Glow's corner

Metaphorm

glow — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 22:34:09 +0000

Izard and I had big plans for releasing something great at the Revision 2012 demoparty. But as usual things didn’t go as expected. A few weeks before the party we decided to just make something quite simple, so that we could at least participate in the 64k competition. So we decided to make a fast-paced raymarching intro, consisting of some effects synced to a fast techno soundtrack.

The weeks before the party Izard managed to create a nice soundtrack and I implemented simple raymarching support into our demosystem. We used the first two days of the demoparty to implement all the effects and synchronize everything to our soundtrack.

We managed to deliver our entry on time for the 64k competition. But we ended up 9th (out of 9 entries…), mostly since there were a lot of good entries.

This is also the first time I experimented with raymarching distance functions and it felt really promising. We’re definitely going to do more with this in future releases.

Tech: C++, Direct3D, Pandora software synthesizer, Nerve demo system

Downloads: Metaphorm (at pouet.net)

Video:

About

glow — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:41:02 +0000

Hi, welcome to my online portfolio page. I’ll try to keep the reflection part as short as possible, so here are some facts about me:

name:
Thijs Kruithof, also known as Glow

age and gender:
male, 31 atm

country of origin:
The Netherlands

focused on:
coding (mostly computer graphics and audio synthesis) and a bit of graphic design and web design

other interests:
the demoscene (member of Inque)

current daytime occupation:
currently working at a game development company called Guerrilla Games as a game programmer.

previous occupations:
achieved my Master of Science degree in 2007 at the Technical University of Delft, where I graduated in Computer Science with a specialization in Computer Graphics.

and after that I have worked for three years at at a game company called Coded Illusions, followed by another 2 years at another game company called Playlogic Game Factory.

how to get in touch:
through my LinkedIn profile or you can just drop me a message at or just simply leave a message here on my site.

Nerve demosystem

glow — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:20:42 +0000

Nerve is a demo system with which you can easily create a cool 64k demo. It is a single plugin for Maya, which turns Maya into a full 64k demo creation tool. There are already some publicly available 64k demo creation tools around (to be precise: .werkkzeug and aDDict2), but these tools have everything integrated in them, all content creation is performed inside their own tools. My demo system uses Maya as a basis, since Maya has already proven itself as a great modelling and animation tool.

All of the 64k’s that I worked on have been built using Nerve. What started in 2006 as a simple “scene player” has evolved into a full blown demo engine; with a runtime component optimized for size and a designer plugin for Maya focused on usability and ease of development.

You can follow my development progress on my nerve demo system blog. You’ll find lots of info on the project there, together with screenshots and downloads.

Here’s a short video of Nerve, displaying some of its features:

Tech: C++, Direct3D, Maya SDK, XML

Note: No binaries are publicly released.

Link: http://nervedemosystem.blogspot.com (my development blog)

Obsoleet

glow — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:30:15 +0000

In the first week of June, 2006, I went to a demoparty called Outline 2006. Together with Izard I made a small 64k demo. Since I had as good as nothing prepared (I only had a barely working texture generator), I had to do all the coding at the partyplace. This 64k demo is the result of this one and a half day of nonstop coding. I’m not very proud of the result (it’s too short and too ugly ;)), but I am proud of the fact that we actually finished something at all The textures in the demo were generated with a very early version of my Gentex tool, all animations and modelling were done in Maya and exported using my own tiny Nerve demo system tools. This demo was kind of a testcase to see what my Nerve demosystem should be capable of. Ohw, and the soundtrack is handled by the v2 soundsystem, courtesy of Kb of Farbrausch.

Tech: C++, Direct3D, v2 softsynth

Download:

Obsoleet (final version) (at inque.org)
Obsoleet (party version) (at scene.org)

Screens:

Obsoleet, screenie 1

Obsoleet, screenie 2

Obsoleet, screenie 3

Video:

Gentex

glow — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:31:13 +0000

Gentex is a procedural texture generation engine. It’s main purpose is to generate good-looking textures to be used in 64k demos. Therefore the whole engine aims at having very small footprint (only a few kilobytes).

Since gentex is nothing more than a numbercruncher, there was a need for a good frontend to be able to design more complex textures than the usual sinepattern. The program which does the job is called Textureer. With Textureer you can create a procedural texture by literally wiring nodes, representing effects, together.

* Please note: this is an older project, since I already implemented a much improved texture generator for nerve demosystem. You can find more info and a demo video here.

