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                           Ü M L A Ü T   D E S I G N

                                   featuring

                                   MC FANTOM

                                at Function 2019


         Probably the most garish, incosistent, cliched demo that I
         ever had the misfortune to embark on creating, because
         people have been complaining about wanting this for the last
         year or so, so here you go.

         Are you not entertained?

         Making this was probably the most miserable, isolated
         experience I've had in the ~20y scene career, spending about
         4-6 hours a day for ~2-3 months every day, while being aware
         how disposable the end result ultimately i going to be,
         doing the artistically "wrong" thing, and yet, still knowing
         that this is the right demo to work on to prove a point. Or
         maybe it's the right thing to do artistically and its
         purpose is to feel awful. I don't know.
         
         My mentality was always, if you don't have anything new to
         say or show, you might as well leave, and this demo is quite
         literally nothing new - everything in it you have seen done
         before and better - and yet we as the scene seem to be drawn
         irresistibly towards what doesn't challenge us, the cozy
         nostalgic safety blanket of boingballs and cubes and
         drum-and-bass music.
         
         But is that what we want? Experiencing the same thing over
         and over until a future generation eventually forgets what
         it originally was about, and eventually walks away from the
         legacy that we have been cultivating? Don't traditions and
         customs need to be challenged to be truly able to be 
         appreciated? To have an external reference to what makes
         them great? Or are we too afraid to realize that their
         greatness is strictly pinned to the era they belong to,
         and by extension, so is ours? And isn't the whole idea of
         the merit of a timeless work we look back on that it was
         different, that we were in awe because we have not seen
         anything like that before?
         
         Imagine all of that going through your mind as your demotool
         crashes for the seventh time in a row in an hour. At least
         there was autosave.

         (The fact that they shut off gas in this whole apartment
         block two months ago for repairs (apparently it's been a
         life hazard for a while, hooray) probably didn't help
         feeling good about anything; I haven't had a proper hot
         water shower since. Yay for water boiler kettles though.)

         This is probably the last demo I make with this engine. Back
         then I vowed to use a graphics API (DirectX 9 in this case)
         until I feel I squeezed the absolute last drop of technical
         possibility out of it; given how the shader compiler starts
         to stall/crash as soon as flow control is involved, and
         I've finally got around playing around with GPU instancing,
         plus I've hit the limits of the editor (700+ nodes in GDI),
         I think it's time to move on from a 17 year old API to
         a 11 year old one.

         Massive thanks and respect to MC Fantom for lending his
         voice to the tune, especially because he did it roughly
         a week after becoming a new dad - big up rudebwoy, lavjaman!
         [emoji] [emoji] [emoji]




         Runs okay on my 1060 3GB, not so great on my RX580.
         Probably helps to have an i7 and a good chunk of RAM.

         Uses:
           FXAA by Timothy Lottes
           ASSIMP
           ZLIB
           A ton of edgewear to shut the whiners (well, one) up

         Thanks to Gary J. Hung for the hardcore kicks.


               Gargaj signing off - Friday; September 13, 2019

                            http://www.umlaut.hu


