Sorry if you already knew this, but out of pure chance I thought I would check to see if one of my favourite web sites – Nectarine Demoscene Radio – was back on-line today, and lo and behold, it was! Nectarine had been streaming classic and modern demo scene tunage across the tubes for years. Site admin Yes had built up an awesome collection (18,000+ mp3s!) and like lots of other people I had saved hundreds of favourite tunes on there, voted on thousands, and listened to probably weeks worth of tunes!

And then some script kiddie went and ruined it for us all. He found an exploit in a script, and wiped the whole database and back-up. The site died and the scene lost a little bit of its heart the same day.

Lots of people wanted to help bring it back. I offered my services (as did many others)  but the events obviously took their toll on the Admin, and the site was destined to be nothing more than a fond memory. I would check back every 4 months or so, just in case, and today I struck gold

So I putting a shout out – if you used to listen to Nectarine, or are just interested in 24-hour streaming demo scene coolness, then go over there, register and help to breathe life back into the site again.

http://www.scenemusic.eu

The Assembly Summer 2009 Convention is now under way, and  you can watch it live at Assembly TV.

The good stuff doesn’t really kick off for a few hours. But they show lots of cool demos, random interviews and lots of mobile phone adverts until then Plenty more info on the official site.

I’ve got it up and running on a spare monitor watching via the 1MB VLC stream.

There is some great stuff coming up on the schedule (the GameDev Compo tonight for example). But if you miss it, you miss it, until they re-publish the recordings later in the month. Join me on Twitter (when it isn’t being DDOSd!) to chat about it – @photonstorm

I’m ashamed I didn’t pick this up since now as it happened back in August, but evoflash released their 99er demo at Assembly 2008 into the browser contest there and won. When you watch it, you’ll understand why! A truly amazing example of what can be done with Flash (and the Away3D engine). Click the picture to watch the demo.

Or go here: http://evo.bombsquad.org/99er/away3d/99er-evof.html

It’s stuff like this that makes me want to use Away3D instead of PV3D! But the new BSP enhancements I saw at FOTB08 in PV3D were very impressive.

Damn it’s great to have so much choice

I just had to write something to say that the oh-so-excellent MindCandy Volume 2 DVD has been released! Volume 2 is all about Amiga demos and contains 30 full productions spanning the range of the Amiga scene, from the Red Sector megademo and Enigma, right up to Fat Fits Karma by MadWizards, and Silkcut by The Black Lotus.

All of the demos were captured and rendered using genuine Amiga hardware, and then painstakingly stitched together for the best possible viewing on DVD. There are loads of extras as well, so for just €15 I urge you to consider buying this – I just ordered 3 copies (1 for me, 2 to give to friends at the forthcoming TGC Convention)

Just a small update to the PixelBlitz Engine today, but a pretty cool one!

I'm creating an intense shoot-em-up game as my water shed test of the PB engine. Each day I get to add a few more features to PB that makes the game closer to reality. Once I have reached that point I know we'll have something truly useful on our hands

Today I added in a backdrop behind my ships and thought "damn, that ought to scroll" - but I figured that PB ought to handle the scrolling for me, automatically - just set it and forget it. So that is what I've added to the engine tonight.

It's a piece of piss to use:

Which allowed me to create the following demo in around 20 lines of code:

I'm quite pleased with how this is shaping up You can autoscroll any PixelSprite, with full transparency preserved (so they can be overlaid on-top of other PixelSprites for true glass-window scrolling effects). The PB engine takes care of making the scroll seamless for you, and you can modify the speed on-the-fly (although I'd recommend not to do it every frame if you've got a lot going on).

The only issue is that scaling an auto scrolling PixelSprite will mess it up, so I'll need to remedy that.

It's now the weekend, but if i get some spare time I plan on continuing my task of fixing the left over issues before cracking on with collision groups and sprite mask tests.

Here is the source + FLA.
You'll need to checkout latest revision (v21) of PixelBlitz from Google Code to compile it though.

This is just a short post to say that the excellent new album "Behind the Square" has been released on C64 Audio.com. It's a collection of remixed Mad Max (Jochen Hippel) tunes, put together by ACC:Xess. They are superb, spanning everything from the haunting Astaroth game over track, to some classic demo screen music. Superb value for £4.99 Click the album cover to visit the site and buy it!

http://www.c64audio.com/productInfo.php?cat=STCD2