A Byterapers & Doomsday creation 2024 Rainmaker, released at the Revision 2024 demoparty, Deutschlandia. Random memories of making yet another demo. Once upon a time there was a song made by Roz. We were planning to use the song in our demo at Assembly 2023 but then a sudden commercial surprise came about. Roz got a gig with 3D Realms to make music for the expansion disk of a game called Ion Fury and he withdrew the song from our project. Just think - making money with music rather than using it for an awesome demo! Unfortunately this happened only two weeks before Assembly. Suddenly all our dreams and mighty plans were burning in a massive fire on the playground of sorrows. The demo was no more. The ideas, designs and parts were put back into the desk drawer as there was just not enough time to recreate the demo using a new tune. Except right before Assembly Roz hollered and said he had done a new song, a sort of "two penny Aphex Twin". Too late man, game over man, game over. No time to remake the demo And so the party begins. The crew was there and you know, party stuff was happening. Location: hotel near Assembly. The bar. Time: 03:00 at night. Plenty of demoscene is happening. People have plenty of “demo” in their system. Those who don't, are inserting more. Mikron starts to babble about night, rain, wet asphalt, wet posters and so on. Dark and rainy. Just like it was outside. The mood was set. Traditional Finnish autumn inspired the frustrated demo making minds. Everyone was murea, so much demoscene wow. Next morning in the Assembly prize ceremony Wode climbed to the stage to receive his winning prize for the photo competition. Unfortunately Wode had lost his voice the night before and was only able to wheeze his thanks to the audience: "There was too much demoscene last night", he croaked in pain. Also the following day Mikron had to repeat all his nightly ideas to the rest of the crew, as everyone had had too much demoscene to remember the vision properly. Meanwhile, demo technology had developed quite a lot between and during the last Doomsday and Byterapers projects. Previously the Byterapers DOS demos were made with an old Byterapers Mr. Sex demo engine. Later the Windows demos were made with Demopaja and finally with the Byterapers Renaissance engine. And then we moved to the mighty Notch. That was of course a massive change in every way. Previously Wode had created the Astronaut/Doomsday (2022) demo using Notch. Other chaps took a look at the engine, thought "that's nice, let's do something with it" and started learning its secrets. Wode joked about making a projection mapping demo and gosh, that idea sparked plenty of excitement. Mysdee had made a scene comeback at Zoo 2022 & X 2023. He was very enthusiastic about both the Notch engine and projection mapping . And the right opportunity came about quickly: Mapsion Festival, which is an annual festival of video mapping in Finland. The boys decided to take part in it. Wode/Mysdee: We joined the Mapsion competition to see how demosceners from world of code would do in the world of art. The competition prizes were also really good in comparison to current demoparty prizes. The biggest limitation was the building itself: the demo would be projected on the front wall of a mansion as a video. The surface of the building had doors, windows and all kinds of rough spots, and was also multicolored, so it was really challenging to get it right. You just couldn't do everything. Mapsion did its trick though. Wode and Mysdee learned a lot about Notch, and the projection demo was finished in time. Eternal Now! unfortunately had too much demoscene in it for the art folks running the competition, as the "pop music" style soundtrack and demoscene visuals were not high art enough for the jury. Guess they had too much fancy wine instead of tasty demoscener dance beer. When our boys started working on the Project Mapsion demo, Notch granted us two individual licenses with us promising "to do something really awesome". Well we did. You can check out Eternal Now! from Pouet/Youtube: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=95513. It is a video mapping + projection demo, projected on the front wall of an actual building. Seeing we actually did something really awesome, Notch blessed our work and gave us a third license. Very big thanks for this goes to Deepr of Adapt, who also has provided us with some very important technical support. During the creation of Eternal Now! the team had another idea: “let's do a demo for Revision, based on Eternal Now!” - "let's re-edit Eternal into an aggressive "part after part" demo, let's go hard 'n' heavy!" But let’s get back to the rain. Mikron continued discussing the rainy demo idea with Wode and folks and requested if Roz could add "a rainy intro part" to the "two penny Aphex Twin'' song. That came out juuuuust right. Rainmaker October 2023. The ideas were forming up to be a proper demo design. The overall theme was rain. The name? Rainmaker. We hosted a LAN party in October. There Mikron specced the 2nd song of the demo to Mysdee. First plan was to top Roz's tune - quite a tall order. After a few weeks' progress, it was agreed that it would be OK to mellow down the demo after the first part. We would first have some aggressive action by Roz, then a smoother and more peaceful song by Mysdee. Maybe have some synthetic cellos or string instruments. Well… we didn't get any of those, but something better. 29.2.2024 First full version of the 2nd song from Mysdee. Works! Out of the window went cellos and strings. 2.3.2024 The rough draft of the demo is coming together with proof of concept effects. 7.3.2024 First full length demo draft is running, but still with plenty of repeating effects. This version was refined a lot for the final demo - only three effects remain still in the same position (both cities and the fungus growth). Getting there took 27 days with at least some of the team working on the demo almost daily. Yet, in the middle of March we were facing a crisis. We were missing lots of graphics. Both of our primary graphicians, Manu and HBT were completely swamped with work, and they did not have time to participate in this crucial crunch. We had to find a graphician and QUICK. Mikron sent a message to our old friend Marvel/Future Crew on 16.3. and he promised to do two logos immediately. Marvel was invited to the democrew channel and he quickly participated fully with the actual design too, not just making logos. Marvel says: When joining the project, the demo was already in pretty good shape. Pacing and transitions weren't there, but the core idea, a majority of the effects, and the music was there. In the last two weeks was Wode and Mysdee were pulling long hours perfecting the demo to its final form. Which brings us to wonder... Maybe one day we could make a demo featuring also Purple Motion. That would be the ultimate Byterapers-Doomsday-Future Crew collaboration. Just think of the confusion amongst the voters! Even the oldtimer (B) Ylä-Savo team participated in the demo project. T.o.B. created 3D objects, like the Revision logo in the beginning of the demo. Actually, T.o.B made some 3D assets for Eternal Now! as well. Fun stuff, as his previous demo stuff were done decades ago. In the demo team channel many (B) members gave valuable feedback during the process. Some not. Especially Mr. Sex provided insights such as "couldn't you make a better physics simulation", but the silence was deafening when he was asked to code a better demo engine. :) On a number of occasions we disagreed on creative direction. But we very quickly agreed based on the majority’s opinion. We all knew the demo will not get better if we stubbornly stick with our own fixations. As a side result, there are a lot of ideas that never made it to the final cut to be used in future productions . A lot of time was spent on the pacing of the demo. Mysdee, who did the editing and syncs, was fixated with ultra-fast paced cuts, and that no part should linger on the screen longer than a couple of seconds. He is not a fan of those 3D floaters from the late 90s that infested PC scene and ruined Amiga demo creativity for years. Rest of the team pushed back a bit, and the end result is still breath-takingly fast paced, but with proper flow - an excellent creative compromise. The first full draft of the demo was 403 MB and at some point it was a whopping 600+ MB but after some final fixes and scaling the final competition version was exactly the size of the first draft: 403 MB. Large textures and other data assets take their toll and there's overhead from the Notch engine as well. In the end the demo has little to do with the initial rainy ideas. Everything changed, but changing the name of the demo would have been a bother. On 31.3.2024 the demo was delivered into the competition with help from Sky/Byterapers. Kudos to him for driving 1300 kilometers. Most of the demoteam is present at our remote competition studio in Tampere, Finland. We hope for the best. Cheers to all! Btw no actual water/rain parts were included in the demo. Except one sunken city, perhaps the mystical lost Batlantis? Yours, Byterapers, Inc. & Doomsday