I saw my first demo in 1993 or so. It was magical: I would run a program, and a display of shapes, effects, and music would appear on my computer, all rendered in real time. One day, after watching one of those demos, still humming its music, I started my editor to try and code a simple 3D cube, when my little brother said:
“Oh, so you think you’re going to be able to code that…”
He was 10 or 11 and probably just wanted me to get off the computer so he could play a game, but it hurt me a little at the time.
So, of course, nearly 30 years later I still remember it and I dedicate this project to that memory.
Last April I realized that, one year from now, it will be the 30th anniversary of Second Reality, and thought that:
So I started working on it.
Now, about a month later I realized that I had never written a demo before, it was taking me a long time to get something going, that I have little to no idea what the names of the different effects in the demo are, much less how to code them, and that I don’t have enough artistic ability to redo the drawings for a 1080p or 4k resolution world.
Therefore, I decided to complete the intro, put a ribbon on it, release it along with the source code, and see if anyone would like to build upon it.
You can exit the demo at any time pressing Enter or “Q”. It works at a 1080p resolution, fullscreen. It should work in a computer but also on a phone or tablet.
Many of the assets were reused or adapted from the original Second Reality demo, whose source code was published 10 year ago, for the 20th anniversary. I repainted the planet landscape so it doesn’t look all blocky and upscaled.
The music is played in real time from the original S3M, of course; I wrote the player myself, though it is pretty much an “only needs to be able to play one song” affair.
Let me know what you think!