Action Point 2012: Abort Retry Fail

snapman's picture
Sat, Aug 11 2012 04:00 PM
08/11/2012 - 16:00
08/11/2012 - 18:00
Etc/GMT-7

YOU HAVE TWO MORE WEEKS!

Almost nobody got anything done in time for this event, so I've moved the deadline up another two weeks. August 11th is the new deadline. Come on, I know you can do it! We are also looking to gauge interest in a "Warioware DIY" category.

Welcome to Action Point 2012! Action Point is the world's leading Klik & Play Online Demoscene Party.

[ Download the Invitation Demo! ]

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, Action Point is a (semi-)yearly online demoparty in which we make Demos and Intros and Cracktros and anything else that involves pretty effects and ridiculous non-interactive visual absurdity in the medium of Klik & Play.

While the Demoscene's primary interest is technical ability with a high-gloss sheen of visual design and musical talent, take note that this is still Glorious Trainwrecks. Action Point is more than simply a celebration of elaborate event writing. It is also about creating unusual and unique visual/auditory art as well. What I'm trying to say is that while simulated 3D lighting effects in KnP are expected, waves of wiggling wizard clipart is also a desirable outcome.

OFFICIAL DEADLINES AND SUCH
This is an APPROXIMATELY-TWO-WEEK EVENT. That means you should start making a demo TODAY, and be here on SATURDAY JULY 28th, exactly one week to-the-second after this month's KOTM. Submit your demo(s) to this page at that time (or earlier if you can't make it). Also let's meet up on IRC and the MUMBLE SERVER because this is the release party. (Does anybody want to livestream the demos as they are posted? That would be pretty cool.)

One week later, at the same time of day, will be the AWARDS CEREMONY. Awards in a .gif format will (probably) be given to winners in a variety of mostly made-up categories. It's a silly tradition!

If you're looking for inspiration, take a look on Youtube for Atari ST, MSX, Amiga, and C64 demos, or check out the demos from previous years. And here's a demo made in PowerPoint! Yes, it was actually released at BreakPoint 2010. For real. And the prevalence of 64-bit Windows has officially made running Klik & Play demos just as difficult as running C64 demos. Yeah, just think about that for a while...

Good luck and make something crazy!

AttachmentSize
ActionPoint2012Intro.zip669.43 KB

Games made for Action Point 2012: Abort Retry Fail

NameCreatedsort iconByScreenshotComments
Pile HeaD Dem0 Xtreem08/28/2012 - 00:19xpilehead.png1
Fred the killer unicorn08/15/2012 - 20:50laffertyr0
Fred the killer unicorn08/15/2012 - 20:49laffertyrBoss3.jpg3
KaoS08/06/2012 - 18:16SpindleyQkaos-partial.png10
Commodore 64 Christmas Demo ZZT08/04/2012 - 03:02xc64ss.gif3

Comments

FlaviusMaximus's picture

This demo invitation is the

This demo invitation is the most wonderful KNP art i've ever seen in my entire life.

SpindleyQ's picture

The invitations for the

The invitations for the previous years are also quite special, if you haven't seen them!

sergiocornaga's picture

Seconding amazement at the

Seconding amazement at the invitation demo! IT'S SO GOOD.

SpindleyQ's picture

AW YEAH once again I have no

AW YEAH once again I have no idea what I'm going to do BUT IT'S GOING TO BE GREEAAAATTT

Smedis2's picture

OH MAN ACTION POINT

OH MAN ACTION POINT 2012

-----------------------------
THAT HURT, THAT REALLY HURT!

Zecks's picture

god dammit

So much incentives to get my creative shits together.

So little will. :(

FlaviusMaximus's picture

Man, playing those entries

Man, playing those entries for the previous years and demos, they're so amazing i can't stand a chance this year. all entries have codes and cryptical shit in the Event Editor that i can't understand. i feel so dumb now

SpindleyQ's picture

It's okay dude, we give out

It's okay dude, we give out prizes for "most wizards" and "largest filesize". As KOTM teaches, it doesn't have to be a crazy technical achievement to be interesting or inspiring.

