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          »CL9:»BIG:TP'00 Party Report
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»CL4:      by Corial/ex. Focus Design

»CL0:Welcome to my personal party-report
from the annual The Party. As an
opening statement please allow me to
mention a good initiative: For the
first time, the organizers had really
been outreaching in order to get the
scene peoples' opinions on what should
be done to ensure the sceners'
continuous support to The Party. I
found that initiative very good and I,
among others, supported them with
point of views and ideas. However, let
us return to this topic later on.

On December 27th, I, Corial,
Optima/Haujobb and one of his friends
set course toward Aars, this God
forsaken town in Northern Jutland in
Denmark. This year we chose to travel
by car in order to bring our PC's, not
too much space to spare but it was all
right. After about 5 hours of driving
we arrived at the party place, as
usual, Messecenter Aars. Even though
it was still quite early, we
encountered nothing but an impressive
array of cars, hardware, people,
snow(!), which all made us set our
hopes high. Finally, The Party would
be a scene party again, I thought.
Then the usual procedures followed:
Getting the stupid wristband attached
to your body, getting your hardware
in, finding your seats etc, etc.
»CL8:We had reserved seats in hall A. The
hall which the organizers had reserved
for sceners until a certain date,
after that date the gamers could
reserve seats in hall A as well.
However, not many sceners had arrived
at that particular time. I saw Chaos
and Kb/Smash though. Hours later I
realized that there were hardly any
sceners at The Party! Even though I
was seated one table from the big
screen, I found myself almost
surrounded by non-scenish people. What
a disappointment this was to me!! I
knew before The Party started that
some Danish sceners would boycot The
Party due to their own reasons, but
finding only Blueberry/Loonies and
Optima/Haujobb present from the Danish
Amiga scene was a huge surprise to me!
Actually, I found Blueberry to be the
only visible person in hall A with an
Amiga, respect :). I really did not
see any other Amigas or C64's there.
Either, I did not look closely enough
or else there were not any - I choose
to believe the latter! How on Earth
can people expect that The Party will
find its way back to become a
scene-party, when the sceners do not
even bother to show up? I have often
heard the argument that sceners would
not show up because The Party was bad
last year. Goodness Gracious, so if
you cannot have everything go exactly
the way you want, then you quit? True,
you have every right to. But then YOU
have absolutely no right whatsoever to
moan about that the scene is dying,
support the scene or shut up! I grant
every respect to the organizers for
trying to please the scene. To return
to my opening topic, the organizers
tried, they did not fail, the sceners
failed! I blame the absent sceners for
making The Party what is now is: "a
copyparty, not a sceneparty" to quote
my friend Optima/Haujobb.

»CL0:The party, lacking every touch of
"party atmosphere", continued without
the people who should have been
present (yes, I am still referring to
you absent sceners) and it was time
for the opening ceremony. Loud music,
fine visual entertainment, not bad at
all. They had included loads of
effects from stunning Aardbei (PC) and
it worked quite well! A few hours of
silence and then I took over! I hosted
a A500 Classic Demo Slide, worked
fine, and there I saw some people
actually showing some interest in the
great old A500 demos. I was not
allowed to play the music too loud,
unfortunately :(. Still it was a nice
experience for me, and I hope I
contributed to some nostalgic
conversations among the few who were
part of the A500 era.

Evening - time for the concert with
Das Saint. I was ready. I had bought
some cheap redwine in Aldi, and Optima
had brought some beer. The
soundpressure was quite overwhelming.
It left my jeans vibrating onto my
legs, what a laugh :). Furthermore, a
lot of cotton wool in my poor ears
made the evil tinnitus stay away (for
»CL0:now), and made the concert a good,
loud, but also very short experience.
Still, Das Saint & his dancing chicks
were worth the while.

»CL8:Ok, my memory after the concert is a
little »CL6:blurred» - time to leave the
chronological order I am afraid, I
suspect the redwine and beer had some
kind of effect on me :).

