\I[Tint - Backstage|By Frame, Equalizer and Offa|Section: Groups]

\F2\4\M"T I N T"
\MThe Backstage Moments
\F1\3

\C[ClipArts/pinnen.Chnk]
We sat down, made us comfortable, started to smell the aroma of our luxury ice-creams just bought at the cafeteria and smoothly began our conversation about TBL and their The Gathering-winning demo "Tint". As I had made a bet on their demo that it was going to win, I gladly received the big amount of 60 Swedish Kronors to spend on those wonderful creamy frozen ice-bits. In some strange way, Rubberduck, one of many masterly coders of The Black Lotus, felt happy anyway. However, to get to know more about their demo, I asked Equalizer and Offa, the main coders and designers behind the stunning production of theirs, to tell the story of the hole thing.
\2
The HAM8 chunky-to-planar converter was 100% finished to The Party V but since we didn't have more than a few routines ready for it, we waited to show it and tried NOT to reveal the secret... (The C2P theory is real simple...) All HAM8 routines are coded after newyear. We spent about two months with coding new routines, then about two months putting it all together, bugfixing, and drinking beer. When we mixed everything we ended up with TINT. Me (Equalizer) spent about six hours every day (I was unemployed since newyear), Offa and me had some very rough weekends with lots of coding (and beer) so it's a lot of work behind TINT... The first HAM8 routine was the voxelscape (in the beginning), and some other routines that wasn't put into Tint. The texture mapped phong routine was also one of the first that used HAM8. 

Here are some technical stuff:

The C2P routine was made in two versions, one blitter only (four frames) and one CPU only. Then the two was mixed together and now it selfadjusts (every frame) to the best result. On a 060 it uses almost CPU only but on A1200 (no fast memory) it uses almost blitter only. The HAM8 mode gives you a total of 262144 colours to use. 

The standard amount of colours for texture mapped phong are 256*64=16384. The texture is in 256 colours and the light uses 64 scales. The backgrounds use full truecolour and is done in truecolour programs like ImageFX. One problem was that we had to write our own IFF-to-chunky converter since none (known to us) could read truecolour images.   

Total size of the demo is about 5MB (crunched).

Sizes below are uncrunched size and VERY approximated:

\F3\MMusic                      1.1 MB
\MPictures                   1.5 MB
\MAnim Cars and Flowers      0.9 MB
\MTextures                   1.0 MB
\MBackgrounds                0.5 MB
\MDatafiles (objects etc.)   2.0 MB
\MTotal                      7.0 MB

\F1
\3...and Rubberduck went away to buy another ice-cream. This time a cheaper one!

\C[ClipArts/pinnen.Chnk]