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INTRO-RELEASE: The Castle (Impossible 2)

Download (131kb) (final version)
DIVX video from amidemos.org (40mb) (a little bit jerky)

Forum at pouet.net
Image Of The Day at flipcode.com


2nd at MekkaSymposium 2002

Code: Psycho, Blueberry
Music: Booster
Graphics: farfar
3D modelling: Maytz


The castle is the long awaited sequel to Impossible utilizing our new much faster perspective correct 3D engine. After a 2D introduction flying through lots of clouds, we are flying around in 6 different scenes of a castle (see the screenshots below): A dungeon, a bit nicer looking room with a well, a stairs scene, a library with a fireplace, some sort of church and finally the upper level with a fountain, carpets on the walls and a dragon.

For the technical details, the textures are build of some small tiles, which are then combined into larger textures and finally noise etc. is applied for variation. This way we can have much more interesting textures than fully generated usual intro-textures. We have 2mb of different textures. All scenes are then lit by a build in raytracer including (soft)shadows in some locations. The lightmaps generated by this process take up 10 mb. The 3D engine is faster than ever allowing full 25 fps operation everywhere, and we are introducing a new system of multibuffering, which by using all the available chipram as a frame queue is allowing more complex scenes, as we basicly just need the average frame, instead of the worst case frame to be rendering at 25 fps.

The intro is requiring FPU and 16 MB of Fastram, and an 060 is required for the intented constant 25 fps operation. However it has been reported to run quite ok on 040 too.

The intro ended up 2nd in the intro competition at Mekka-Symposium. However the compo rules allowed both 3D hardware (which also cuts away a good deal on the code size) and a 5 times faster PPC, and the winning intro from Potion used both, and those requirements wasn't even announced to the audience. (That said, Potion still released an extremely good intro).

This is the final release version. Compared to the compo version we have added more timing effects, a version for CGX/P96, a new endpart module and finally the ability to run on machines with 16 mb fastram.

Look at the featured Image Of The Day at flipcode.com for a more detailed technical description.