Shine

By Adok/Hugi


Shine was originally a chartsmag, but it also contained articles from the first issue on and since issue 3, it was considered a "full" diskmag. Eight issues were released in total in the years 1997-2000. The editors were Baloo and Goofy, who first belonged to various groups and in the end were members of Replay.

All Shine issues are available from scene.org. Most of the issues have been downloaded 1200 to 2600 times. Shine #1 to #5 are DOS-based and with the exceptions of issues 2 and 5, they work with or even without DOSBox, but you will need dos4gw.exe for some issues. The other issues of Shine are Windows based.


Shine #1

Shine #1 was released in April 1997. On starting the mag, a title picture by Java of Cryonics appeared. A click later you came to the main menu, in which you could choose between the following sections: editorial, charts, news, messages, adverts, interviews, invitations, reports, results, support, greets, credits, addresses, list of voters. The panel graphics were drawn by Feather of Tpolm. The mag engine was coded by Unreal of Pulse. The music (two tunes) was composed by Fender of Peek, Elusive of Peek, Mitch of Crest, and Dane of Crest.

For the controls both a mouse and a keyboard were required. With the mouse you could scroll by clicking the buttons on the

rear of the screen, and the keyboard was needed for exiting the current article by pressing Escape. It's a pity that this couldn't be done with the right mouse button, too.

138 voters participated in the charts of Shine #1. The votes were collected during a period of six months. The charts categories were groups, demos, intros, diskmagazines, coders, gfx-artists, musicians, swappers, beers and scene countries. In addition, there was a combined points chart like in Parrot or Imphobia.

The adverts were divided into the categories swapping, BBS and others. There were two interviews in this issue of Shine, with Pascal (the creator of Cubic Player) and The Black Lotus team. Furthermore, Shine #1 contained three party reports (Icing 1997, Intel Outside III, Wired 1996) and many party results.


Shine #2

Shine #2 was released in November 1997. There weren't many differences from the first issue. Shine #2 got a new interface that looked like the old one, except that it had better graphics. However, it had more bugs: The buttons didn't work, and sometimes strange characters appeared on the screen when the line should be blank.

The code of the new engine came from Camel of Pulse. The graphics were created by Made of Bomb and Feather of Tpolm. The music was contributed by Radix of Tpolm and Caramel of Fascination.

Like Shine #1, Shine #2 contained only a few articles, which dealt with topics like the Norwegian scene or someone who gave Remdy a ripped picture to use in his new game. The charts had the same categories as in Shine #1 and were based on the votes of 104 people.


Shine #3

In November 1998, a year after Shine #2, Shine #3 was released. Once again it featured a new engine by Baloo. After the title picture (drawn by Off of Pulpe), you entered the main menu, which was quite well designed; it even had a 3D-rotating wireframe animation in the background. The texts were displayed in a rather simple looking text viewer with no background picture and a bit too small buttons for line-wise scrolling on the bottom. What's a bit annoying is that the buttons aren't at the same locations as in the article selection menu. Tune 1 was made by Andromeda of Noice, tune 2 by Loonie of Groove.

In total Shine #3 contained 460 kbytes of texts divided in six sections: editorial, charts, news, adverts, messages and articles. The charts, based on 76 voters, featured the same categories as in the previous issues. Most voters came from Poland or from Sweden. From each section, the 10 best entries were listed, except for

demo groups, where there were 20 entries. The votes were already counted in June 1998, so the charts were already a bit dated when Shine #3 was released.

Most of the articles were written by Psychic Symphony. Psychic wrote most of them in the first half of 1998 and, as he said, they mostly contained old points of views of him and ramblings about some topics. Even so some of them might still be interesting to read, for example "Explaining demos to non-demosceners".

In "How music have fun with your mood", Groggy of Total wrote about his experiences sitting in a train on his way home from Remedy and listening to some music by scene musicians. He wrote what his thoughts on listening to the individual tunes were and drew the conclusion that they affected him "in a very unhealthy way".

"The MIDI syndrome - Why Midi sucks!" and "It's not the SIZE that matters" were two music-related articles by Makke of Comic Pirates and Hugi. First he explained what the benefits of mods were compared to midi, and then he argued that "it's not the size of the MOD that makes it good, it's the quality compared with the size that makes it good!".

Cousman reviewed the music disks Artcafe 2, Distorted Musicpack and Slkkro2 Musicpack. He wrote a paragraph about each tune and concluded with its duration and result (i.e. rating). Consequently, the complete reviews ended with the total duration and the total result.