Tech: C++, Assembly

Downloads:

Chaos

Gaar

Golvend

Groenig

Klieder

Inque

Rots

Steen

Swamp

Tex

Vreemd

Textureer in action

Kleurboel

glow — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:00:05 +0000

I’ve been playing the game Enemy Territory for more than two years, and one of the features of the game I’ve always liked is the usage of colored characters in your player’s name. Enemy Territory uses an improved version of Quake 3’s name coloring, in which you can set a color for the following characters using the special ^x syntax. For example ^1RED, will result in the word RED displayed in red. And the word ^1R^2E^3D will result in a red R, a green E and a yellow D. Almost all clans in ET use their own ‘format’ or ‘clantag’ style for all clan members. For the clan I was in, Holy, we also wanted to have some cool clantag. For that purpose I made this small program called Kleurboel, which you can use to design (or style) Enemy Territory player names

You can type in a word using the special ET color syntax, and directly see the resulting colored version of it. You can also save the resulting image to the clipboard or to an image file.

Tech: Delphi

Downloads: Kleurboel (448kb, v0.1)

Main interface of Kleurboel

Image generated by Kleurboel

Welcome

glow — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:47:23 +0000

Hi there, welcome to my personal portfolio website. On this website I present several projects I have been working on in my spare time. Feel free to look around, and in case of any questions you can leave a comment or contact me. You can find my contact info on the About page.

Exo

glow — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:40:33 +0000

Originally developed for Breakpoint 2010, Exo is a 64kb demo that we finally released at Outline 2010. Just as our entry for Breakpoint 2009, we didn’t manage to finish it on time, so we released it one month later at the Outline demo party.

It is the first demo that we made with a new version of nerve (with lots of cool new stuff in it; such as deferred shading, HDR, bloom, realtime integration with Maya, advanced beat-syncing support and particles). And once again we used pandora, our software synthesizer, to play the soundtrack. Although we upgraded it again. All direction, music and some of the graphics were done by Izard, and I did all coding and the rest of the graphics.

As usual we really needed a bit more time to add some more polish. So we’re not completely satisfied with the end result. But at least we managed to release something at all. And it actually ended up at the first place in the combined demo/intro competition. Which got us a free baseball cap and a can of fanta

Read more: here.

Tech: C++, Direct3D, Pandora software synthesizer, Nerve demo system

Downloads: Exo (at pouet.net)

Video:

Scatterpillar

glow — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:20:26 +0000

This is a 64k intro Izard and I made for Outline 2009. It’s probably the first 64k that we’re actually kind of proud of. It took us quite some effort to squeeze everything in 64kb. About 1 hour before the deadline we were still stuck at an (compressed) executable file size of 70kb. But with some last-minute hacking we managed to reduce it to 64kb.

Izard did the soundtrack (using our Pandora software synth), he also did all the modeling (using subdiv’ed low-polygon meshes) and all direction. I worked on the code, all the shaders and the overlays. It uses our nerve demosystem, which got some upgrades specifically for this demo. Such as support for bezier splines, and geometry instancing.

It ended at the first place of the combined demo/intro competition. You can read more here.

Tech: C++, Direct3D, Pandora software synthesizer, Nerve demo system

Downloads: Scatterpillar (at pouet.net)

Video:

Squander

glow — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:52:45 +0000

As often I had the urge to create some kind of game. This time I got inspired by a friend who is working on his own game which is powered by Unity. One of Unity’s nicest features is that it can run from your webbrowser; making it really easy to share your game with others.

So that got me excited for browser games, and it sounded like a good opportunity to learn Silverlight. I’d heared of Silverlight before, but never actually looked into it. Some called it a Flash killer, and since lots of people make games in Flash, why not make a game in Silverlight?

Squander is the result of this adventure. It’s not finished at all. It’s more or less just a very limited, playable tech demo.

I’ve spent several days and evenings working on the game, but after a while I got bored and just quit. But in the end developing with Silverlight was quite fun.

The game’s design is quite standard (”shoot and survive”); it features several types of enemies, which you must kill to score credits, which you can then use to upgrade your ship with some new weapons. Weapon upgrades can be bought through an ingame shop.

Also note that the game is not optimized at all, so expect some poor performance

Tech: Silverlight 3, C#
Tools: Visual Web Developer 2008, Expression Blend 3, Inkscape

Play Squander here

Here are some screenshots:

In-game action

Pause menu opened during some action

Shopping around