pouët.net

Beautiful demo...one of the absolute highlights from the competition!

Absolutely stunning. The best linux demo to date?

Nice skating dancing!

loved how it really took of after that atmospheric start.

Also: linux!

Beautiful!

absolutely beautiful!

Dragged on a little to much with the same.. but hell.. o_0 keep it going! looking forward to the next one!!

awesome! best linux demo ever :D

usually i wouldnt comment after seeing it in a tiny stream but i guess im on the safe side if i say: bestest linux demo evar!

didn't do too much for me, but it's not bad i guess

best linux demo

Windows port plz. ;)

Beautiful at parts, thumbs up abduction and taking to other dimensions.

The start was good.

The end was good. Or rather, what very much looked like the end was good, but it sort of just went on and on from there. :-)

The stuff in the middle was… too long.

Story demos are hard (and rare, probably for that reason). Kudos for a decent attempt, but I don't think you nailed it just yet. (Also kudos for making Linux demos :-) )

Reminded me of MoViT

I really wish I could say something positive about this prod. There definitely went a lot of manpower to create it (which I always admire), and which is the main reason I'm not downthumbing this one. It's cool, too, that you're supporting a non-windows platform (although I'm technically not a Linux fan). But:

* it's god-damn too long. If you want to tell the story, sustain the atmosphere. Keep the watcher itnerested in stuff he's watching. In case of this prod, the cuts are too long, they attempt to be cinematic (in which, in my opinion, they fail). After a while you lose a grip on the story, because it's just so slow. Or maybe I just can't admire it, dunno.
* 3d art is very poor on occasions. An example I can recall was the scene at the end with the tunnel and visible hands.. not only were they unproportional, but also the whole cut looked kind of funny, whereas (as I suppose) it was supposed to be sort of dramatic.

So, all in all. A piggy.

just not smooth enough

Hm, very cheezy. :o

unfortunately the script errors out.


other than that i enjoyed this one particularily. nice setting, atmosphere, progression, music, gfx... like it a lot :)

YT tells me: Bestest linux demo I've see so far. All in all standard demo though. Motivational thumb-up.

Feels like this has been influenced by Haujobb, particularly "Liquid... wen?" and the dance made me think of TBL & Ocean machine along with parts of the music. The greatest suprise of the compo for me. Liked it a lot.

I feel a dissapointment with poor /can I say/ lame animation of main character, but I must admit this was very pleasable and enjoyable cinematic story demo, with good music, and I found it far from being boring.

keep it up.

nice

This is quite beautiful!

Great start scene, it has a really nice look and a great atmosphere. It deserves a thumb for that scene alone :)

Yeah this looked and sounded nice, animation was a little jerky (maybe some smoothstep would fix it?) but I can easily excuse that. I think some people are being overly harsh.

not sure how this would be related to the shell, but it's bash 4.2.
what i did now was remove all spaces and indented with tab (which i'd recommend anyway because i.e. using spaceindentation in Makefiles breaks them).
so it parsed then, but it couldn't find pygtk. wondered why, but then i found out i had python and python2 installed. pygtk has python2 in it's depenencies, so i changed invocation from 'python' to 'python2' in the script, which breaks it here:

uninstalling 'python' doesn't help. clean updated archlinux install btw.

the traceback pops up after i press 'run demo' btw :)

Superb!

There was some stuttering animation, and some scenes were a tad long, but regardless of that - best of compo.

Goddamn amazing.

Some really impressive stuff here! Very nice!

I like the style and the theme a lot. Visuals and sound are really good.

Beautiful. I agree with some others that the pace was not always optimal, but in part it was also because slow scenes in general never work on a big screen with 5000 viewers. Anyway, awesome visuals and solid package as a whole.

ok

Short stories are my favourite form of science fiction, because in a short story you can concentrate on the gist of the story and imply the circumstances, while way too many science fiction novels succumb to technobabble and the kind of universe-building that's really completely secondary and meaningless to the story itself. This demo reads exactly like a good science fiction short story. It's has a fantastic atmosphere, a well-executed concept (despite some animation hiccups) and it concentrates on building on its strenghts instead of trying to go into multiple directions.

