Michael Kargas Portfolio

Demoscene Productions

Quantum Retrofuture (PC OpenGL demo)

Quantum Retrofuture was released at the Breakpoint2009 demo competition. It's my first OpenGL demo that uses GLSL and features a lot of shader based effects like mandelbrot and juhlia fractals, box filter blur, radial blur and few other effects using the pixel shaders, and realtime generated landscape and torus using the vertex shaders.

Links: download, youtube

Close GL (PC OpenGL demo)

This was my first OpenGL demo, released at Pixelshow 2005 and got the 2nd place. It features 3d stars also with shapes generated with polar coordinates, geometry generated with spherical coordinates, effects running on a texture cube without the use of shaders, water effects on a heightmap, 3d heightmap plasma and more.

Links: download, youtube

Led Blur (Gamepark GP32 demo)

It was in 2004 that I've received a Gamepark GP32 from a friend from the demoscene as a present for developing demos and other stuff. I started writting a 3d rasterizer and various effects in my spare time till I decided to release a demo next year. This must be the first time I am writting code for a game handheld. The device has an ARM9 at 133Mhz and 8MB of Ram, no 3d hardware accelerator included. Thus, great effort was put into building a software 3d engine with at least the basic stuff, 3d transformations, vertex lighting, z-buffer and a rasterizer engine for wireframe, flat or gouraud shading and affine texture mapping and then optimized to use fixed point math and avoid division where possible. Effects on this demo range from oldschool stuff like plasma, rotozoomer, tunnel mapping, water effects and juhlia fractals to 3d stuff like vector balls (still retro :), flat/gouraud 3d or enviroment mapped objects. This demo was a great learning curve on how to optimize stuff for limited handheld platforms and how a simple 3d engine works in the core.

Links: download GP32 binary, download PC port, youtube

Creep Tea (Gamepark GP2X demo)

Not far enough from the time of release of my GP32 demo, I already started playing with the next console from Gamepark, the GP2X. After porting the Led Blur demo (and thus the software 3d engine) from the GP32 to the GP2X, I decided to build another demo for a GP2X demo internet competition that was taking place. Since GP2X was more powerful than it's preprocessor I ended showing more of what the engine can do. Landscape renderer with polygons, more complex objects, animated geometry, even a shiny logo of GP2X in realtime 3d. The only new 2d effect in this demo was a rather CPU intensive radial blur. I got the 1st place at the internet competition with this demo.

Links: download GP2X binary, download PC port, youtube

Re-Re-Recycle (Gamepark GP2X demo)

I did another GP2X demo a bit later in time before living the machine for higher ground. This time I have decided to utilize the second CPU of the device for playing OGG files (using a library created from another coder on the community) and the effects were also more CPU intensive. I wanted to introduce true bilinear filtering both in a rotozoomer and upon a textured 3d cube too because I was curious how they would perform. There is also heavy use of box blur filters and crossfading between two frames which in some parts is a bit too much for the device. And all the typical filler effects like plasma, blobs, etc.

Links: download GP2X binary, download PC port, youtube

Voxreen (PC 64k intro)

A week before a planned trip to Spain, I've decided to start writting a 64k intro competition at Euskal 2008 demoparty. I have been experimenting with voxel landscape rendering (classic heightmap rendering actually) not so long ago and so I was thinking whether this could be put to good use for a demo. The concept was that a particular view of the heightmap voxel renderer could be showed all the time but classic 2d effects could be rendererd on the heightmap on each part. So, it would be interesting to see how a scrolltext, a plasma effect, 2d metaballs, classic perlin style landscape or water effects would look like on the heightmap. A crossfade between each screen was done by both interpolating the heights between two screens and the color pallete used too and the result looks nifty. Finally, my intro got the 3rd place at the intro competition at Euskal.

Links: download, youtube

GTP (PC OpenGL 4k intro)

This was my very first try at coding something with the 4k size limitation on PC. At that time I was motivated to try after discovering iq's 4k intro demo systems. The intro features procedurally generated graphics of stars used as billboards for the rendering of several particles. It also uses frequency based image synthesis for some interesting animated texture patterns on some spherical surface and finally a depiction of the game of life with metaballs rendered in 3d on a flat surface.

Links: download, youtube

FTP (PC OpenGL 4k intro)

I had another go at 4k PC OpenGL coding, with a new intro that was literally coded at Breakpoint 2009 (the same party I released Quantum Retrofuture), this time with more exploding particles and a sea of cubes. With this intro I wanted to test myself whether I can create an intro from scratch in one night in a noisy environment as the Breakpoint demoparty, which is a sometimes common habit in the demoscene called partycoding :)

Links: download, youtube