After 20 years, CAPSULE is back with a little intro called:

"Renouncetro"

We wanted to make this little intro to announce that we have returned
to the demoscene.

A week before of REVISION, we decided to do something quick for the
Party and contribute with a small production for the 64k intro compo.
All the programming has been done in a week and the old school music
done in a few hours.

The six members of Capsule today are:

Peskanov (Coder)
Winden (Coder)
Flynn (Coder)
DarkG (3D Artist)
God (2D Artist)
Estrayk (Musician)

CAPSULE.    Danger Inside!

We love 060, we love AGA. Maybe a new demo for this year? I hope so.

Peskanov told me to write a little text about why we chose such a
strange name for this intro. "renouncetro".
It really is an invented name, it is the union of "renounce" and "intro"
because we have renounced on making the demo we were preparing due to
lack of time and we decided make a quick intro to going go to the party
empty-handed.

I'm going to tell you a little about the rebirth of the group. A year
and a half ago, we saw that the date of the 20th anniversary of our
last production "The Last Inline" was approaching. Peskanov had in
mind to do a routine that he always wanted to do at the time and was
never shown in any demo. We thought it would be a good idea to present
a small production for the REVISION with Peskanov's routine and
celebrate our 20th anniversary of our last demo.

Going back to doing something in Amiga after 20 years is not easy,
working methods have changed a bit. Dr.Slump (an old Capsule coder)
helped us configure a crosscompiler for Linux to code more comfortably.

We had serious problems to locate an accelerator 68060 to 66Mhz to be
able to optimize the code in the real machine. In the end, we had to
upgrade an old Blizzard 1240 to 68060 and an old Blizzard PPC 040 to 060.

When were ready to start making the demo using Peskanov's new routine, we
talked to some old friends: Winden and Flynn.

Winden was an old friend of ours from the group (Network) and Flynn was
an old member of CAPSULE.

They were very interested in helping with some routines for the demo and
we began to think about some routines that could amaze the public.

So with the three coders, Peskanov, Flynn, Winden and me as musician,
we talked with another old friend to make us the 3D objects and scenes
we needed: DarkG.

We just lacked a design for the demo, so we talked to another old
friend to design the demo and make us the graphics: GOD (Ozone).

We started working very hard but when we had 75% of the demo, we
realized unfortunately, the deadline was too soon.

A week before the REVISION, it was decided to pause the demo project
and quickly make a small intro
We hope to finish the demo for this year and that everyone can enjoy it!

Peskanov at the keys; some technical bits about this little prod:

In order to make things a bit more interesting than your typical filler
compo, we have tried to code something new or unusual.

Inspired by the hires+laced Dekadence demo, we have been thinking about
new ways to push the bar a little further; this intro renders the
polygons into a 640x360 8 colors planar screen, in fastmem. Yes, you
are reading correctly: planar in fastmem!
What's the point?
When your render screen has the same format as your chipmem screen,
you can avoid dumping the whole screen and just copy the different
words from the previous frame.
This keeps the whole screen dump operation (about 90KB) under 15 ms,
quite often under 10 ms. Another good side is that clearing the screen
is faster as you just clean the bits you need, and not whole chunky
pixels.

The bad side is rendering is a bit slower (well, it depends on the
type of polys you are rendering of course; large surfaces can be
faster in planar too).

You can do something similar using chunky buffers and c2p, but it's
just not as effective.
We used a similar tech in our (ancient) prod "Phase One", for the
endscroll screen. There, we cleared up the chip RAM buffer using the
blitter, and just copied (well, c2p'ed) any data !=0.

Another little touch we added here is the antiflicker; 3 bitplanes are
configured as the same screen, just a line lower, and blended in 25/75
proportion.
It works really nice on a vintage Commodore 1084!

Winden at the keys; it has been a fine week putting this together with
Friends! :) All the object models are created IQ-style, making a
object-specific formula for the bone + a general one for giving them
weight -- working with a cross-compiler + FPU support also allowed
quickly iterating and playing with fully dynamic vertex animation :)

Flynn here. It's been an amazing few days. We only decided to do
this earlier this week and, after a sleepless night, we have an intro.
It feels great to code on the Amiga again. Really looking forward to
releasing a bigger prod in the future.

greetings from

All the old farts / Capsule