Stercoraphasia

CSDB link - .d64 image

This demo was our second release as part of Excess.

Almost all the graphics were my own work, except for the "XS" logo on the first page. There are a lot of fancy tricks to perform smooth colour gradients, involving mixing multiple single-colour sprites (i.e. 256) in front of each other; nowadays it's hard to appreciate this, but it was reasonably clever for the time -- this is a technical demonstration after all!

If you move the joystick, the first-person-perspective accelerating starfield behind the "XS" will move as if you were flying in that direction.

The two sprites in front of the second scrolling starfield at bottom are performing a 2-level "sinus" -- a Lissajous curve -- where two Lissajous figures are imposed on one another to form a more complex pattern.

The music is by Rob Hubbard, ripped (by me) from "Delta".

Hit 'space' to enter the main part of the demo -- a sprite-sinus editor.

This has a set of 8 sprites dancing around the screen in another "sinus" formation; these ones use a nifty psychedelic colour scheme, and use various techniques to provide a 3-D look, with sprites at the top being much smaller than sprites at the bottom. There's also what I called a "sprite priority shuffler"; in other words, an attempt to give a 3-D look to the sinus, by ordering the "far away" sprites to appear "behind" the "nearer" sprites. Sounds pretty obvious, but I make reference in the scroller to Armalyte not doing this correctly. ;)

There's a block of text at the top detailing the parameters, and a cursor which can be moved about with a joystick to change those parameters to provide interesting effects in the sinus.

The scrolling text is by myself and Exocet; when I originally wrote this, we were still "TNT" -- Thundertronix -- our original demo group. We joined Excess just before this demo, it seems.

The music is good -- it's "Dominator" by Matt Gray.

This isn't a great demo, to be honest -- more of a functional utility than anything else. In fact, it's a re-release of the "TNT Sinus Editor", with an Excess intro, when we joined Excess. I think it was my first demo, but I'm not sure.

Stercoraphasia (last edited 2008-01-09 23:31:57 by 86-40-139-66)