Can You Say Dezign? By LaesQ / Raww Arse How many times have you been sat infront of your Speccy watching the latest demo release (most likely Russian) and thought 'seen it before', or 'CHANGE THE EFFECT!!!!!'. For myself and a few others whom I have raised this topic with agree with me - demos nowadays have no real dezign element. It seems that the Russian sector of the scene have adopted the Amiga/PC style of demo. You know the usual full screen effect followed by another full screen effect followed by... You get the picture. But with this they seem to have left out the dezign element. So what is this dezign element? If you're making a trackmo (something which can't really exist on Speccy with it's many different flavours of disk systems - See below for a brief description), everything (and I mean just about everything!) should flow easily and seamlessly. And to add to the overall effect, it should be timed to the music. I have seen brave attempts to do this in a few Speccy demos of recent times. But they only seem to be able to lead from one effect into another and then that's it, back to the usual show effect - blank - show effect - blank - sequence. I think the lowest form of effect transforming must be the common fade in/out. Even that isn't seen in alot of demos of today. And what happened to all those fancy clears, etc. All it takes is a simple AND/OR rountine! CLS just doesn't cut it nowadays! USE YOUR IMAGINATION! Morphing is another good form of effect transforming. I've seen morphing of basic shapes (vector style) and even a dancing person. But no one seems to have seen the real potential behind morphing, well, not on Speccy at least. Another thing is the 'When is this effect gonna end?' scenario. You know what I mean, you're watching a demo and up come some swirling dots. They swirl and they swirl and they swirl and you go and make yourself a drink and they're STILL swirling when you come back! Ok, so you may have spent five years coding those damn dots, but making someone watch them for five years just isn't fun! Don't you coders speak with other members of your group? I'm sure they'll tell you when an effect has been displayed for long enough. And stop coping other peoples effects EXACTLY!! Ok, so you found a new and great way to do it that takes 5 tacts less than the original one, but it looks EXACTLY the same! Also the average demo watcher couldn't care less if your effect takes up 70,000 tacts or 70 tacts! It's what it looks like that matters. Don't think that 'demo' means endless effects either. Take a leaf out of Agent-X's book and look at Hypersonic II. That started with a small (funny) story. This seems to be one of very few that I've seen so far that has a story in it. Some may say that 'Condomed' had a story to it. Ok, yes it had a story to it. But the action was still and boring. But it was a foot in the right direction. And what about the all time classic 'Beruska'? I still have yet to see another demo of this variety and class. Have a sense of humour! So many demos nowadays are soooo serious! I'm surprised half of the Speccy scene hasn't committed suicide in the past year or two. Anyway, I hope I've made myself clear and that some other Speccy groups will read this and learn. LaesQ / Raww Arse. Trackmo - Derived from the two words 'track' and 'demo' - meaning to show a demo by loading tracks of data from a disk.