The last 1 / 2 weeks I've been working on the demo system that we're going to use for our full size demo for the Intel democompetition and I just wanted to post some info of it's current state here. The difference with this demo and all our previous demos is that we don't have any size constraints this time. Therefore our "nerve" demosystem in its current form is not quite useful, it simply lacks all the basic things you need for full sized demos. Things like 3d models, textures and mp3 audio are not supported by nerve. Well at least not pre-generated.

So I'm working on a spin-off engine for our new demo: nerveHD. HD, since it will be capable of handling more complex things than nerve is capable of. It is integrated into Maya, just like nerve, using a viewport rendering interface, and it uses COLLADA for all its data transfer. Its rendering system is a pimped version of Nerve's rendering system.

I still have a lot of things to implement, but I have the basic systems up and running now. It can already process COLLADA scenes correctly and render them inside Maya, as you can see in the screenshot.

Some things still underway are: animation support, HDR, skinning, particles, overlays and (soft) shadows. That's the plan at least.

Wow, something really unexpected just happened... I just received the confirmation that Inque will be competing in the Intel Demo Competition this year. We're one of the 4 teams that will be competing against last years' winner Still.

Our entry (a full-size demo, not a 64k) will have to be ready on the 30th of June. We'll receive a Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme pc for free, and if we manage to actually win the competition (which will be hard, since this competition has always had top quality entries) we receive 4 more of those.

Anyway, there goes our schedule for our 64k for Evoke and all our free time. But this is going to be really fun :)

We just came back from Outline 2008 (in Braamt/NL) where we have released a new 64k production: Wrecked Angle. It's our first release that uses our own softsynth (pandora) instead of v2 that we used before, and it's also our first release with the new shading pipeline of nerve. All this new tech assured me that I've had enough bugs to fix in the past days. Izard and I have been working quite hard the past week to get everthing together. Pandora was full of little ("this setting should have an exponential range") and big ("omg, everything is out of sync?!") bugs.

Anyway, we've been working on this release from wednesday last week right until the deadline yesterday evening, six o'clock. We even had to work through the night yesterday, and skip the sleeping part, to get everything working. But we did manage to fix it all up into a final release were we're more or less proud of. It is actually more "polished" than our previous releases.

Ohw and for this demo Izard again did the soundtrack (but this time using our own synth pandora, instead of the dull v2 synth) and I took care of the coding, visuals and direction.

The release can be found here: Wrecked Angle on pouet.net, or check out the video I captured of it:



Ohw and Outline 2008 was really fun, despite the fact that we didn't even reach into the top 3 with our entry. Which was kind of weird, we hoped for a higher rank.

Anyway: this was more or less a first step into the direction we want to go. Were going to advance our soundengine a bit further, and we also need some improvements to our graphics system. Next stop: Evoke 2008.