screenshot. So I asked them a floppy, copied the stuff from my 286 laptop, and handed it over to them. Luckily it didn't crash, as the party version did on XP's and 2000's. I wouldn't say they were flattened about it, but they weren't disgusted either. I, however, refused to watch their intro, because I knew this time they managed to make something that actually pleased them too, and I thought seeing it before the bigscreen would kinda spoil it, so I said "No, thanks, let's wait until Saturday night". But before anything could happen, I heard a familiar sound through the air, and said "Sorry, I MUST watch this know." Yes, it was 604 allright, pumping the air from Put2's two huge speakers. I said "This demo is friggin awesome!", he said "Hey, you got any more of these?" "Suuure, want a whole CD?" And the rest of the day was spent by watching demos from my collection. Put2 said some kweyker-lamer had once come and said to keep it down, because "he can't hear the game". Of course we answered with squeezing the volume to the max.
Tomcat also appeared, and was pleased to see that we tried to keep the hall's air filled with the music of Jizz, instead of crappy commercial techno, which was played all day-all night by someone. So we put some extra boost on the amp (even though the speakers were crackling like hell), and tried to bring back some scener-feeling to the hall. Zoom also bought his CD, so we added stuff to the pool like Mutant Poulets Project 2, which is a total braindead 2D-gfx demo and rules hard due to Rez's excellent (partymade) soundtrack. Charlie also arrived and greeted me the traditional way ("GARGAJ YOU ANIMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!!!!"), quickly set up his Amiga, and started coding. Ketyere, main-editor of the probably only Hungarian diskmag CLi, also joined us watching demos, after taking a photo from our laptop, and asking my permission for the party-report from FLaG. After around X hours of demos, and of course sucking with the ones that crash, hang up, don't show up correctly, etc. I decided to get a nap, but was to lazy to wander to the sleeping room, so I chose a bench, took out my pillow and started trying to get some doze. It wasn't easy, not because the usual party-volume or the temperature, but since the bench was only like 50cm-s wide, you actually fell asleep while concentrating on staying on it.
After a nice 4-hour nap, I woke up because of a funny thing: Gamers don't sleep. The same guys had been playing (half-naked) on the same computers since Friday afternoon. Pretty crazy. (Of course coders don't sleep either, but that's a different story.) After grabbing some chow and a beer, I wandered around to see whether there was any growing scener-activity around, but I only found Ebola and Gem coding an OpenGL 1k (actually trying to crunch it down to size), and Charlie still fixing the timer routines for his intro. As TrX's machine looked quite abandoned, I sat down and booted up a mIRC to kill the time. The first few minutes was spent mainly with cursing because one of the bots was playing some kind of a Russian Roulette, since we all had the same hosts, and it detected our conversations as flooding and randomly kicked us out. Soon we started a totally useless kinda fun, namely IRCing with someone who's sitting beside you. ("Hey, where are you?" "Look down here!") We also started to pick on the ones who didn't attend the party, and I soon found out that the main problem these days in partying is definitely money.
BoyC arrived totally sleepy, sat before Ebola's PC, started an IRC, and fell asleep again. This fact kinda scared me, because this meant their intro would rock. Tomcat appeared and said he wanted to do a trace pic, so I gave the keys over and watched. They were developing a nice Gameboy game called Qbik which kinda resembled C64's Boulder Dash, so Tomcat decided to choose the title pic's mesh (the main character holding a diamond and giving a totally stoned facial expression) to compete. I had this weird idea that we should put DFJ's (mainorg) head on the diamond. I never thought that Tomcat would actually do it, but he surfed to DFJ's page, d/l'd a photo, hacked it on the traced image and entered it to the compo.
The Fresh guys also arrived, (getting the usual welcome: "THERE'S THE FRESH!MINDWORKZ! THERE'S THE FRESH!MINDWORKZ!"). I saw the time appropriate enough to announce the joining of Vercy to ÜD, So I ceremonially gave him one of the official Ümlaüt Design T-Shirts. (It was a very nice moment.) Charlie meanwhile fixed the timer routines, and started to hack in the music-player, which played the original track incorrectly. So he asked Vincenzo whether he could hack together a nice tune. He said OK, he vanished and after like 30 minutes, he appeared with a full (cool) chiptune! Now even though the tune was cool, Vincenzo had to rewrite it several times because it turned out that FT2 was not really ProTracker compatible. And as Vincenzo was composing, I was helping out Charlie because he had hard time figuring out which effect is which in PT. Luckily they didn't change much on FT2 so I managed to help him out. What I really found cool was the language Charlie was coding in, called PowerD. It's a high-level Amiga programming language with nifty functions like immediate variable swapping ("a:=:b") or multiple results for a function ("a,b,c:=d();").
