Breakpoint 2010: detailed report. Part 2

I publish a sequel. The first part is here .


')

2. Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

I woke up at 10 in the morning, went outside, ate an omelette with coffee. We talked with the musician xni, from the group RNO, known works on Amiga (AMIGAAAAA !!!). He was on BP not for the first time, he writes music exclusively on bass, he also announced a track on the Unofficial Tracked Music compo (he took 9th place on the results).

Then I went to the shower. Showers worked on a specific schedule, but at least three hours a day. The poster read “PIMMELPARADE” :) (Pimmel = penis). Inside, everything is civilized, the shower is elegantly invigorating, went there every morning.



It was scheduled several official events, meetings with the organizers. The first is the Meet the Networking team (also known as Notworking). Behind the screen, if you climb the stairs, a third of the organizers sit there, and there are also the main network nodes on which local wired and wireless networks are arranged. If I remember everything correctly, then the Internet comes to them through 4 DSL links. An additional UMTS receiving antenna was also installed. Someone asked why there is no DHCP in the wired network, to which he received an answer that they tried this approach, but then everyone starts to raise their own DHCP servers, and conflicts arise. Wi-fi is not really slow, but simply in the hall it is very difficult to make a good coverage. Although there were several access points between which roaming was supported and which were supported by Cisco equipment. Liching at Breakpoint is certainly not welcome (“you still have faster internet at home”), and many ports are closed. Squid is used as a proxy.

After this mountain of information, I went outside, took a pizza for myself, and joined the conversation of a small group of people with Gargaj. The Hungarian musician talked about some kind of game, which, as I understood, they do together with the other members of Conspiracy . It seems that this is something multiplayer, not free and is now in alpha stage. He also told an amusing story of how he taught schoolchildren the art of the demoscene, if I am not mistaken, in Stuttgart (he was paid for it), and how when he showed them on the Elevated screen, and then told them that it was 4 kilobytes. , the girl, “so in glasses, with pigtails” did not believe him: “You lie to me! It's impossible!" :)

I said hello and asked about their latest 64kb demos, Actuator - the text in the credits hints that this is their last thing, they seem to be forgiven. Gargaj laughed and said that the demo they did, did, did for all sorts of different parties, and it is in fact never completed, because it is “just a robot and two tunnels”. And it seems that some text was necessary at the end, well, Gargaj wrote something, and Zoom says, "yes, they will think that this is our last demo." And then: “Oh, yes, this is what you need! all sorts of assholes will come up and ask about it! ". It would also be strange to make your last demo on a new engine. Here, textures are generated on the GPU, and you can see that it loads almost immediately, a second or two at the very beginning is spent on processing music.



Then I took my leave and went inside, where the executable music contest (newschool, 32 kb limit) started. Nothing interesting was playing, but then “Gargaj - Commence / Collapse” appeared on the screen, and this track wildly broke all the previous ones. The 17kb track (with the ability to render in .wav), combining elements of drum and bass and trance, and at the end of a changing pace and turning into dubstep, eventually won deservedly.

Then there was a meeting with the Streaming team and the Beam team, i.e. those people who respectively monitor broadcasting on the Internet and the projector / screen / scene. They were located farthest, at the top of the grandstand. The man showed several screens with views of the hall, the street and the tent, explained that the video server is very simple, that it is not difficult to organize at all, the main thing is to get video inputs, and there is already a matter of software and technology. Microphones are placed in many different places, so the picture and the sound of what is on the screen easily comes down to the sound of the crowd in the hall. Everything was broadcast to the Internet in H.264 with a flow of 500 kbps through scene.org servers, and the Flash player on BPTV was chosen from the principle of popularity. Last year, an average of 800-900 people watched the broadcast at the same time, and in 4 days Breakpoint "generated" 35-40 terabytes of Internet traffic. This year, probably, 1.5 times more.

We were led even higher, where one of the most famous characters in the demoscene, kb / farbrausch, was waiting for us. It turned out to be very funny, and it showed all the more interesting :) But first, another organizer, chief of all the world, showed him the wildest console to control various light sources, which are mostly located near the stage. He said that his work is mainly to emphasize what is happening, i.e. mostly background. Then kebby showed us on 4 large monitors that he had there, and how the image from each can be displayed on the projector. One of them shows slides - it opens up a demopati system, Partymeister (the local site www.party is kept on it), while others run videos and demos. Since the PC is better than 60 frames per second, and for, say, the Commodore 64 is fifty (otherwise all scrollers in the original will fly to hell), there are several computers. When connecting, only DVI is used. There are two identical companions in the same place, and exactly the same for the organizers behind the screen (where demos are tested, see below). Namely: Core i5-661, 2 GB DDR3-1333, nVidia GeForce GTX280 with 32-bit Windows 7 Professional cloning installed. And even though they sometimes behave differently, he said, grinning, kb. He also showed a giant audio mixer, played a jingle and demonstrated in his signature style how he announces something from above. At the same time, the stage is 30 meters away, and without immediate feedback, a delay is obtained which prevents the speaker from speaking normally into the microphone, so there is a feedback speaker next to it. By the way, all the equipment was not bought, but rented, so much more profitable, often with markdowns (in firms familiar demostseners work).

