Making of Drool This

Making of Drool This (THIS IS THE ORIGINAL VERSION!)
--------------------

Written by Yolk / Parallax.


Drool This by Parallax positioned 3rd at the Assembly '94. Mop asked me to
write some kind of story about the making of the demo, so here we go...

Many of you have probably noticed that Drool This won't work on a stock-
A1200. The reason for this is actually quite simple. Huge pre-calcs and
animated routines... NOT!!! The REAL reason is that some IDE hard disks may
not be fast enough, so if we would load a routine after routine, it could
cause some serious trouble with the music-timings. And there isn't any other
thing in the demo which could be called DESIGN, so we didn't want to spoil
that... :) And routines like REAL gouraud-shading and texture-mapping with
1x1 pixels and 256 colors won't be that fast without any FastRAM... So the
demo needs 6MB of memory, which was the maximum amount allowed in the compo.

Graphics were a big problem while doing the demo. We only had one graphician
at the time, Block, who doesn't have AGA. Warthog had rendered the Parallax-
animation in the beginning, and we got no other graphics. Legend rendered
the "At the Assembly '94" text a week before the party, and said it was hell
of a work to make those polygons look good... He said that he can't do the
rest of the texts, because he hadn't even done the music for the demo yet!

At that time Prayer's font for the end-writer arrived, but we still didn't
have any backgrounds for the routines, or graphics for the Doom-routine...

Doom-graphics (or should we say 'Poom-graphics'?-) and city textures from
Mistral arrived couple of days before the party. We still had some hope...

Mistral is Legend's 14-year-old friend, and at that time he wasn't in PRX
(or in any group). We decided to take him in our humble crew at the party...

My tune, which plays first in the demo, was done in January, so I didn't
have to worry about that. But I had to do the end-part tune... I already had
a beginning, and Legend wanted to continue it. When he came into my place,
the night before the party, he had done 4 patterns! So it wasn't ready... He
also had a preview of the second tune (Prodigy & Opus 3 megamix... NOT!-)
with him, and he finished it at 4:00 a.m. with head-phones... Great.

The Assembly '94. While waiting for the doors to open, Simply said that he
hadn't slept the night before, 'coz he was too busy to finish the demo. He
had also drawn the backgrounds and made the textures for the texture-mapping
routine! I expected the worse, because I had a slight idea of Simply's
abilities as a graphician... :) But, when he showed the demo first time to
me, I was really impressed! And so were all the others... Backgrounds were
nice IMHO, and the texture-city was REALLY great looking! Huh!-) At that
time there wasn't Mistral's graphics in the Doom-routine, but graphics by
Id Software, so it didn't look very good then... :) When I first time saw
the graphics by Mistral, I was shocked; "How can a 14-year-old draw such
stunning graphics!?" Well, it's still a big question...

OK, we got ALMOST all the graphics, only some beginning-texts missing... The
night before the party at my place, Legend figured out how to get those rest
texts done quickly. So he rendered them at the party-place, that's why they
have quite bad quality... I converted the letters with Pixel 3D Pro from
Lightwave-objects. Legend also rendered the cow in the end-part from Imagine
3.0's object which comes included with the software... :)

We finished the end-part tune sometime in the night. I was a bit drunk then,
and I'm not exactly sure was it me or Legend who finished it. 8-) Anyway,
all seemed to be great, but NO. For some odd reason, Doom-routine crashed
on an A4000. When it was fixed, voxel-landscape and the end-part writer both
crashed on an A4000! 8-( They would have worked on the compo-machine, but we
didn't want to release such unworking shit... (Anybody remember Critical
Mass!?-)

Well, after hours of painful waiting Simply (with some "help" from Topi
"Pinta-ala" Kanerva...) got the whole shit to work, excluding the strange
bug which causes Doom-routine to crash sometimes. (This bug is also in the
fixed version of the demo.) Then came our biggest mistake, and without that
mistake we could have win the compo, according to Zuikki / Stellar... Well,
what was it then? Uhh... WE LET -SIMPLY- DO THE DOOM-MOVEMENTS!!! Aaarrgh!!!
Debug claimed that "I can't do them, let Simply do them!". And so he did...

That's why everybody wondered why was our Doom-routine jumping strangely all
around the place, and looked like it didn't even move!-(

Well, I admit it's a bit cruel to claim Simply, because he didn't sleep for
75 hours... (He had a bet with Guru / Sahara Surfers!-)

Debug has made the movements in the fixed version of the demo, and they look
MUCH better, even on an A1200. I just hope that it would have been like that
in the compo-version too...

During the compo we were praying the Keuhkoz that our demo would work... And
it did, if you don't count the absolutely stunning movements in the Doom-
routine... We were quite satisfied with the applauses during the texture-
city and "Intel Outside"-logo, but after seeing the demos from VD, Stellar,
Alcatraz and Rage, which looked quite nice on the big screen (you can't
actually say the same when seeing them on the monitor!-), we didn't think
that we would be placed in the top-three. Luckily it happened!