Danni's picture

Blah blah don't use Klik &

Blah blah don't use Klik & Play anymore blah blah not sure if I will participate.

Smedis2's picture

I

I TRIED

http://www.2shared.com/file/u5enQZt6/I_Tried.html
-----------------------------
THAT HURT, THAT REALLY HURT!

FlaviusMaximus's picture

+1 for using 3D windows

+1 for using 3D windows Pinball MIDI

Danni's picture

You mean Maxis Full Tilt!

You mean Maxis Full Tilt! Pinball

Windows 3D Pinball is just Full Tilt! Shareware with the banner artwork changed, one of the MIDIs removed (there's a MIDI that plays when you accept a mission that's missing in 3D Pinball), and a few fixes for some Windows XP incompatibilities.

Smedis2's picture

So Microsoft just took the

So Microsoft just took the shareware of that game and slapped that banner with that goofy looking guy on it?

-----------------------------
THAT HURT, THAT REALLY HURT!

leilei's picture

it's actually an earlier

it's actually an earlier build Microsoft licensed.

There's a few-months-later (Nov 95) of the Full Tilt! pinball demo with Space Cadet.

avery's picture

ye

explain to me how the hell you did that in klik and play and maybe ill make something

leilei's picture

Alterable values and set

Alterable values and set positions

Danni's picture

Pretty much.

Pretty much.

SpindleyQ's picture

oh god only four days

oh god only four days left

if I can't make Klik & Play's horribly broken math play nice in four days I've got NOTHING OH GOD

SpindleyQ's picture

OH MAN now is the worst

OH MAN now is the worst possible time for my laptop to be flaking out on me :( :( :(

SpindleyQ's picture

If I manage to finish this

If I manage to finish this thing, it will be because I do not make a single mistake from now until the deadline.

It will also probably take like an hour to work its magic once run, since I need to do horrible things like implement my own multiplication. Gunning for "Least optimized" this year!

SpindleyQ's picture

Don't think I'm going to be

Don't think I'm going to be able to submit on time :(

My custom fixed-point multiplication routine is busted, and it's going to take some time to rework. Time which I don't really have today!

Smedis2's picture

TO THE REPAIR SHOP

TO THE REPAIR SHOP AWAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

-----------------------------
An Excellent Comment/Thread/Post

OMG

I have to work, so I can't be around while you guys are doing this.

I didn't really make a demo entry... instead I made a quick game. It's yet another clone, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out how to play. It likely will be (more?) buggy if the .gam is run from anything other than knp.

flash version: http://games4noah.sitesled.com/flash/omg.html

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omg.zip231.63 KB

9 Doors

I started working on another (kitchen sink of an engine) game for Action Point 2012. Maybe some tricks will be nifty enough to be considered demo-able. At the moment, I'm trying to implement an in-game map of sorts where the player can pass from frame to frame and have information about that frame saved (items collected, doors opened, etc). Does anyone have a good/easy/efficient way to do this?

I'm uploading a small example of what I'm trying to achieve. Unfortunately, this only allows for 9 flags to be stored per global value:
(This won't necessarily be a problem with 4 players' worth of global values, but I'd rather keep my events down if possible.)

AttachmentSize
9doors.zip28.44 KB

BOK

BOK

AttachmentSize
BOK.zip69.73 KB
Noyb's picture

Whoa, Conway in KNP. Nicely

Whoa, Conway in KNP. Nicely done!

Thanks

Thanks! I think I could make it run a lot faster if I gave it a little more time. Maybe one day I'll play with it again.

BOK v2 w/ music... and a couple of extra events to enable the candle effect in the dungeon game.

AttachmentSize
BOK2.zip136.49 KB

¡Andale Paco, Your Popsicle's Melting!

I became distracted and never returned to the dungeon game...

Here is an engine I threw together yesterday. There are three not-so-challenging stages.