The next phase in the intromaking was syncing the stuff to the music, which wasn't too hard, since the intro was only three rotating non-shaded non-textured objects (star+torus+cube). As I was watching Charlie coding, the Slengpung staff (Melwyn + PS + Daniel + Inferno) arrived, and the fun compos were announced to start outside the place. As the Slengpung guys had some releases they wanted to enter, we offered TrX's machine to help them out, as TrX was occupied with the fun compos. This was the moment where the party's worst feature appeared: Crappy net-access. PS tried several ways to leech the MP3 entry he uploaded, but most of them failed, some probably due to the firewall, some obviously dying because the speed of 81 byte/secs. Luckily Melwyn's and Dixan's MCH entry arrived quite fast, so the next problem appeared: Uploading. I asked a run-by organizer about the possibilities of uploading compo-stuff, and he told me an IP-address, and a login/pass combo. I went back to the PC, but when PS logged in, all we could see was an empty directory. I ran back, and asked whether that was the correct FTP or not, because there were no sign of the compo categories' separate directories. They said, yes it is. I said, "OK, then create some directories for the releases." "What?" "You know, directories..." "What directories?" "D'oh! Like MP3 and such!" "OK." Back to the PC, single 'MP3' directory is there (*sigh*), PS tries an upload, fails. Retry, fails. Ran back to the orga... "Give some rights to write in those directories!" "Hm?" "We want to upload a release, dammit!" "Oh, OK, just a minute..." Back to the PC, retry, works... PS says: "Oh BTW, we could create our own directories..." Well, that's an option... PS also showed us a preview of their Evoke demo "True2", which looked nice enough. ("No, we're NOT going to win Evoke this year!")
The fun compo ended, and too pass away time remaining til the compos, Tomcat invited me to play a game on his cool Atari, namely a game called Slot Racers, which consisted of a maze with two prick-shaped 'something'-s shooting squares at each other. Sounds quite primitive, tho' we managed to shout louder than the whole partyplace and was looking like two lunatic idiots who seemingly enjoy a game that consists of rectangles. (Oh the feeling of Oldschool games...) After a series of serie shots (one player shoots the other, who tumbles back in front of him (boom-boom-boom-...)), and a nice shot which resulted the two projectiles going in circles in the middle of the field, I managed to win the set 4-2. We also took a try on River Raid, which is quite a usual shoot-'em up game, which I labeled "antisoc-randalieren game", and we ended up yelling "THE END IS NIGH! THE END IS NIGH! WE ALL DIE! THE END IS NIGH! MOTHERF...!"
Soon, compos started to approach, and we headed upstairs where we met the Slengpung guys chilling at the lounge. They bought a nice watermelon and was trying to hand off all the leftovers, which was around half the stuff. Although I hate watermelon, I got persuaded by PS to eat a bit. We spent the time left with discussing the newest demos, mainly from ASM'02. We got into a little debate with PS about Chimera, he tends to like it, I still think it's not 'arty' enough, and codewise it's a waste of space. (IMHO all the data could be packed in 64k.) I also tried to guess which one is the most downloaded Farbrausch-prod, but I failed since I misheard the question, and started guessing the most UNloaded FR-prod. We also spotted a nice feature during the party, namely the SMS-wall, there was an opportunity to send SM's to a phone number, and your message got viewed on the bigscreen. During that time, the orgas showed some demos, mainly Linux ones, and played lots of .sid-s. Melwyn mentioned that he heard that Nokia wants to implements .sid technology in it's new cell-phones, so you could have e.g. Commando as a ringtone. Everybody definetely said: "That would RULE!"
The compos started with with C64 musics, once again dominated by Vincenzo/MCL (as usual). The C64 GFX had a nice long scrolling picture, and the single C64 intro was also nice to watch ("KISCSILLLLAAAAAAAG!"). Followed up were the fourchannel entries including my little tune, which was basically DnB loops cut and mixed in various ways. Although there were no real mindkiller tunes, it was clear that Vincenzo will win this compo, and mine will finish last. The multichannel compo also brought some nice tunes, but still nothing extra. The MP3 compo was prolly the worst, very few tunes managed to bring freshness to the pool. The Beethoven-compo (fast music compo with no speakers available) was actually quite enjoyable. After the music compos I met Vincenzo and said he had a nice 4ch, and also said that first i thought it was a Reed tune, since I thought it was his style. Vinc said "Weird, I thought it was mine..." Oops. Touched a vein there. "Yours was nice too, the only thing wrong about it is that it's not music." What goes around, comes around, they say.