Shortly after this presentation, the Sundown Quiz quiz began on stage. Sole, Syphus and Okkie competed with havoc, ne7 and maali in various frivolous contests, among which is to eat a bunch of Pringles chips, call the platform demo by name, quickly stuff a bag of potatoes into pants (PANTS OFF, POTATOES IN!) And other nonsense :)

Then we went to chat with the Compo team. The main one in this part of the organizers was ryg / farbrausch. He said that although all the declared demos are shown on the big screen, because There are not many of them (and even if it takes two hours), then you have to make a selection in a music competition, otherwise the competition will take a lot of time, and it will be difficult to vote. When he said that 70 tracks were announced this time, I knew for sure that mine would not work (it turned out later). For selection take volunteer musicians who have to listen to everything, and at the same time they do not know who owns a particular track, so everything is fair. He further explained that PC demos are shown on the screen in real time, but the Amiga and C64 demos have to be recorded, because problems often arise, the consoles fail at the most inconvenient moment, and then everyone - creators, viewers, organizers - the demo suffer you have to restart, the moment is lost, etc. And of course, there is no talk of any emulation. Then he led us down to the demos recording room. There, the Amiga (which “hadn’t let them down for five years”) was connected to the video converter, then the video signal goes to the computer with the software that is used for recording. The data format is DV. Since the video is immediately with the sound, there are no out of sync problems. The video converter also has to be selected, because for example, the C64 outputs a PAL signal that is very bad at the standard, so much so that any expensive equipment refuses to work with such a signal. The guru finished, and we thanked the ryg and we went back to the hall ...

Where soon you could see good handmade and freestyle pictures. But when the Animation / Video contest started, I went to the front row. There were of course many boring videos, but everyone remembered exactly Membrain , Ninja Gent 2 and, of course, How to use Blender . While watching, I talked to German Gita, who declared a thermo photo of an elephant for the contest :) (and then took the 5th place). The girls, by the way, turned out to be more demopathic than I expected to see, but, of course, they did not go in droves.



In the evening, the Scene.org Awards awards ceremony was held for the best demos of 2009. While waiting for her, talked to Nemesis and the demoscenter from Belgium, who was at the party with his pregnant wife. Her clothes on her stomach were written in the Intel-style “Little demoscene inside”, very cute :) Scene.org Awards were held by Okkie and Netpoet, depicting the release of emergency news. The best quote is: “Outrageous is a new meaning: 64 kilobytes. That's roughly the size of a Word document ... empty. ” Netpoet also let himself go, said, "I could even take my pants off" and let my pants down to the public's joy :) As a result of ASD, they took three figurines with their Rupture (including "Best Demo "But there was no one from this Greek group at Breakpoint), and two more Smash from Fairlight.

A bit later there was another “concert” - ronny / farbrausch played its DJ set, which consisted of primitive techno, house and also demo tracks. Maybe the set was nothing, but the volume was outrageous, and the #breakpoint channel was not satisfied (“PC 4K GIMMEH GIMMEH”). Plus, many finished their productions, and loud music prevented this. The truth of the scene was a lot.

I tried to find Russians on Breakpoint (and, according to the site, there should have been at least four of them, and Quite also participated), but I didn’t find anyone, even though they even made an announcement around the hall when I asked.

When the set was finally over, the 4-kilobyte demos started, on the Amiga and the PC. At first they were few, but one impressed. Anyone who wants to understand the AMIGAAAAA meme is sure to watch Ikadalawampu's live recording , it was just a bomb. But on the PC the demos were in bulk. Mistrace by TBC and Darwinism by Archee are great, unreal things. It's a pity for Quite - 1kb demo and without music (and TBC is more interesting, and with music, and also 1kb!), But now it turned out that they did not have time to finish the amazing stereographic 4kb hypnoise part 2 , and they had to declare this unimpressive thing.

That day I could not fall asleep quickly - where I slept yesterday, someone very loudly started watching German porn, I heard her crawling and it was impossible to sleep. I had to move to where it is quieter.