I have also a funny personal thing to share about this demo. I'm not sure in which order the demos were shown, but a bit before this there was the one demo from Pyrotech (?) that had greetings to every single group that had won the Assembly demo competition. While I didn't like that demo all that much, I started thinking about making a demo that would be based on greeting all my favourite groups that hadn't released anything for a while. Of the few names on that list that I could definitely come up with during that demo, Vovoid was definitely one. And then this one came up :) One of the definite highlights of the compo for me.

Oh, and also: congratulations for making the first relevant Linux demo.

I am not sure about this, it's mostly rulez than sucks. It was maybe a bit long watching the robot doing some dance figures and nothing new, though I liked the music and the progression of it with the visuals, somewhere in the middle I was dragged into it.

Speaking of Linux: video-capture or cross-compile to Win32 anyone..?

This could be really something, but there is one crucial ingredient missing: A character centric demo needs decent character animation. I'm not sure if this is a technical problem (re-inventing everything on linux again?) or an artistic issue, either way, it destroys a lot of potential.

But still, it was one of the best entries in this years' ASM demo compo.

A very nice demo -- the first seriously nice Linux demo since 2006 actually. Could use some HDR rendering though, fades look quite washed out :)

If someone tries to run it on 64-bit Linux and gets the OSError exception when starting the demo (like nemesis did), make sure to install 32-bit compatibility libraries (ia32-libs on Ubuntu).

nice intro and then... totally utterly boring + non-inspiring music. can't understand the hype here. i guess that the linux achievement saves it from a thumb down. at least until i've watched it again.

many regards ! im' not a coder but i'm happy to finally have a linux cool designed prod to tast on my computer ! thanx for producing this, regards

nice but a bit too stretched thus too long during the compo

Very nice graphics, but rest i meh.

A good demo. Quite intriguing and I liked the soundtrack.

My only criticisms are that the colour scheme was too bland and the scenes were too dark. It could've been more, but still a nice demo.

uh, not my cup of tea.

best demo of asm2011

Improved towards the end, some nice atmosphere. Doesn't fit in a demo compo awfully well with its often slow pace.

omg. this was borring ...

This is beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. I will however criticize (even if jaw already cleared it out) that for a character-centric demo, the skeletal animation should have been cared for a lot more.

Love the music too.

 

Had a nice start and great looking environment, but with the INSANELY cheesy overlays, the lack of development (sure, you tried to make a story, but it went nowhere and turned out to be a lame effects show), and absurd length it was just awful.

I'm sorry, but this is just.. Annoying. I mean, the opening scene sets the tone perfectly (and I _love_ the vertical sliding scene transitions), and then nothing happens for 10 minutes. I'm glad I wasn't at Assembly this year because I'd be pissed for having to sit through it in the compo. I know a lot of work went into this, and it makes me sad because the work could have been spent so much better. :(

PS: on the Vimeo-page you write:
How did you manage to inflate a 10 minute track up to 16 MB? One MB per minute is MORE than sufficient quality

Not bad, much better than it looked on stream, there's a lot of detail around indeed. The big problem is that it's fucking boring. Nothing at all happens apart from a mediocre 3D model of a girl doing some absolutely terrible animations. The backdrop is awesome, but the main character, and the lack of action undermines everything.

Still, a decent demo, and I'm always delighted to be able to watch demos natively on my computer without having to rely on wine or crappy video captures, so thank you for that.

Nice space/dream travel but skating or using hover-shoes on a planet ? ;)

Nice music, rendering and hand-made animation. Should be faster paced and some things really ruin the atmosphere like 'tunnel with hands' scene kbi mentioned.

Plain irritating demo going on to long...

Puuh.. what to say. I really liked the great work on the animation a lot - finally a figure which is moving as well. Also the space topic and the graphical arrangement worked great for me. Actually this prod shows how much visual impression you can create with good arrangements and graphics and less effects. It appears to be amazingly simply sometimes, but I really liked this different style. And big respect for the outstanding skating animations.

