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| Squish is a great demo in 64 kilobytes. AND says that filesize is important for both, the demoscene and game-making! |
4Sceners: Demos are often optimized in their size, files are often heavily crunched together. You often showed what's possible. Do you use your scene experience for your game development work or is such kind of technology not needed in todays games? Modern games are always getting larger and it seems nobody cares about data size optimization.
AND: Unfortunately it's not that useful as it could be. When we are working for next-gen games it's YES and NO at the same time. Yes, when you are working on games you don't think about fitting it to 64k. But all the time there are problems like: How to fit our game to one CD, or 2CD, or one DVD. It looks like people don't care about filesize but that's not true. They do care about it. The only difference is the filesize scale. PC games should be scalable and all the time you have to think about loading speed, memory usage and so on. On consoles it's even worser. Different configurations and not enough resources. It is just a different level of optimizaton. They DO CARE. They DO. And finally that 64k experience getting useful again but on a different scale :)
4Sceners: What do you enjoy more? Demo or game making?
AND: I enjoy both but in a different way. Demoscene is more a hobby. You do it without any deadlines (normally), you do it for yourself, for your pleasure in your free time. You fell free to experiment and you are not dependent on someone else who will tell you what to do to sell it better. It is free. Game making is more specific. First of all, it is commercial stuff. There are a lot of people who take care about money and many other things. In some ways you are more limited. But in another - you are not. For example, if I am doing some special effect in a demo, it's predefined. It is the same everytime you run it, you don't have any camera control, etc... Games are interactive. Like, when you create some effect and it's cool, you can see it in many places, in many different conditions.
4Sceners: We haven't seen any new scene production from you since Assembly 2003. Do you have any plans to release a new demo or intro soon? The crowd is hungry and it would be great if you could give them some food ;-)
AND: I don't like to talk about plans. All I can say is that I am working for a long time on a new intro technology since I've |
| Kreed, the first FPS on which AND has worked, was released in Germany more than one year after its original release in Russia. Maybe this was the reason why it couldn't convince German gamers. |
released the Zoom3 intro. I don't want to release just something based on the same technology because anyway it will look the same. But working on something new takes a lot of time. When I say a lot, it means a lot. And sometimes situation is like: all or nothing. You work on something but only later on you will see how it works and if it doesn't work then it doesn't work. In my previus intros I was concentrated on separated tasks and was using external stuff as much as possible. Now I am trying to do the same but I can't do something using external stuff and so I am starting to do my own. And again, you are not sure about result. So.... We will see.
4Sceners: The demoscene is a perfect example for creativity without any limitations. What do you think is necessary to bring the demoscene a bit more into the public?
AND: Well. I think there are several kind of things to do. Sometimes people are making demos for "themselves". I mean, only demosceners can understand it. It should be more "POP" style in its good meaning. If people that are far away from the demoscene will like it than it will be better in my opinion. And also creating new kind of compos. For example, WEB based: like Java/Flash/etc demos, Mobile demos and so on. We have it of course and I think this is the right direction. Somtimes I don't like it. But I see what happens now. When most of the young people are interested by internet and internet technologies and a lot of that people even don't know anything about demoscene but they are very talented.
4Sceners: What things do you like besides computer work?
AND: I like to play piano. Just to play something what I feel. Unfortunately, I don't have real pino but synthesizer sounds a bit crappy. But anyway I like it. What else... I like to go to gym and to work on myself. Especially, when you spend a lot of time in front of PCs.
4Sceners: What plans do you have for the future? In terms of the demoscene as well as the gaming side.
AND: I have a lot of plans but it's better to keep them in mind, you know. So, let them be my little secret :)