/edit/
- tweaked some things and added a couple of stages

/edit 2/
- some new graphics
- title screen

/edit 3/
- flash link

¡Andale Paco, Your Popsicle's Melting! (flash)

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paco.zip140.35 KB

Noname

Noname

AttachmentSize
noname.zip362.02 KB
Zecks's picture

argh, this came so soon! i

argh, this came so soon! i kinda want to revive my first concept from 2010 but i only just got the idea and it'd take a while. might do it some time, though. (i'm really slipping with this stuff nowadays, aren't i)

sergiocornaga's picture

A WarioWare DIY category is

A WarioWare DIY category is a nice idea, but since the sharing functionality of that game seems to have imploded, I'm not sure how it would work. :(

Danni's picture

Okay, I now have Klik & Play

Okay, I now have Klik & Play set up on my laptop's Windows partition. If I am able to pull off this idea of mine, I swear it'll be like nothing you've ever seen in Klik & Play before.

Danni's picture

I am running the numbers to

I am running the numbers to make sure everything fits within Klik & Play's limitations, and... so far this actually looks quite doable! Assuming Klik & Play's object associativity rules play nice and I don't run into issues with too many events (I hope), the bulk of it just seems to be grunt work (and there's macro tools for that). All in all I'm kinda psyched for this.

I would like to ask though... what IS the event limit in Klik & Play? I know mojofltr ran into it once. Or is it determined by the density of your actions in the Event Editor?

snapman's picture

Curious

You've got me curious as to what would need that many events. Are you setting up some pre-calculated math tables? Unrolled loops? Man, just the idea of having to write a KnP speedcode event writer both excites me and freaks me out.

Danni's picture

Yeah, unrolled loops,

Yeah, unrolled loops, because I need to iterate and I _have_ to have everything instantaneous (since KnP doesn't support the so-called "fast loops" which are available in later programs). I have some ideas on how to reduce complexity though which should hopefully prevent my program from crashing KnP.

By the way, the macro tools won't be for the events, they'll be for the image import (upwards of 10,000 images! Yes KnP can handle this many images in a frame - I checked).

snapman's picture

Video?

If you're importing ten thousand images, you might as well be using a FLI animation. Or are you going to be displaying them in different orders, sliding them around, overlapping them for various effects? Either way, it sounds like something that isn't going to run on my dedicated KnP machine, hahaha. As a personal challenge, I always try to stick to practices that would run at acceptable speeds on hardware from the era (hence my reliance on exploiting bar counters as though I were doing copper tricks on an Amiga), but targeting modern CPU speeds does open some interesting doors. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Danni's picture

Nope, not video! And the

Nope, not video! And the images are actually fairly small.

I don't think slowdown will be a huge issue. What sort of processor are we talking about here? I can set my laptop to run at just 800mhz to try and simulate what it'd be like on an older system.

SpindleyQ's picture

I'm suddenly filled with a

I'm suddenly filled with a strong desire to reverse-engineer the event sheet file format so that I could perform import/export of events to textfiles.

Danni's picture

Whoa, if you could get both

Whoa, if you could get both import and export of events working, it might solve the "lack of copy + paste" problem!

Watch out though, as I think the structural integrity of event data kinda depends on the corresponding objects actually being in the frame.

Danni's picture

Roll Call

So Smedis made a demo, mojofltr made a game and is in the process of making another one, using a complex KnP engine (as am I). SpindleyQ is making a demo too...

Anyone else planning on making demos? There's still time and it'd be kind of a shame if it were just the four of us.

Zecks's picture

i want to but i want to do

i want to but i want to do other things as well. i'd need to come up with something to replace most of the old shit in this demo first.

tbh most of the non-kotm activity has been dying slowly, and as much as i'd like to help it i can't focus on it as much anymore.

regardless of this i have some visually (and technically?) impressive non-demo poop in mind, but we'll see does anything come out of that.

Zecks's picture

and apparently my other idea

and apparently my other idea doesn't work. drat.

im sure i could build something around a trick i've used somewhere if i wanted, but other than that i can't come up with anything new and exciting

Danni's picture

Going on vacation

Going on vacation tomorrow. I've already done all my planning work - I hope to get this whole thing done and implemented by Saturday but no promises!

pensive-mosquitoes