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.


13 comments:

  1. I know demoscene and it's just magical what you do, it's almost witchcraft to be able to do so beautiful and well with so little.
    You're code gods to me.

    For TacO, personally, I'm not in a hurry for updates, as long as it works and there's no gender issues with the API. In short, as long as we can exploit it, make markers, wait a little is not a big deal.

    The important thing is that more and more people are interested and the different types of packs that are provided are diversified enough to please the greatest number.

    Many tell me that they couldn't play without so much help for various things.

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  2. BoyC -- wow. I had no idea there was still a demoscene. I kinda knew about it back when things were happening with the Amiga (yah, old guy), but had no idea things were still going on. Super cool.

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    1. You should look into attending a party, this weekend we had legends like the founder of Censor Design pop up out of nothing and he's into his fifties too :)

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    2. Pretty epix to see tha you're a member of Conspiracy. I'm german and the demoscene has always been pretty strong over here. I probably watched my first demo 30+ years ago (yeah, i'm frikkin' old). Thinking of it - the oldest demo i can remember is DOC's Demon Demo (Demons Are Forever) on the AMIGA.

      And I remember a lot of other stuff like ODYSSEY by Alcatraz, Hardwired by Silents/Crionics, Human Target by Melon Dezign, TRSI Megademo, His Master's Noise by Kaktus & Mahoney (I still listen to some of the tracks from time to time), a lot of the stuff from Sanity, etc.

      And I love a lot of the PC-stuff. farbrausch did a lot of crazy stuff, ASD, Fairlight, CNCD, etc.

      And of course stuff like Universal Sequence, Chaos Theory, etc ;-)

      Keep up the great work!

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  3. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea there was a demoscene. Cool tool to -)

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  4. omg that is fantastic video , i can see why you won 1st place and crowds favorite. keep up all the good work

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  5. Well first of all congratz on the 1st place! :D WOOP WOOP :D
    and as ive said that i have to ask as im not been deep diving into the subject, how do you mean with all just running with an executable? i mean it has to get the videos and stuff from somewhere right? (noob questions but well im a noob soo xD)

    And as it comes to Taco, Hey no worries mate! no stress and thanks for the amazing works as it helps me with not having to tab out for every single thing like world boss timer and so on :)
    only running one screen so tabbing out for just about any information becomes such a hassle after a while and in current state i dont really have the economy to actually buy a second screen so hell if updates are slow isnt a problem as it helps me alot as it is already :)

    good work and keep up the awesome work you do :) You are amazing!

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  6. Dear admin, thank you for this awesome tool!

    For anyone who has the 'blackscreen' problem after executing GW2TacO.exe or getting a 'traillogger.cpp' crash error, and if your gfx card is nvidia, one of the solution is to set the GW2TacO.exe to use the integrated card of your laptop. This can be changed on your nvidia control panel.

    If you can see the marks/icon on the screen but without the yellow trail, it could be that microsoft .net framework hasn't been installed in your pc/laptop (could happen if you forgot to install it right after you reformat your pc/laptop)

    Keep up the good work admin and thank you for this wonderful tool!

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  7. Pretty good post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your blog posts. Any way I'll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon. Big thanks for the useful info. Body Kit

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  8. I you are still care: I noticed that after 2019 SAB patch, TaCO interferes with left-clicking some buttons such as "use", "accept"ing wiggly chest rewards and etc.

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  9. Oh, wow. Now that's something. I had not pieced together that you guys were also behind Conspiracy — I remember being obsessed with "Chaos Theory" way back when. Belated Congratulations on achieving 1st place last year!

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  10. I just started playing WvW again and I love using TacO for it. However, I noticed that the newer versions do not have the option for colored wvw markers that my old versions do. Am I missing a setting? Or was this a specific change? I narrowed down the issue to the config file. But since I'm not well versed in the coding of TacO, I'm not sure what difference each config makes in order to activate the colored wvw map markers.

    Any info on this would be appreciated!

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    1. I think I figured it out. You need to re-input your API key and then the icons will be colored. I hope this information helps anyone else.

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