It’s again time for Evoke, and since Evoke features the best (read: most frequently working) Internet connection, I’m again able to write a live report. So, if you read these lines before Monday, August 13, 2007, watch out for updates :)

Friday

The last two years, the weather at Evoke was quite decent. Not so this time. During my three-hour journey from Hannover to Cologne (thanks to some traffic jams from Leverkusen on) I witnessed both sunny sky and cloudbursts. I arrived at about 16:00, and to my surprise, there were already some of our guys present, namely subc, ted, jk and (of course) the whole moodsplateu crew. They already reserved a whole table block (out of nine), but I bet this is not going to be sufficient. Also, I noticed that the hall was a lot emptier than last year at that time.

[19:15] Right now, we’re waiting for the guys and girls from Leipzig, who are some hours overdue already. subc is fighting fatigue, while ted tries to make his dead iBook working again. The usual waiting-for-the-party-to-begin stuff, you know :)

[20:30] Coming up now, after a significantly delayed opening ceremony: The Intel Demo Compo. I guess they’ll repeat the five entries on the bigscreen and afterwards announce the winner of the compo. While waiting, I fixed some details of the Linux version of our demo entry.

Saturday

I didn’t update this post for quite a while, sorry for that. The reason is simple: sleep and work :) Sleep because I grew tired yesterday quite early, and work because we were busy finishing our demo. However, here are my thoughts about the compos so far (except for the ANSI/ASCII compo, which I missed):

Tiny Music: There were two quite remarkable technical stunts in there. One entry managed to squeeze quite well-sounding guitar samples into a 22k (compressed) module file, another one was made up of four sawtooth samples only, but produced very professional sound out of it. Other than that, the quality and number of the entries are average.

Ogg Music: There was a great diversity of different styles in this compo. Crome submitted a Power Metal track again and he’s getting better each time. JCO’s Jakob Bienenhalm track was a little bit weak compared to what he entered the last years. The largest part of the entries was, of course, electronic music, mostly Drum’n’Bass. dq’s entry is facing some serious competition there.

Wild (Animation): Nothing remarkable to write home about.

PC 4k Intro: There were only four entries, none of which came close to the intros that were shown at Assembly the week before. Again, there was nothing really remarkable.

Pixel Graphics: The usual quality range, from quick mouse paintings to elaborate compositions. My favorites are the pictures from cp and Helge.

Raytraces Graphics: Again, there was a large range of quality, topped off by a incredibly detailed rendering of a valley with vegetation, wooden bridges and everything.

[21:20] Now we’re all waiting for the final three compos: PC 64k, Alternative Platforms, and of course PC Demo.

[0:15] The PC 64k intro compo was relatively poor, just like it was at Assembly. The quickly made (party-coded) intro by inque will most probably win.

The Wild (Alternative Platform) compo featured an interesting musical MIDI-controlled Pong game by JCO, a hardware project to build an alarm clock with SID sound, a rather bad Nintendo DS demo, a classical C64 megademo by Bauknecht and finally biff’s Windows CE / .net Compact Framework demo. I think’s it’s going to be a close call between Bauknecht and us.

[1:30] It’s over now – the compos are done, everyone sits down to vote or dances to the music of 303F, the live act currently playing.

The demo compo, by the way, was made up of roughly one third fun or obviously-crap entries (containing our demo as well as the notorious Rob is Jarig), another third half serious, well-made demos. Unlike at other parties, the entries seemed not to be sorted by quality; two of the clearly superior demos were shown before the fun stuff. The remaining demos were special in that they all were serious efforts with top-notch graphics, but they were based on a funny, rude or obscene theme. I really can’t predict the outcome of this compo, except that the first place will most probably go to Cocoon.

Sunday

[10:30] No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sleep any longer, and now it seems that I’m the first or second one of our group to be awake. Currently, I’m browsing pouet.net and filling my iPod with some new tracks from Evoke, if I can get hold at them.

[22:00] As it turned out, the others were not sleeping, but eating breakfast at McDonald’s, apperently. Afterwards, we all sat outside, out stuff already packed, waiting for the prizegiving ceremony to begin.

The ceremony itself was quite funny, which is largely due to netpoet’s lack of seriousness (about which I personally can’t complain :). He even … erm … convinced faline a.k.a. “Miss Arts” (because of her Kakiarts shirt) to moderate one of the compo categories :)

The results were somewhat strange in places. The winners of the streaming music (dq) and 64k intro compo (inque) were quite clear, but I didn’t expect Faith to win the animation compo. Also, I didn’t expect us not to get any prize in the alternative platform compo – biff, faline and dq only got the 4th place in that category. But on the other hand, we somehow managed to win the PC demo compo, which I still find hard to believe. I mean, c’mon … winning a compo with (let’s face it) mediocre crap one time is strange enough, but this happened to us two times in two years now: At Breakpoint ’06 with “Origami”, and now with “8-Bit Wonderland”. I’m not going to complain, though ;)

[22:45] Now I’m back home. Because there were no traffic jams whatsoever, the travel back home went as smoothly as one could imagine. We’re now checking out and discussing (via IRC) the aftermath of the party – exchanging photos, celebrating the first “thumb down” for the demo at pouet, stuff like this :)