3. WE LOVE YOU!

During the day a “very important announcement” was planned, but before that a Breakpoint tour was also held for the inhabitants of Bingen, so everyone was asked at least for the time of PANTS ON :)

When everyone gathered in the hall, the scamp asked to make a place in the corridor, and then showed on the screen a video in which a group of organizers broke into the supermarket in the middle of the day and loaded their carts to the top with chocolates and chocolate hares. And then, in real life, they ran into the hall and began to distribute sweets to everyone. It was very nice and unexpected :) Scamp: “Happy Easter! We love you! ”

Later the contests began. In the executable oldschool music, Flamethrower by reed definitely remembered, the track on C64 with really cool guitars and voice samples. Then there were a lot of pretty good photos, and after that - executable graphics in 4kb (in this competition there was a gorgeous tower of Babel, just like in the picture). Then there was a contest of streaming music, after which the phrase FUCK ON THE FLOOR AND BREAK SHIT even became a small meme. There were several games in 96kb. I remember only the multiplayer three-dimensional " snake " (out of competition) and a very funny game on C64 about Spike and Molly (DARN IT!).

It is time for all sorts of various demos. Commodore 64 pleased only one , but, as usual, long and with a bunch of effects. It was much more interesting to watch the wild demos, as it was really crazy. Demos on mIRC , Microsoft Powerpoint , Android, Sega Dreamcast , on a TI-8x calculator , on a cube of 4x4x4 LEDs ... Finn lft, as always, pleased with the thing on the Atmega hand-made microcontroller. When he said from the screen that he had to lower the chip frequency from 24 megahertz to 18 to work with the PAL signal, someone in shock shouted “WHAT? !!!!” from the audience, and it was hilarious :)

In the evening, the band Ultrasound performed, which plays music originating from the demoscene ("You make it, we play it"). Guitar, bass, drums and a chic saxophone. Having played along with the truck of Jesus Christ Motocross , popular since last year, they moved on to playing Rob is Jarig, but then kb burst onto the stage and started screaming, “Enough! How long can you always play Rob is jarig, he was in our invitation demo, yesterday at Scene.org awards, and will still be in demos! Is there really nothing more original ?! ”And they, together with the band, started playing“ Never gonna give you up ”. We can say that the whole hall was rickroll'd :) (and the second time in a day, because before that happened in one of the Wild Demos). It turned out very soulfully, kb is generally a mega-talent. And then he sang his own theme from the well-known Candytron , and it was even cooler. In the end, without the kb, the band played Elevated, to which they also wrote the words and brought them to the screen so that the public could sing along.

By the way, during the pause between songs, the soloist had nothing to do and sang Trolololo, and the crowd picked up. The global meme is very global, amused :)



With a delay of one hour, the demo began, first on the Amiga, then on the PC. Elude showed on Amiga another three-dimensional demo with unreal graphics. And on the PC, Wir sind Einstein from UF & DD (“Research is lust / In science we trust!”) Was pleased, then built from millions of dots without textures and polygons Agenda Circling Forth from Fairlight & CNCD (points are new voxels, I tell you ) and the debra from farbrausch, which ended the contest, called fr-043: rove , "8 years of Breakpoint, 15 years of the tradition of demopati at Easter."

While watching the PC demos, I sat surrounded by Poles, and every minute one could hear “KURWA!” Or “ZAJEBISTE!” In general, Breakpoint had the most Germans, Finns, Danes and Poles, the rest were smaller. There was also one Japanese, a couple of Canadians.

To vote, you had to exchange your strap for the code entered in the form on the infodesk. Right after the end of the contests, everyone went to vote at the request of kb, but the server failed, and kb offered everyone to go and have a drink on the street and then go vote :)

4. End

In the morning, NASA’s shuttle took off, and I don’t know if it was live or recorded. kb announced about the time of departure of buses to airports: “the shuttle to Frankfurt ... okay, the BUS shuttle” :) By the beginning of the display of the results, enough people had already left, maybe half.

Before analyzing the results, a small seminar was held on vacancies for demoscenters. scamp and chaos advertised their firms, one developing network equipment in Bingen, the other developing games for the current generation of consoles.

Prizes were distributed in all competitions for the first three places. A Dutchman sat next to me, he was given 60 euros for the third place in the freestyle graphics competition, that is, he paid for the entrance ticket. For more serious contests, GeForce GTX 260 and 280 video cards were presented. In addition, the representative of nVidia, who brought all these cards, also presented another GeForce to smash for the most powerful GPU operation in the Agenda Circling Forth demo.



At the end, all the organizers took the stage, about 60 people solemnly said goodbye. Scamp said that Breakpoint would no longer exist, but 70% of the team still wanted to organize demopati, and that Breakpoint was not perfect, some demopati did something better, so this summer will have a meeting to combine all the experience and create a demoparty better than before. Breakpoint is over, but next Easter there will definitely be something new, “There's no fucking experience!”

And I will definitely go, and I recommend you. A lot of impressions, a unique atmosphere and many clever, sociable and very open, kind people from all over the world (and of course AMIGAAAAAAAAAAA!).

• Your photos with Breakpoint 2010
• Excellent photos by thec
• Download all productions, recordings of some events and concerts from FTP: ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/breakpoint/2010/ and on pouet.net