"The beginning of the end" was the name of another article from Cousman. He listed several things that in his opinion would lead to the beginning of the end of the scene. The coolest examples: "The beginning of the end is, if the most popular diskmag needs more then a year to release issue no.13.." and "The beginning of the end is, if the amount of how-to-vote articles in a diskmag is higher than the amout of voters.."

Next were some party reports, along with very concise reviews of the corresponding demos and intros, and of course their results. There were two reports about Compusphere 9, one by Goofy, the other by his groupmate Flex.

Finally, there was a "Swedish Scene Report" with some info on the Swedish demo groups and a list of the Swedish parties, written by Goofy and Baloo.

Shine #3 also contained interviews with the following people: Bjorn Lynne, Raven of Tpolm and Pimp, Virne of Coma, Wog of Orange, and Diskhawk.


Shine #4

Shine #4 (from March 1999) was a transitional issue released to show that the mag was still alive. Instead of serious charts, the main feature this time was a tool that translated phrases vital for every demo party attender, such as "we need more beer" and "stupid organizers lost our contribution", into the Scandinavian languages, Polish, Portuguese, and Hungarian.

The DOS-based mag system used Indoor Music System 0.5 and required VBE 2.0. After a successful start and sound setup, a title text showing "shine issue four special edition translator:kenneth" was displayed for a few nanoseconds, after which you got right into the main menu. The rather innovative interface used a 16:9 area on the screen, so there were black stripes on the top and on the bottom. In the background one could spot the number "4" and a Gameboy-like set, the rest of it was in a bright blue. The table of contents was displayed right-aligned in the center of the screen. To the left of it, a little 3D animation was played. You could choose the article you wanted to read with the cursor keys and Enter. Each keypress made a black line in the bottom half of the screen tremble; the faster you made keypresses in a row, the more heavily it moved. The articles were displayed on a screen similar to the main menu, with the exception of a different background picture and some red lines moving around from the left to the right, which looked nice. With Escape you could exit the current article and quit the mag when pressed in the main menu. At the end an average FPS indicator was displayed. The design was done by Goofy and Baloo, and the music came from Croaker of Halcyon and Tpolm.

About 100 kbytes of texts were inside this mag. The charts this time consisted of just one category, namely the best beer. Carlsberg won. The "Shine Awards" went to Skal and the rest of the Bomb team for their stunning demo "State of mind", which, as Baloo wrote, was "a pleasure to watch". The poems coming next were mostly short and poor. In his article "Party Reports", Psychic Symphony mocked at phrases that appeared in almost every article about demo parties, while in "Running out of Topics" the same author talked about the writers block everyone of us editors has from time to time and which is especially evil for him as he, besides to releasing a new Demojournal once a week, has put supporting every active international diskmag with at least three articles per issue into his head. The scene news corner was mixed with news about movies and showbiz. How fitting: The "Academy Awards '99" also appeared among all the demo party results. Another article worth mentioning was "Drink on demoparties?".


Shine #5

Shine #5 was released in September 1999. It doesn't run on my PC, but I was able to extract all texts from shine5.exe by using a shareware tool called Multi Ripper (mrip) 2.60. It's 347 kbytes of articles in total. Credits: Baloo was responsible for code and some of the graphics, Roger (formerly known as Goofy) made some of the graphics as well, Radix made the music and Warpig of Exceed made the intro picture.

The charts were based on the votes of ten selected sceners. There were the same charts categories as always. There was just one advert in this issue (about EliteMag #1, which was probably never released). Among the more interesting articles were reports of the Arf Party 1999, Bushparty 6.0 and Summer Encounter 1999, the diary of Psychic Symphony's Europe tour 1999, and the review of the Takeover 1999 party magazine. In addition, there were a Gothenburg city guide, poems, movie news and reviews, music reviews, and articles about various topics such as operating systems and sportsmen. There was also an interview with Radix in this issue of Shine.


Shine #6

Shine #6 (December 1999) once again features a new engine. This time it is Windows based. The coding was done by Baloo. Sunday and Antony contributed graphics, Loonie and Xhale made the music.

