i s o w o r l d

a 4k intro coded for bytefall'99 by shodan//tcp

this file will hopefully give you some information about that intro
and related stuff that is probably interesting or maybe even useful

_,ooo,_

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`L$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$T$$$$$; $lⁿⁿⁿⁿⁿⁿⁿ(*)ⁿⁿⁿⁿⁿⁿⁿl$ ;$$$T,

`°°ⁿⁿⁿ°°`       `°°ⁿⁿⁿ°°`

this intro requires:
* fast pentium or compatible processor
* vga
* 400k of base memory
* pure dos to run party version (NO windows'95!)

the party version will only run in pure dos, no windows'95. win'95 does
mess around with timer, and my sync blows out. release version contains
win'95-compatible sync code. that's the only difference.

in fact this intro was made on a k5-133 in windows'95 dos box, and thus
it seems to be fairly stable. even windows could not crash it, though i
discover some mystical bugs from time to time which disappear after one
good old reboot or even dos box restart. and the most annoying thing is
that i'm unable to force those bugs to appear under debugger, oh well..

fast machine is surely *much* better, that's due to the fact everything
is optimized for size, not speed. and yesss, if anything goes wrong and
crashes, try doing a clean boot. sometimes it really helps.

as of the time of writing, this piece of assembly does feature:
* antialiased italic text writer (oh wow)
* 2D metaballs (aka blobs)
* metatunnel
* some twisted object generation
* simple texturemap and envmap generation
* texture and environment mapping (used for phong shading)
* realtime 3D isosurface generation
* water

this of course is not too much but heya.. that cute marching cubes algo
is something not that hard, but fairly space-expensive, and by the way,
it does require 4608 bytes worth of tables - and i still wonder whether
these tables might be generated, not just simply stored. and yes, heavy
fpu usage also does things to code size. and the object generation..

there's no design. sorry, no bytes left for it. well, at least it is no
boring engine show with a few textures done with the same routine. huh,
it surely is a dumb effect show mainly aimed at coders. but that's what
4k's mostly are anyway.

well anyway this is first ever (i guess) 4k intro featuring isosurfaces
and first ever (as i guess, too) production from russia featuring those
damn isosurfaces, so that's just enough to be happy with it.

i'm releasing this intro under that funny "tcp" label. tcp is, err, uh,
current version of a title for a demogroup that i am trying to form. as
of time of this writing, i'm the only one who is in the group for sure.

as this is the very first release of mine and is the very first release
from tcp too, no huge release list or member list or something, sorry.

some source may eventually leak. i'm not going to release anything now,
though. just try to convince me that i'm really ought to release source
if you feel it's worth the try.

astroidea. doomsday. dubius. exact. gmf. pulse. psychic link. quad.
rage. rhyme. sanction. statix. tbl. trauma. xevius.

i heavily respect you and admire you for what you've done,
and must thank you for all the inspiration.

e-mail: shodan@chat.ru
fidonet: 2:5036/5.47