The competitions in general ran
without any big problems, and yet
there was a little power blackout
during the PC intro and somebody
forgot to type SETPATCH before showing
the Ephidrena demo. Yes, that
particular little word actually means
something :). Most competitions had a
serious lack of contributions,
especially on the Amiga and C64
platforms (absent people, I think of
you again), the Amiga intro
competition only had 6 contributions.
No doubt about the winning intro.
Nature made a well-working intro with
very good code and very good music
(compliments!), a worthy winner. The
Haujobb intro: Personally I do not
like it. 2 coloured (and a few times a
bit more coloured) effects, a bad
framerate in general and a lousy
module. I suspect this intro to be one
of those popular "out-of-time-we-use-
old-effects-and-a-newschool-design"
intros. The Mankind intro: really
great. Nice technical effects from
Krabob (and Tex?), presenting loads of
nice and technical difficult stuff,
how nice to see! I do not remember the
music, but this really should have
taken the second place, in my opinion.
This was also the only Amiga
production using PPC. But I guess you
all know this by now. The rest of the
intros are not worth mentioning.
 
»CL0:The Amiga democompetion: Only 5
contributions. Let us start from the
bottom: not worth mentioning, not
worth mentioning, an a500 4k from
Spaceballs "Noisejesus" subtitle
should have been: the hunt for
tinnitus. Too bad that a 4k takes a
prize in the democompetition, and too
bad that The Party cancelled the
original 4k competition. Newschool
effects in a copperchunk display (as
if you know what this means :( ), hmm,
why the hell not? Slummy should not be
blamed anything. The Ephidrena demo.
Well, I would have preferred to see
this demo on a 060 instead of a 030 on
the bigscreen. However, not judging
the speed, but the demo as a whole
this demo was really a disappointment
to me. Unfortunately, Loaderror once
again decides to recycle his effects
and release them in a new package. I
really, really feel sorry for you that
your work was not shown properly.
However, this demo is an example of a
production with 90% design and 10%
coding. The design IS nice, but the
code is lacking a lot. The musical
atmosphere was fine, though.
Megademo2000 / Haujobb. In my opinion
a worthy TP winner. This is a very
technical demo using many interesting
and different algorithms, showing what
»CL0:coding the Amiga is all about. One
third (more or less) of the effects is
reused and the rest is new code from
Optima. Due to lack of time, some old
musical scores from Marc were used,
fits the megademo-style all right. And
then the graphics: Extremely good
graphics from Peachy and JCS, I must
say. Converted from the PC, but still
fine quality. The demo as a whole has
only a little design, it is an old
fashioned megademo produced in the
spirit of Offa's and Azure's demo
styles. Many people will argue that
this sucks. Maybe it does nowadays.
But I for one, would rather have a
demo with a lot of cool code to win a
party than having a demo with only
design to win. That is a matter of
taste, of course, but no doubt about
that the right winners were found both
in the intro and in the demo
competition when you think it over.

»CL8:If you disagree, and think that
Ephidrena or another group should have
won the different competitions: A
piece of advice to you then: Show up
at The Party, then you actually have a
chance to make an impact on the final
result, not a revolutionary thought, I
know, but since you were not there...
You know the story already.

Let us continue to the PC platform.
The organizers had chosen not to
decrease the prizemoney on this
platform in question. That was
rewarded with a number of really fine
releases. The best production from The
Party00 was found in the PC intro
competition. "The product" from
Farbrausch, featuring magnificent
coding from Chaos, a stunning module
from Kb/Smash and an overall
impression which was extremely
stunning!! This really was a demo
covered in only 64k, the best 64k I
have ever seen. It totally breaks down
all known limits of intro-coding - it
left me breathless! Stash/TBL was nice
- The Product is nicer! The Danish
coder Macaw/Nonaliennature-5 (or
something) reached the second place
with a traditional openGL intro. A lot
of typical GL effects, a lot of
design, nice music. The third place
went to Fresnel2 / Kolor. A stunning
raytracing (among others) intro, which
made quite an impact on the big
screen. Actually, I thought this would
have taken the second place due to its
high quality coding and overall
impression, but it seems that hardcore
coding is not popular anymore.

The PC demo competition. Again, we
encountered very fine releases from
the PC sceners. 6 very good releases
from INF, hybrisNEMESIS, Damage,
Haujobb, Scoopex and Medievil. No
doubt about the winning demo on the PC
either. A very nice GL engine with
some surprises from the coder Kravitz.
Not a revolutionary demo, just plain
well-working. "LegoBasics" was the
name of the second prize winner,
presenting no less than realtime
psychics as first presented in the
game "Hitman". A very fine piece of
»CL8:programming. The demo was a bit short,
but it was really ok that it took a
prize. Third place to Finnish Damage.
Well, this is what I connect with a
typical GL demo. A mixture of
colourful, blurring effects which I
really cannot make head or tail of.
This is how many GL demos look like,
it looks all right but I do not think
it is a demo. In my opinion this is
more a music video, a nice one though.
The Haujobb demo was more Art - part
2. Absolutely nothing new, almost the
same colours, almost the same graphics
and textures. They really, really
lacked some new thinking, sadly.
Personally I liked the Scoopex demo
very much. It was the first PC demo
from Metal Designer, and I think he
did a very good job. Due to the fact
that Scoopex is quite inactive, I was
surprised to see this quite
well-worked through demo. A good
module from Virgill and nice graphics
and colours made this demo worth
seeing. Should have been placed better
than the Haujobb demo, in my opinion.
There were more releases, but watch
them yourselves if you want to know
more.