After the beautiful title picture you get to the main menu. You can choose between Editorial, Advertisements, Help, Demoscene news, Charts and Articles. The Articles section has the sub-sections Scene, Reviews, Misc and Party. In the Scene sub-section, there is an article called "Behind DemoJournal #65" in which

Psychic Symphony analyzes DemoJournal #65 and comments on the articles. There are also interviews with Unreal, Mrock, Probe and Gnilk, as well as an article about Voomie ("One of the scene's most underrated people?"). In the Review corner, there are reviews of Sunflower releases, of various diskmags and movies. There is a coding article about light effects. The Misc section contains mostly jokes. Inside the Party section you can find interesting reports about Distance '99, LTP 3 and Dreamhack 1999.

The charts are jury-based again. This time 15 people were

selected for the jury. The categories are the same as usual, except that there are two separate categories for accelerated and non-accelerated demos.

The new engine of Shine #6 supports true-type fonts. Unfortunately, the text isn't displayed justified. Thus the text lines have partly very different widths, which doesn't look good. There are also some formatting mistakes, e.g. in the party results and when photos are overwritten by texts. Also, the space between two words is too big. But what's good is that images inside the articles are now supported.


Shine #7

Shine #7 was released in April 2000. On starting the mag, a title picture (drawn by Jkole of Milk and Woorlic) is displayed for a very short moment. I didn't even manage to make a screenshot. Then you can choose between spring and autumn. The colour set and the background music depend on your choice. For spring, Steffo of Cryonics composed the music, and for autumn, it was A-move of Park.

The text layout has improved compared to Shine #6. The font in the menu and the charts is a tad small, but no problem for my trained, glasses-doped eyes. The width of the spaces is okay this time. The main change, however, is that Baloo has now taken the time to edit the articles so that the dots aren't glued to the following words and they use the full screen-width. Also, the picture alignment works better now: There are no pictures hidden by text written over them any more.

This issue contains about 30 general articles, plus a special about The Party 1999. This special was originally planned to be released as a separate issue before Shine #7, but Baloo decided to merge these two issues to a bigger one.

Let's start with the special first. We have two reports by Replay's coders (Baloo and Whisker), which tell us in detail how they got to the party and what they drank there. Of course it is illustrated with some pics showing some of The Party's guests with the highest SQ (Scene Quotient). Then we have reviews of all the most important releases, enhanced by a rich amount of screenshots; the texts usually have the length of a screen-page or a bit less. What may also be interesting is the polls regarding The Party, with questions like "How often have you attended TP?" and "Do you think the right demo won?". Out of the 18 people who took part in the survey, 14 have been at the party at least once. In every category except intros, only a minority thinks the right entry has won. In the intro category, Haujobb's "fuckwit daddy" is accepted by about 61% as the right winner. Furthermore, there is a chart that shows what the TP results would be like if only the survey participiants had been there.

Concerning the general charts, not much has changed, except the design: The buttons are now invisible, you only see a rectangle when you move your mouse over one. And, in addition to the jury charts (9 people), there are also public charts again, this time with 49 voters.

Finally let's speak about the general articles. They are divided into the sub-sections Scene, Misc and Music. There are mostly movie reviews, cook recipes, CD reviews and some stuff about charts and party voting. There's also an interview with Heatbeat in this issue of Shine. The author list ranges from Fred over Makke to PS.


Shine #8

The final issue of Shine is from November 2000. It features a new engine once again, coded and designed by Baloo. The music is from Vic of Level-D (an MP3!) and Deansdale of Exceed. The look of the magazine isn't really special, the fonts are quite small and thus hard to read by default, but the size of the fonts can be changed in the configuration menu, and the mouse controls work okay. The engine also supports animations, and we can see some small ones inside the mag.

There are the sections Main, Code, Music, Hollywood, Realworld and Demoscene. The coding corner deals with tiled texture mapping, motion blur in hardware accelerated 3D graphics and how to create Shine plugins. The music section is hosted by Vic, it contains tutorials on Cubase and Buzz Tracker and two other articles. The Hollywood section mostly consists of movie reviews. The Realworld section is about iMac, cooking, the Expo 2000, PDAs and drugs. The Demoscene section is the biggest one. There are news, a party calendar, various articles by Makke, D-Lee and others ("Amiga 500 scene", "The Diskmag", "Names that are the same, but..."), quite a lot of reports about demoparties, interviews with Chandra, Yes, Gday, Seffren and Das, lots of reviews, a special corner about Mekka & Symposium 2000 with live comments from IRC, and the charts from Fleur issues 1 to 4 (world charts and Hungarian charts).


shineRETRO

Besides the regular editions, a special "retro" edition of Shine was released, which contained the articles from issues 1 to 5 embedded in the engine of Shine #6.


Adok/Hugi