qb64/programs/samples/pete/tor

QBDEMO (C) 2002 Tor Myklebust

The fractal zoomer should run at 60FPS on a 500MHz machine.  I disabled
vsync because it runs like shit on this 300MHz machine on the higher zoom
levels (inconsistent 20-30 fps).  I basically just packed the rest of the
demo with really shitty effects.  There is no music because I don't know
a damn thing about sound coding (aside from the fact that you use Fourier
transforms a hell of a lot), and I also don't know the first thing about
art/music.

The fractal zoomer uses a number of cheap hacks.  First, I only render
the fractal image once per 50 frames.  It zooms in by a factor of two
each time.  It is rendered at a resolution of 320*200, because we don't
want blockies to show up on our 160*100 rendered image.  I've tried
doing the "maximal" 224*141 (or thereabouts) image and it looked bad.
We render four scanlines per frame, drawing as few pixels as possible.
We zoom the 160*100 in the middle of the previous frame's 320*200 to take
up every fourth pixel in the new frame, then (ab)using the intermediate
value theorem for the pixels in between if the neighbour pixels are the
same colour.  This causes some minor visual artefacts which you shouldn't
be able to see (except the one white line where the yellow is disappearing)

This code is VERY LOOSELY based on Alex Champandard's code in his "The Art
of Demomaking" series.  I made up the zoom hack and the IVT hack because
QB is more than twice as slow as DJGPP.  I thought his palette-cycling
looked really stupid, so I omitted that.

I shouldn't need to explain the shadebob effect.  Everyone knows how to do
shadebobs, or can at least figure it out in two or three minutes.  No
hacking was necessary here, as the effect is trivial to begin with.

I also shouldn't need to explain plasma.  No hacking was involved here,
either.

I did the flag thing because I saw an american flag flying in some past demo
which i just looked at (15 minutes before the deadline).  I didn't have time
to code an american flag burning (I've done this in C by just rendering less
and less of the flag (having the fire "crawl across" the flag) each frame,
and using the "burning" areas to seed a fire.  Besides, burning is supposed
to be a proper way to retire a flag, and we can't have that.

I wanted to add a (phongshaded, swept) scrolltext, but time did not permit
it.  You can see something like this in mesha or lbd or something (however,
because QB is QB, it probably wouldn't be half the quality).

I started this 27 hours before the deadline, and finished it _on_ the
deadline.  Yay for me.