Ocean Machine was still being written when Breakpoint 2005 began. The Swedish-based group The Black Lotus (TBL) worked on it in a hotel room in Bingen, Germany, for more than 30 hours, and went to the hall with a crash bug still hidden somewhere in the code, hoping it would stay quiet while the competition was recorded. The demo won the Amiga demo competition with 1,021 points, ahead of the Loonies’ Multiverse with 814 and Madwizards’ Glare with 680, and it went on to win two of the Scene.org Awards for 2005.
Fast facts
- Group: The Black Lotus.
- Released: at Breakpoint, Bingen am Rhein, Germany, on 27 March 2005; final version 10 April 2005.
- Result: first in the Amiga demo competition, 1,021 points.
- Platform: Amiga with the AGA chipset, a 68060 processor and at least 32 MB of fast memory, or the WinUAE emulator on a PC of 1 GHz or more; later converted to the Atari Falcon.
- Credits: programming by Kalms and Rubberduck; graphics by Louie and Nichosen; animation by Tudor; music by Yolk of CNCD. MiKRO made the Falcon conversion.
Made at the party
The story of the weekend comes from Kalms’s notes to the final version. TBL had decided on “a less industrial, more ambient/atmospheric audiovisual demonstration”, and it was “far from being finished” when the group set off for Germany. While other groups worked in the party hall, TBL worked in its hotel room: “Code is written, objects are modelled, scenes are synchronized to the audio.” The work stopped after more than 30 hours because of “a savage bug” that could crash the demo at any moment, and the group entered it anyway.
The notes also show how a 2005 Amiga demo was built. Kalms thanks the authors of VBCC, VASM and VLINK, a C compiler, assembler and linker, which the group compiled into its own cross-development tools, and the company Hansoft for the project-management program TBL used to plan the demo. A screenshot of the plan is included on the disk.
The final version
Two weeks after the party, on 10 April 2005, TBL released a final version. The crash bug was gone and the music synchronisation fixed. The dancing girl no longer moved jerkily when her scene took three frames to draw, the landscape part was redone because the original “just looked too nasty”, and the greetings got palette fades. Demozoo’s tags for the demo name a volumetric voxel effect, an animated sky and the dancer; no public source describes how the code produces them. MiKRO later converted the demo to the Atari Falcon, as he did TBL’s Silkcut and Starstruck.
In the Scene.org Awards for 2005, Ocean Machine won best graphics and best soundtrack, and it was nominated for best demo, which went to MFX’s Aether. A year later TBL won again, this time against PC demos at Assembly, with Starstruck.
Sources
- Breakpoint 2005, results (web, secondary copy of the organisers’ file): Amiga demo competition. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2005/breakpoint05/results.txt
- Kalms, “Ocean Machine by The Black Lotus”, text file with the final version, April 2005 (web, secondary copy): release dates, requirements, credits, the story of the party, the changes in the final version and the tools used. https://files.scene.org/get/parties/2005/breakpoint05/amiga/demo/tbl-oceanmachinefinal.lha
- Scene.org Awards 2005, archive of winners and nominees (web, secondary): best graphics, best soundtrack and best demo. https://awards.scene.org/archive.php?year=2005
- Demozoo, production entry for Ocean Machine (web, secondary): party dates and place, the Falcon conversion and tags. https://demozoo.org/productions/4/