Read the Summer Preview review in Demoscene Weekly: One C File, One Shader, Zero Excuses.
Good news! The Summer Preview secret goal of 50 million views has been reached! (We're pretty sure the counter counts millions, otherwise we're 49999950 views off.) So, without further ado, here are all the secrets:
The entire thing looks a bit like the Rolling Spheres level [mobygames.com] in Dragon's Lair. It's a coincidence, believe it or not.
The high-wheeler is a reference to The Prisoner (1967-1968 TV series). It's about a probably unjustly imprisoned secret agent and his attempts to escape. Among other things, but that's the gist of it.
The Project Moloch logo is from Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (2016-2017 TV series). It's mirrored and flipped and slightly off screen because our dorky artist made a misteak. We noticed. The error is hidden behind Dirk's helmet in the official picture.
ENCOM is a large technology corporation in Tron (1982 film), and "Conform, Submit, Obey" are subliminal messages in They Live (1988 film). Question authority!
*NULL* is what some compilers generate when attempting to print a zero pointer as text. It's not very helpful. At all. Gcc on my Jetson Nano doesn't care, and it ends in a SIGSEGV, as expected. Thanks, Gcc!
The shader glitch is a nod to a bygone age: When Norwegian TV broadcasts encountered problems back in the 70s and 80s, that picture was shown. It translates as "We're sorry: Technical error". The design was just awesome. It still is.
Blimpy is a Pink Floyd reference. They used this floating pig as a concert prop. Sometimes it broke free and floated away. Good times! Anyway, it has absolutely nothing to do with a beloved children's book character from Holland which shall not be named.
The secret number is 117649. Check out the upper right corner. It's from Pantheon (2022-2023 TV series). Don't remember it? Think about how many years it would take to build a Dyson sphere and make it do something useful.
A random pixels glitch is always fun, and a green glitch usually means your UV-planes are all zero. Kinda infuriating when everything's rendered in RGB. Which should be all the hints needed to figure out what goes wrong in the pile of crud known as the Netflix Windows app sometimes.
The Ministry of Information logo is a reference to Brazil (1985 film). It's about... well, it sort of explains how modern development tools and methods work. That's our take: Yours may differ.
The voice snippet with some dudes arguing about a missing car is from the 2000 film Dude, Where's My Car? [imdb.com]. Like Tron, it's a cult classic. Totally, dude!
Chester: Dude, where's your car?
Jesse: Dude, it's not funny, dude, the car is gone.
Chester: Yeah.
To clarify: Vilos Cohaagen is working on a book called "From Noob to 1337 in 0x15 Minutes". It's not done yet. Sjur created the cover many years ago for a completely different purpose. Who says we don't recycle? Anyway, to cut a long and boring story about our first encounter with the South African demoscene in 1991 short, Vilos has made the first chapter available for free on his webpage: cohaagen.com. Please contact him directly if you have any questions.
Dirk has "Real Programmer" on his back. We're not pythoneering here. If you feel like a break from the pythonesque, we recommend Vilos' book (when it's ready), or a classic: Real Programming.
See you somewhere in time... is it a reference to Christopher Reeve's greatest movie or Iron Maiden's greatest album? Take your pick.
Greetings to Commodore Amiga demo groups we could remember at the time of production. We're related to some of them: Triumph, Scoopex, No Limits, New Wave, Cryptoburners, IT, Spaceballs, Offence, Razor 1911, Crusaders, Kefrens, and Cinefex Design.
The talking is from "Rhythms of the Universe" by Mateo & Matos. It's on the 1999 album The Many Shades of Mateo & Matos [discogs.com]. Great mix, mediocre audio quality. We tweaked it a bit, but kept the clicks and pops for that classic LP sound.
Girl: Who are you?
Wizard: I'm the enchanting wizard to rhythm.
Girl: Why did you come here?
Wizard: I came here to tell you about the rhythms of the universe.
That's it. Be seeing you.
We're not just building killbots in the lab during springtime! We try out new things so we're ready for Xmas. This year's Summer Preview, aka. Project Moloch, has mostly improvements in the base system. Which is one C file and one shader file. We fixed the font rendering, nailed the timing, stitched up the fades, and made everything weirder and more colorful than usual. Is that possible? Signs point to yes. The glitches are intentional... or are they?
Music: Miami Midnight Drive [bandcamp.com] by Chris Huelsbeck [patreon.com]. Used under a royalty-free license. We love Chris' music and his great selection of easily licensable tracks!
The shader is based on Ocean tunnel to surf [shadertoy.com] by Elsio. It's licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. He usually makes great shaders, but that one was kinda half-baked. No matter: We added an extra sphere, beefed up the colors, sync'ed it with the music, added some plasma, made it fast enough for the Orin, well, the stuff we always do. Modified shader here.
The end picture is a recolored ripoff from Dragon's Lair [mobygames.com]. The Ministry of Information logo [wikipedia.org] is used unmodified for a change. The high-wheeler [wikimedia.org] is in the public domain.
Tor Ringstad made some cool reinterpretations of Dirk the Daring from Dragon's Lair, with a little help from his robot army. He also made Blimpy, which is totally unrelated to that game. Our resident artist, Tom Casso, drew the Project Moloch logo from memory. In Microsoft Paint. Sjur Julin made the actual cover for Vilos Cohaagen's first book, so that's not an easter egg. Weird. Vilos has published the first chapter on his webpage:
Chapter 0x00 - C: The Language of the Gods [cohaagen.com]
Have a great summer!