I really don't know what to think about this, the music is really pleasant but the stiff character is just creepy. So it's a piggy, because of the nice environment & music.

worthy podium-placement!
but the Z-Splines have been the best in the demo and you showed em like 5 seconds only :p

What? That's like 128kbps, far from sufficient... The soundtrack here I think is quality wise sufficient.

About the demo itself, it's decent, even very good at the moments like the the first couple of minutes, but sadly it's not consistent in quality.

Maybe it will grow on me. I'd love to see it realtime as well.

what others have said, mainly.
cool to see a character, but the animations deserved more love.
also, too much cheese to my taste.
piggy.

If it's MP3 or WMA, but not if it's aoTuV or CELT.

Nice animation but... all the other stuff didnt really do it for me, so piggy.

very cool style, but way too long.

It is more than sufficient, and one would be using variable encoding anyway, so stop talking about fixed bandwidth. There are long parts of this soundtrack that would use far less than 128kbps too, shrinking the size even more. I don't know how else to say this, but you're just going to have to trust me when I say that I know what I'm talking about here :)

i missed the dolphins. only heavy use of dolphins can even top the kitsch in this one.
but no thumb down, since it's one of the best linux demos so far, and the graphics were quite nice in places

Not THAT cheesy.

I tried to dive in and it worked.

Great crescendo, and amazing work. Deserve the podium imho.

.

Nothing personal, i'll thumb it down because you used a cheap trick (android girl) to get the Assembly voters on your side :) Otherwise it's good enough, although too long

Appealing to the audience is a 'cheap trick'? :) (I know what you mean, but it still sounds wrong).

i somehow second gloom here.

it started so great and then sadly went on for a long time without getting anywhere...

gloom: I don't have any doubts about you not knowing what you're talking about, and trust me I know too. I guess we just have different views on this matter. Personally I'd prefer demo soundtracks to be in FLAC or other uncompressed format, but hey that's just me...

how the hell did that get a 3rd place?

also, a motivational thumb down!

noby: I think that's where our opinions differ, yeah. I consider using FLAC or even WAV in demos to be pure bloat. :) It contributes marginally to the quality (very marginally in fact) but uses 5 or 10 times the space. But, it's your release and you treat it how you like. I just thought I'd mention it :)

This demo is nicely different, and I've always been a sucker for story demos. I also enjoy the slow build-up myself.

On a second viewing it didn't feel as long as it did during the competition, but I still feel it should have been edited. Liked it enough for a thumb.

Somehow for a moment I thought that just maybe there will be a chick typing away on a C64 somewhere near the end.. ;)

The intro felt like somebody tried to copy visualice's recent style, and didn't quite pull it off. Then, dancing manga robots with terrible animation. If you're going to do character animation, then character animation is kind of a key skill, no?

Well, I didn't like it. But I respect the work that's gone into this, technically and artistically it's close to being really good. So, no thumb down, and keep at it, I'll look forwards to the next one :)

Very nice demo, congratulations for the 3rd place! I hope we dont have to wait another 3 years for your next demo. :)

Much better than your last demo at asm and I think you deserved 3rd place!

A bit too much focus on girl in the end and I was waithing for the effects to really go to the next level but maybe next time... solid thumb!

My favourite of the compo!! well done!! bring back the story demos like the old Days..

Big thumbs up!!

started to feel sleepy during this one

I really liked this one

Very refreshing demo, very well done, everything is very consistent!
One of the best demos in the compo!

BTW I just noticed that the vimeo video was uploaded 16 days ago, but the compo was 3 or 4 days ago. Is that a vimeo bug, is it allowed to release early in the rules?

Worked the best @ the compo for me. From despair to extacy! Dunno what ever happened to her in the end though. Only criticism was that it was too long (repetitive at points) and the music could gone even deeper (was fitting nevertheless). Thanks!

Super awkward modeling/animation and most of the graphics look pretty old. Plus nothing happens.

Am I missing something here?

can't have it running on my 64-bit Debian distro. launcher.bin just segfaults without an error message. :(

How come this isn't on top of the month?

