Demoscene tribute: Untitled/Dust
23/Aug 2009
Untitled/Dust is IMHO one of the most underappreciated demos ever. Sure, it won The Party 1993, but I don’t think it later got the recognition it deserved. One reason may be that it was quite difficult to launch it on many machines (IIRC) + it required lots of conventional mem (I was lucky enough to have PC that was compatible with this demo, but it required some config.sys+autoexec.bat wizardry). Not as difficult as with Optic Nerve (great demo, as well), but still’ It may be not be the best example of flawless design (to put it mildly), but codewise - it’s amazing. The opening sequence contains texture mapped, flat shaded 3D world (1993, year after Wolfenstein has been released)! The rest may not be as impressive (still worth watching of course), but beginning was truly jaw-dropping at that time.
Some folks did appreciate the effects in this demo, though, as Dust coder - Stone has been later recruited by fellow demosceners from Remedy and became a lead programmer on their little game about cop who had lost a wife. As they say - the rest is history.
Old comments
Pawel 2009-08-27 08:44:24
John Doe 2009-08-24 01:11:22
“Remedy, cop who had lost a wife,” what an elusive clue :-P. Truly, you’re a payne in the ass, Payne! Ahh, history… Nostalgic enough
SCNR
macbirdie 2009-11-03 10:13:46
Yep, jawdropping effects in that age.
Do you maybe happen to remember a demo where the end credits were created on a water surface? The demo group greets would emerge from under the water and then suddeny disappear creating incredibly realistic (at the time) waves. The water was not done in the 2d convolution matrix way - they behaved much much better. Maybe with some sort of connected springs, I don’t really know. There was a mode where you could play with the water yourself using the mouse. It was equally impressive, for me at least.
admin 2009-11-03 10:27:19
Heartquake/Iguana, I think I’ll make a note about it :)
macbirdie 2009-11-03 10:27:45
Never mind, found it. Heartquake by Iguana of course! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9_VUDz_tuM
3yE 2009-11-18 12:53:30
YES! This and Heartquake were my absolute favorite demos back when i got a rare, used GUS, imported from Germany into the rural Ukraine. The installation disc contained all important demos up to end of 1994 or so, from which i learned about the scene.
And i am absolutely heartcrushed that my parents threw away my Ultrasound a few months ago. :/ Since i discovered that, i don’t talk to them any longer.
Optimus 2010-10-24 11:20:32
I thought the water in Heartquake was done with the convolution/filter method because the same coder had released source code for that part which did it this way. But that old doc explained the math behind, why a convolution filter worked like charm for this effect.