»CL0:That was all I had to say concerning
the competitions. The votingsystem
this year was way better than
L.I.N.K.E.R which The Party used last
year. However, a lot of people had
problems uploading but The Party
accepted to receive the productions on
CD's when the network was down. Good
service unlike last year! The Scoopex
demo was delivered on CD 3 minutes
before deadline. Metal Designer sent
the demo to Optima at the partyplace,
who then tested and delivered the demo
even though he had left Scoopex, a
nice gesture. It seems that nobody
encountered any votekey-cheating this
year. That could be due to the fact
that not a lot of Finns had showed up.
Remarkable at TP99 that there were so
many Finnish prize winners. The
votekey was on your wristband again
this year and that seemed to do the
job.

I have actually heard some funny
rumours concerning the Amiga demo
competition which I would like to
share with you: Some Hungarian Amiga
guy implied that it was Haujobb which
had sabotaged the Ephidrena demo,
persuading the organizers not to run
setpatch before showing 'J'. Yes,
Haujobb balloons and drunken German
lads dressed in white bathrobes are
known to be very good means if you
want to bribe people :). Other people
have also implied that Megademo2000
only got the number of votes it did,
because Haujobb had cheated with the
votes. Of course, you are right!

»CL1:1)» Naturally Haujobb would cheat with
   the votes, and only vote for their
   Amiga demo and not their other
   releases.

»CL1:2)» Furthermore, of course they would
   avoid voting for their own PC demo
   while they were cheating with the
»CL0:   votes for Megademo2000, just in
   order to make people believe that
   they did not cheat. They
   deliberately left their PC demo on
   a total of 154 votes on the 4th
   place, of course!

I really must admire your sense of
logical thinking, well done! To avoid
any misunderstandings I clearly must
state that it was written in an
ironical tone.

»CL8:Time for the closing words. Let me
start with questions to you, dear
reader: What makes a party a
scene-party? Is it the location, the
facilities? Does anybody find eg.
Fallingbostel more appealing than
Aars? Is a sweaty gym the answer to
sceners' dreams? No, of course not I
hear you say. Then, could it be: A
scene party is a party with sceners
present? Yes, of course it is, I hear
you say! That means that it all comes
down to who is present, and who is
not. Not exactly a revolutionary fact,
but it still amazes me that so many
people are unable to understand
something as simple as that! The Party
has lost its status as a scene event,
simply because nobody from the scene
bothers to show up. Everything was put
in our hands this time. The organizers
asked: "What do you want?" we have had
our chance now. Not everybody had
their own personal wishes fulfilled
when TP asked people, I know, but then
you should have tried harder! Why
should The Party have any special
interest in obliging the scene's
requests in the future, when hardly no
one supports their event? The Party 00
was like it has been since I first
visited The Party in 1993. A name and
a hall-complex for the visitors. The
special atmosphere from the beginning
was created by the sceners and how on
Earth can somebody expect a party
feeling when the people, who should
have been there, are absent? A motto
for the future could be: The Party
"Nothing new under the sun", because
there really is not and that counts
for Symposium/Mekka, Gathering,
Assembly, TRSAC and every other party
ever held. The scene people are
responsible for making a scene-event,
is that really so damn difficult to
understand? 

I hope I have stepped on somebody's
toes, because that means that you have
understood my point of views. I salute
the few who faithfully visited The
Party, and I hope that other people
will pull themselves together and
think, just a little bit that is all I
am asking for.
People who did not visit The Party due
to: Large travelling expenses,
sickness, exams, work, a normal life
etc. should not be included in "the
absent people" that space is reserved
for the hypocritical people who think
they are too good to make an effort to
make parties what they once were.

Comment on this all you like, I really
do not give a damn about it.