Lots of wasted potential in an easily forgettable prod.

It is longer then it should be. Demo starts to be interesting after 3rd minute. I will rahter thumb up some of your previous prods or wait for your next one ;o)

I must agree with Ferris - Sorry

i really liked the intro part, really nice to watch for the first 2 minutes. the rest was too cheesy and also much too long for my taste.

nice track and a great start. but then it became just boring on the visual side and the great mood created at the intro was destoyed. so it's just a piggie.

At last some serious Linux release!

absolutely wonderful! brings me back to some of my favorite demos of the 90s that had story like this. fantastic work!

jaw

cant download the 64-bit port, file broken?
can u fix that plz?

the url works but the download ends at ~25mb all the time.
so i think the file is broken.

Huge Production! Visual brainfuck! :)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./launcher-gtk.py.sh", line 18, in run_button
retcode = subprocess.call(arg)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 493, in call
return Popen(*popenargs, **kwargs).wait()
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 679, in __init__
errread, errwrite)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1239, in _execute_child
raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory


wat?

refreshing.

"refreshing."

wat?

If you're making a story demo, one of the most important things you have to consider is direction. Cinematography, editing, lighting, music. And yes, the fact that you're mentioning it in the credits means you know that too.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be any direction here, the opening scene is one long tracking shot which kills any emotional connection or chance for storytelling, whereas the "dance scene" is cut to death (often not to music) completely breaking the flow. Parts are separated with jarring changes and the last time I saw so much dutch-angled shots was Battlefield Earth - probably not a good thing. The stutter edits in the music are painfully misplaced.

It's the exact opposite of what you, I suppose, you wanted to do. You could say it's just a demo, but then take a look at Tribes and how that was shot / edited / scored, and how you SHOULD direct a story demo. As it stands, this is just two prolonged story bits with an cheesy uptempo middle section.

well, it looks like it was a shitload of work, so i feel a bit mean being horrible about it.

on the other hand, it's almost the textbook example of what's wrong with "storydemos", so i have to be a bit horrible :)

- bad direction, pacing, camerawork. the establishing shots at the start don't actually establish anything properly so it's totally unclear as to whats going on or why anyone should care; the only reason i have any idea whats going on is by reading the website that accompanies the demo. if you need a website to explain the story of a *storydemo*, that's a surefire way of telling the direction is off course.
meanwhile the dancing is cut to pieces so it fights against the very sense of grace and flow you'd hope to get from ice skating action. the camerawork there makes me suspect there's a lack of animations that had to be covered up and reused as much as possible, but that's just a hunch.
the tacked on end sequence is a bit pointless also.

- contrast levels are ridiculous - it's basically black with some bits of white glowing stuff for large parts of the demo. there might be some decent models and shading under there somewhere, but it's impossible to tell.

- the pretentiousness level is remarkable. (see: website explaining the demo; huge, overlong credit sequences; "epic" musical score), which is probably what motivates me to want to slate it more. pretentiousness is fine if you've got the meat to back it up, but if there's something shakey about the base material then it's a risky strategy.
- frankly the subject matter is unoriginal and unappealing, but maybe that's just because im old. :)

the problem with storydemos is (as you can guess from the title) you not only have to make a good demo on a technical and aesthetical level which is interesting to watch and has solid content, you also have to think up a good story and tell it well - which is way, way harder. doubly hard when you build in the restrictions of time, budget, resources and technical issues, and even worse when you try and make it character driven (ive been there and had the same problems, so i sympathise).

It's ok! ))

Quite cool looking and had some nice epic Athmosphere :) Well done!

looks more dated than it is, watchworthy demo nevertheless

Anyone know how to run this on a ~2015 distro? I had to install libasound-plugins-pulseaudio and libXmu for i686 which fixed some missing dependencies but now it just hangs on the load screen. Running Fedora 21 x86_64.

Somebody reminisced about this and I thought to come and give it the thumbs up. Better late than never.

perfect design

doesn't click

You guys should definitely make more demos like this, this is all fantastic stuff!