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hi there, i just returned from this years evoke demo party in cologne, no interesting fractal releases, but i made attention when i danced on the stage when there was a wild compo with no music :D and didnt have to pay for my drinks afterwards ;)

nonetheless, i talked with some of the main organizers, and they want to do some kind of new-compo with me, next year, and they asked me to come up with a set of compo rules ...

so, what would you expect from a demoscene fractal competition ?!? what could be the borders for such a compo ?! i would love to make a whole set of competitions, likewise as the annual compo, animation, still and realtime ... perhaps i am just going to feature the annual compo there ?! i mean showing "follow me" on big screen might be interesting for the crowd as well, but my question ist: how would you design a live demoscene fractal competition ???

Hm. I hardly know the demoscene these days. Have never been part of it, but was in its orbit during the 8 and 16 bit home computer days (even to the point of reverse engineering a trick or two, but never released anything).

So if the goal is simply to have fun, and BE the scene, then I have no suggestions to offer. But one could decide to give this new category of compo a bit more meaning, an incentive to go where no coder has gone before ...

After all, "fractal" is just one very specific type of procedurally generated structures. So the compo could be about generating rich structures from short programs. That can be ever smaller fractal detail as you zoom in, but that could also be ever new horizons as you move forward, or ever new shapes with every new repetition of the generator.

Program sizes would probably have to be limited, though not sure if 4k is large enough to let people be truly creative with new algorithm types. Or one could ask that all demos of this type must accept a "seed" parameter of so and so many bits, so that a single program can produce a multitude of results, and most of these results must be interesting.

There could be sub-categories, generators for: sound, melody, harmony, texture (as for texture mapping), surface (as for displacement mapping or hypertextures), object geometry, architecture, landscape geometry, and of course abstract/wild style. On the other hand, as long as the compo is new, it makes no sense to shatter it into tiny fragments.

i surely would like that, but for all those 1 or 4k coders the outline data would be even more impressing:

• 8GB of raw lossless compressed video data
• almost realtime fractal generation with about 15 days 24/7 rendering

rofl2

that might be an idea, it might happen that when i dont come up with compo rules that i ask them if they would like
me to present the annual compo results on their big screen!

Cool to hear that those scene still exists. Looong ago (1995?) I did he graphics for such a Wild compo, was really coool and I would love to be part of such an event again (we got 2nd place in our category, so now 1st? ;-)))

Here is the link to this ancient piece of crap ;-), if your are interested:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-lzoRvMCfI&feature=player_detailpage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-lzoRvMCfI&feature=player_detailpage),

so you are a coder nowadays ;)
what would you expect from a fractal compo !??!?!?
basically i think about things like:

use mandelbox, mandelbulb, and another predefined formula, in a realtime rendering environment, either executable or fragmentarium, or something similar, amd do a camera flight through it ....

my problem would be, that basically it would be a normal demo, so what distinguishes a fractal compo from a normal scene compo !??!?!

ok, as a side note, it is going to be a review of the annual compo, similar to the chaosTV show i published recently, this means the 3 best entries in each section are going to be presented on the big screen, perhaps some of you may plan a visit to evoke party next year, especially if you are a winner ;)

This is soooo cooool! I guess if you did it a lot it get to be tedious, but it is still very impressive.