My Demoscene

Introduction

I’ve been active in the demoscene since the early 1990s under the handle “Warlock”, primarily as a member of the groups Amnesty and Absence. The demoscene has been a significant part of my creative journey, allowing me to combine my passion for coding, computer graphics, music, physics simulation, and mathematics.

This post is a work in progress and will continue to grow over time, showcasing several of my past demoscene productions from various platforms and eras. Stay tuned for updates!

Demos

Voodka by Absence (1996)

One of my most significant contributions to the demoscene was the Voodka by Absence (demo purely coded in Assembly x86), released in 1996. This production pushed the boundaries of what was possible on PC hardware at the time, featuring complex 3D scenes, synchronized music, and innovative visual effects.

The demo showcased several technical achievements:

• Custom 3D engine with texture mapping
• Real-time water effect calculations
• Mirror effect
• Catmull-Rom splines camera pathway interpolations

For those interested in the technical aspects, I’ve made the source code available on GitHub: Voodka Demo Source Code. The repository includes the original Assembly code - have fun!

Voodka notably won 1st place at Digital Art ‘96, and remains a memorable piece in PC demoscene history. Working on this production taught me valuable lessons about optimization, creative problem-solving, and pushing hardware to its limits. You can watch Voodka on Youtube. It also runs well in DOSBox emulator.

Nie! by Amnesty (1998)

Nie! by Absence we released in 1998 - coded during academic summer break. Amnesty group gathered at Brach’s place, supported by carrot juice and healthy food, we made this production to happen in just full three days and nights (coding non-stop). It was perhaps our first production that used Watcom C/C++ as main compiler, with all routines still codes in Assembly x86.

Several interesting techniques used:

• Robust 4-bit movies compression
• Meshes, textures and camera movement defined in 3D Studio Max (Warlock coded custom .3ds files loader)
• Virtual reality engine coded from scratch
• Quite dark, and history based animations (see atomic bomb one has strong sync with music)
• Few code mistakes created nice effects we left (Amnesty logo at the end of demo)
• Demo used for the first time 3D accelerators accessed via Direct-X 7 (immediate mode)
• First non-techno music by Szudi :-P

You can watch Nie! on YouTube.

Intros

Revolt by Amnesty (1996)

Another significant production in my demoscene career was Revolt by Amnesty, a 64K intro released in 1996. This intro was won the competition at General Probe ‘96, a notable demoscene event of that era.

As the coder of Revolt, I focused on creating well sychronized visual effects while maintaining the strict 64K size limitation. This required extensive optimization techniques including procedural generation of textures. Intro featureed “cheated” phong shading (used environmental mapping technique).

The victory at General Probe 2 was a proud moment for our group Amnesty, establishing our reputation in the competitive demoscene community of the mid-90s. You can watch Revolt on Youtube.