The graphical compos started with a sad fact which was prolly more than a wakeup-call to the hungarian graphician scene, namely a single entry in the pixel competition, made by Fernseher/Bluebox, consisting a washing machine. The reaytrace compo had a few nice entries by CNV and Maxie, the truecolor compo was actually quite OK, except for a few really lame entries.
Before the intro compos, we talked with BoyC about climbing on stage and lying under the bigscreen. Afterall seeing our intros this close rules hard. The size-code compos brought some neat entries, two 1K's by Illumination and Molecoola, the latter making some nice music. (Ironically, only under Windows.) The four 4K entries were also great pieces of code, especially Floatball and Meta. Then came the 64k compos. First, "Vortex Final" by "Digital Dynamyte". BoyC yells: "The second Y is an I!" Me comments: "See? Some people just can't get other's names right..." And it started. First, the usual space-scene, with the nebulae twirling in the middle. And then everything speeds up with a very cool tunnel (nausea starts...), and continues with a nice design-object + greetz. A retro to the original intro, a nice outdoors planet surface scene, and , continued by some nice syncs. An elevator scene follows, and we approach a giant generator, which starts to spin faster and faster and suddenly the satellite dish on the planet surface starts to emit particles and everyhing is just cool. Creditz, end. Great engine, nice models, okay music and textures, overall a great prod. "Why didn't you say you can make intros too?" "Ehm... well, let's say we did that now."
Following up was our intro. I won't really emphasize on this one, since it would be lame, let's just say everything worked out nicely, the music played good, the syncs came out okay, and it kinda pleased the crowd. The third intro was made by F!M, it was a nice flatshade design intro, featuring a quite neat endpart. The fourth intro by Pohar was an effect-intro with nifty visuals and music, but the design was only as good as in our intro. The last intro was Charlie's Amiga intro, which featured cool flatshaded objects rotating. Oh, the power of Amiga.
The demo compo was long awaited because the United Force flyers on the walls promised us some nifty stuff. The first demo was a FiRG! one, but failed to rech the standards set by the name FiRG!, since both the music both and the gfx were ripped. The Forza demo featured a nice gesture for oldskool guys, a collage of photos from old sceners. It was interesting to see Tomcat with long hair or hear Reptile sing, tho' the latter was more like a torture. The Fresh! demo bought a little differnce from the usual F!M style, this time, instead of electric design, they delivered the slight sicker approach, one of the models showing a bloody operating table and instruments. Still, it was an ordinary 3D flyby.
The other compos (animation + fun demo + web) weren't really worth mentioning, the first animation was simply LAME, the second was slight better but still it was underdetailed and used a ripped Astral Projection track for music. The two fun demos were way too long and although they had some funny parts, most people fell asleep on them. The single webpage entry by TSW was great, but none saw it really.
After voting and talking a bit with others, we went back to the compo room to get the results. We had a bet with BoyC, he was sure that our intro will finish in the first two places, I expected a bronze medal in the best case. I won. No real surprises were in the results, DD won the intro compo, Fresh won the demo. It was time to head home.
After watching some demos, we packed together and headed to the bus station, and got to the train station where we got into a long queue, and missed the train. (The Slenpung guys didn't, tho...) So we (Vickey + Gem + Fat + TCC + Charlie + BoyC + TrX + Mrmaim + Vercy + Gargaj) got into the lobby and spent the next two hours having fun and watching TrX fall asleep, and wake up without having the slightest clue about where he is and what happened. After getting back to Budapest, the troop split up, and each of us continued on own ways home, after having had 3 days of cool party.
Rating:
Category Note Rating
Place Kinda ideal 5.0
Organizing Mmkay (nag-nag) 3.5
Audio Well-set 5.0
Video Incorrectly aligned :) 4.5
Mood 75% = Kweykers 4.5
Compos Let's skip it. 3.0
Sleeping Comfy :) 5.0
Overall We enjoyed it 4.0
Greetz fly to:
FcR, BoyC, Zoom, TrX, Tsw, Charlie, Vickey, Tomcat, Put2, Innocent, Rufus, Melwyn, PS, Inferno, Daniel, Remage, Pasy, Pontscho, Dfj, Aboy, Ebola, Zeed, Gem, Crusher, Leon, Vincenzo, Alvaro Acwellan, Shr, Fat, Krokko, Homen, Ketyere, Szati, Sdr, Robymus, Lorenzo, Tcc