Tuesday 3 April 2018

When Silence Dims The Stars Above - or why TacO lacks updates from time to time

Hi!

This is an off-topic post for TacO, but I'm proud of the accomplishment and it also gives you guys some insight into why sometimes there's no update for TacO for a while.

Besides playing GW2 on and off and developing the overlay for fun, I have a big chunk of my free time allocated to a hobby known as the Demoscene. Every Easter there's a huge event taking place in Germany that me and my demogroup called Conspiracy do a lot to prepare for. We participate in a category named 64k intro, which means that we create audiovisual presentations that run in real-time from a single executable (no additional data or files allowed for anything) that can be no more than 65536 bytes large. This program, when run, generates music and visuals in real-time, just like a game engine does, the difference is, that here the displayed content is also completely procedural.

So. We went to Revision this past weekend, and are very proud to have not only won the 1st prize in the 64k intro competition, but we were also awarded the Crowd Favorite prize, which was selected from all the entries in all the competitions by the attendees.

So, without further ado, here's a video of our production. There's a link to the actual executable in the description, but at this point many antivirus programs will probably mark it as a false positive (just like it happens a lot with new TacO releases), so I don't blame you if you're a bit paranoid and stick with watching the video.