We're having a blast in the lab as usual! Minor font improvements, trying out Tor's new blimp called Blimpy and some other top secret Dirk stuff. Daring? Gently? Many possibilities.
Finally made some progress on the Summer Preview! It's scheduled for release 1 June 2026. It's gonna be short and fast and completely confusing in an orderly manner. Like always. 4Kp60, Orin AGX, Dirk, yada yada yada.
Just roughly 4 months after the launch of the Xmas Demo, we decided to order some Icarus T-shirts from a different source. The Xmas Demo-themed T-shirts we used to make were just too crap. These look pretty ok:
Project Icarus T-shirt [teepublic.com]. As always, order at your own peril. We don't get any kind of kickback for promoting this. It's just a cool T-shirt with an Xmas Demo connection that only the cool kids (or old hackers) know about. And the obvious Dirk Gently reference, but I don't have to mention that. Jeez.
The Xmas Demo 2025 was reviewed in Demoscene Weekly by legendary scener Vilos "Cox" Cohaagen. Read the review here.
Progress has been slow on programming projects, since we've been working on a mystery project that has absolutely nothing to do with programming (or this website) for a change. I did some work on a summer preview that might end up looking cool, but the math is a bit icky. Still. We love the 80s, so it's the usual tunnel and some lights and clouds and radical coloring and crap. Like always. I love the new GLSL compiler, since it ushers in an era of less obvious optimizations.
Trying to run some hard parallel non-separable filters on the Nano was less than successful. Let's face it: It's getting old. I tried it on a Xavier, and that opened a can of unexpected worms. Not like you ever expect them, though. It's still great on a single core, but it seems the runtime code... err, transmogrifier doesn't like all cores working at once. Results were totally unreliable. Can somebody bury the remains of Transmeta now, please? And yeah, I gotta buy some new ARM-based hardware. Again. Stay tuned.
The Norwegian version of Real Programming was released 5 years ago today. Every time we're mentioned on Norwegian programming-adjacent websites, sales numbers shoot up. Last year was no different. Keep it up: Any news is good news! We're still looking for more Waterhousers and Ryghs so we can hand out anniversary awards, like in 2024. Unfortunately, nobody made the cut. Damn. We're keeping our hopes up for this year!
We released a HTML version of the 2023 summary last year, available here: Real Programming Condensed. It's not that long and contains all the main points.
From the archive: A simple tool that shows the time in a readable size, including seconds. Keeps running until you break it. No command line options, no dependencies, just roughly 50 lines of C. I still use it: Great for reading the time from the far end of the lab. Windows and Unix versions.
Source files:
A test run:
nils@mork:~/src/timeux$ gcc -O2 -Wall -o timeux timeux.c nils@mork:~/src/timeux$ ls -l total 16 -rwxrwxr-x 1 nils nils 9264 jan. 23 08:24 timeux -rw-rw-r-- 1 nils nils 1450 jan. 23 08:24 timeux.c nils@mork:~/src/timeux$ ./timeux #### #### ##### ## ###### #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ### ## ## ## ## ## #### ## #### # ## ## ##### ##### ## ## ## ## ## # ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ###### ## ## ## ## #### #### ## ###### ## ## ##### ####
Quicker than expected: The Xmas Demo 2025 now has more views than 2023. 2024, which was much harder to make, lags way behind. The roll of the (YouTube) dice. I guess we'll hold a bake sale and get a DGX Spark [thregister.com] for this year's festivities. Good thing it's far off. Still.
Happy new year! We released the Xmas Demo 2025 last Friday before Xmas. With help from old scener Tor Ringstad [demozoo.org], we did a 4K demo on the AGX Orin. After the Summer Preview fumble, it had to be done. Mistakes were made. Morons will be punished.
Improved timing, even better stateless rendering, and an array of new and almost not crap rendering methods were introduced: Full resolution flexibility and "I can't be believe it's not MSAA". Isn't as great as it might sound. Hmm. We spun some new shady shading techniques based on last years 1080p feast on the Nano. Read the code. And the book. Speaking of code, it shrunk: The control code is just 943 lines with comments, shaders 1731 lines total. Sjur got it running on Mac for the first time, but it's not ready for release yet. Maybe next... err, this year.
In the lab, I installed a new PC with a 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and a busload of RAM. Wise move: RAM prices have increased a lot since then. AI rush still not wearing off, it seems. The PC is just ridiculously much faster than the old one.
More tube gear in the lab last year, too! A Brocksieper and an Elekit 300B amp, and an assortment of NOS tubes. I also installed a DECWare input switcher and a Pro-Ject Pre Box RS2 Digital, but no pictures of that yet. Have to dust off the cam, I guess. Listening to music is fun again!
Work is progressing on the new filter theory loosely presented here. Since I quit working, there's endless time to do it, actually. Hoping to have a simple implementation for non-separable filters ready soon. Working with an old colleague who knows more math and filter theory than me on this. I just whip data around in patterns necessary to keep power usage low. Or execution speed high. They're often, but not always, the same.
Stay tuned for more top notch stuff in 2026! (May be considered regular stuff in some regions)
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