from dust till dawn

by fairlight

at remedy 2004

this is very much a compo version.
as it's gone 5am now before the deadline,
and we are very tired. we will fix it next week when we have had some sleep.

in fact, we're so tired we cant even find the offical flt nfo file to fill in.

why did we do this intro? we wanted to take a break from hard work on more serious productions,
and release something fun. (and, not uncoincidentally, something short.) and test our tools. (yes,
"tool test" is a catch-all excuse here, too)

you get a dialog when you start up. it has some options for mesh detail and texture detail.
picking those lower than high detail gives you lower poly meshes and smaller textures. means it
runs faster and also generates a lot faster, but looks worse (and is potentially buggy, especially
for meshes.. might get things popping through the camera or something).
it's helpful though, because our first 3d scene sends 150,000 polys. twice. a frame. and then
other stuff on top. and quite a few mb of textures too.

requirements:
- a gfx card supporting ps1.1 and vs1.1. but for speed you'll want something better. and you had
also better have a lot of vram, unless you enjoy texture swapping.
- a decent cpu, like over 2ghz. (that this means better than the remedy compo machine is not lost on
us). cpu is rather important here.
- a lot of ram.
- windows 2k or xp.

we actually tested this reasonably well. works fine on radeon (9000+) or geforce (ti4200+).
that's a lie actually. we tested the intro player well, we didnt test the intro itself hardly at all :)

credits:

smash  		- mesh tool, texture tool, softsynth, engine, fx, intro tool, design, coderart
pantaloon 	- main code on intro tool, fx
reed		- music
maali		- 3d graphics, scenes, design
aln		- 2d graphics, textures, design
buzzie		- extra helping hand with scenes/design/fx

much thanks to ryg/farb-rausch for kkrunchy, without which we would never even have got near 64k.

known "issues"
- dont run it along with any other directsound-using program running. causes the music
to screw up. thats the worst bug there.
- it eats gpu, cpu and ram.
- it doesnt like slower cpus (like probably the remedy compo machine), because it hogs cpu. and with slow cpus things can skip a bit.
- did i mention it needs a fast cpu?
- some rendering glitches.
- there are little timing bugs here and there.
- the precalc bar lies. so if you think "its taking ages right at the end of the bar, it must have
crashed", dont believe it.
- lower than full detail on meshes and textures are subject to little (or big) bugs, especially meshes.
it's mainly for lazy people who dont want to wait for a long precalc, and we'd hope that nobody
would show it on less than high detail in a compo. unless the compo machine was really shit.
- it doesnt exit bang on time. when it goes black at the end, it's finished.
- it's not very long. that's partly because it's not very long, and partly because we dont like
long boring intros. =)
- we like spikeballs.

please do mail bug reports, to smash@fairlight.st. we want a solid intro engine.

see you at assembly.