Hauptsache Strobo 4k and the BluFlame group

By Adok/Hugi


In August 2008, at Evoke, a demo called "Hauptsache Strobo" was released. It became 3rd in the demo competition. A week later, at Buenzli 2008, the same demo appeared again as a 4k intro. It became 3rd in the combined 4k/64k intro competition. I talked to xTr1m of BluFlame, the maker of the 4k intro, about his motivations and the making of the production.

xTr1m had the idea to create the 4k intro a few days after Evoke was over. "I remember hearing the song being played during the party, and watching the production being made just before its deadline, and I could already see its potential. When the original 'Hauptsache Strobo' was shown in the bigscreen, the audience cheered more than for any other demo", says xTr1m. He admits: "Maybe this was also because there weren't so many decent entries for the PC demo compo." Nevertheless he was determined to make the 4k. Although releasing the 4k at Buenzli 2008 meant that he had only one week of time with free afternoons for coding, he decided to make it for this party for a reason: "This year there were many demo parties in a very short time lapse, the big ones being NVScene and Assembly. It was only logical that the best demo groups would release their best entries at those bigger parties, which leads to very few releases at smaller parties like Evoke and Buenzli."

After contacting the original authors (Stroboholics) and getting their permission, xTr1m started straight away. How did he implement the 4k intro? Here it is worth mentioning that he did not have to start totally from scratch: "I've been creating a small engine for 4k intros since last year's tUM. Here I have to credit las of mercury for revealing to me the approach that I used, he gave me some implementation details and much help. The concept is quite simple: Implement very basic opcodes as functions (like color, rotate, scale, translate, push/pop matrix, and so on), store them in a function pointer array, then write a small demo data parser which recognizes opcodes and opcode parameters, finally call them." Simultaneously, xTr1m coded coded two demo tools, one being a compiler, "which would take some form of demo source code and create the demo data array", and the other one being a preview window "which allows me to edit the demo code and recompile it instantly, so that I can see the changes live". Effectively xTr1m created his own Assembler language for 4ks, which supports vector and matrix operations.

For the music, the 23-year-old coder and musician from Mainz, Germany, used the samples in gm.dls (read iq's article about it in Hugi #34). "I wrote a wavetable synthesizer which allows me to play the samples at any pitch. I parse the music data in the way that I saw was best. Music tends to be very big in the final filesize, so much thought had to be put on how to arrange the music data. Separating the note values, durations, starting offsets (delta coded), volumes and instruments in separate arrays allowed the compressor to reduce the whole music data to less than 9% of the original."

xTr1m (pronounced "extreme") also wrote a tracker of his own, which would sounds exactly like the final 4k. It saves and loads the songs as XML files and makes a "coder export" to a C++ header file which just has to be included in the project to call a function and have music. "raYn, who is the musician of BluFlame, had of course many feature requests and could test this tool much better than I did. Our mutual work has made it easy to make tunes very quickly", xTr1m kindly states.

After writing these tools, which was seven months of hard work, xTr1m only needed to code the 4k in his own Assembler language, make the music with his custom tracker, export the music, include it in his 4k project, compile the demo data, include that in his 4k project, compile the project, and everything was ready. "Pretty fair for only having one week of time", says xTr1m. The first fruit of this work, by the way, was the intro "fractoblob", which came second in the 4k intro competition at Evoke 2008.

What were the greatest difficulties in implementation? xTr1m: "The synthesizer and its tracker. I have never coded one before, and there are so many places where you can make mistakes, for example I had some strange clicking noises, and I haunted that bug for over two months, until I found out that there was one 'greater' comparison instead of a 'greater equal' comparison, which smoothed out the song as it should. And crunching the whole thing down so that it takes as little space as possible, while still sounding good, was a real challenge."

By contrast, coding the "virtual machine" (that is, the parser, compiler and previewer) was not that difficult. "DirectX has pretty neat ready to use functions which you can use. Lighting can be done very efficiently with a simple HLSL shader."

Regarding the creation of the real demo content, xTr1m says that it was "like playing a game. Place an object here, change its size, color, position, animation, create loops, that was the easiest part of all."

xTr1m did not attend Buenzli himself, but he was watching the live stream provided by the "great guys" of demoscene.tv. First he was disappointed to see that the 4k and 64k compos were merged, but on second thought he came to the conclusion that this was no surprise. "It was forseeable that there would be very few entries, which reassured me somehow. I felt that it was good to release my remake, even if it was only a remake, even if it will annoy many people, even if it is not a production to be seen over and over again. I just made it for fun, not to win a prize. I hoped that the audience would have a good time while watching it in the party, and as far as I could hear in the stream, the production was a success, the crowd cheered very loudly."

xTr1m has been using his handle for over ten years, but he hasn't been into the demoscene for so long yet - his first party was Breakpoint 2006. However, since very early in childhood he he has been confronted with music and computers: At the age of five he started taking piano lessons, and at eight he got hands on his first computer, an 80386-DX. "Being a curious kid I quickly found out that there was some strange program called 'Turbo Pascal' installed, which I started to learn all by myself (typing garbage, using menus, finding the 'compile' command, reading error messages guiding me to a help article, watching examples in the help, copying & pasting the examples, compiling, seeing the result). It was like playing a game for me, and I remember being very proud of my very first hello world exe. Later I discovered QBasic and the PLAY command, and started making my first computer music with it. Then came Windows 3.1 with a nice midi software (which I still use today!), Turbo Pascal for Windows, and finally Delphi with the multimedia controls."

Programming and making music were two of xTr1m's hobbies, so, in his words, "it was only logical that I started studying computer science, with a great emphasis on computer music. Now I am a bachelor of science working in a company that develops its software using an own 3D user interface, which is quite cool."

With his midi software for Windows 3.1, xTr1m created his first "crappy" songs. His first introduction to the tracking scene was when he found MOD players in computer magazines. They introduced him "to those greater sounding songs". But it was only much later that he found out about trackers and the tracking portals like ModPlug Central on the Internet. "It was then when a rush came over me and I started downloading music wildly, and listening to the songs while watching the score in ModPlug Tracker, reading the comments and eventually finding out, that many of them were contributions for a party. 'A party?' I asked myself, thinking about the usual dancing/drinking/chatting parties, nothing related to computers... and those party names... Euskal for example. I investigated further, and found out about the demoscene, and then remembered all those intros I've seen in the cracked games I played back then, I remember also having seen Second Reality before. It was a big revelation to find out about that world", xTr1m confesses.

In his career, xTr1m also studied computer graphics and C++ since he "always wanted to learn how to code computer games". At some point in time he decided to actively search for demoparties and found out that one was taking place close to his home. That's how he went to his first party, Breakpoint 2006. "I was amazed and transformed. That experience fixed a path in front of me, to combine my interests and abilities, and be part of the demoscene." At this party, he met someone he knew from a music portal (CTGMusic.com) in person. It was raYn, with whom he then founded the group "BluFlame" and started working on and releasing entries as a group.

Hugi thinks that with "fractoblob" and the 4k version of "Hauptsache Strobo", BluFlame have demonstrated that they have a lot of potential, and we wish them good luck with their next releases.


Adok/Hugi