Oldschool demo effects with OpenGL
While I was looking through my archives, I stumbled upon this old piece of code I did back in 2004, when I was experimenting with openGL programming. It renders a few simple effects that have an oldschool-PC-demo feel, and it brought back fond memories so I figured I would archive it properly, and make a video capture of it before it was too late (i.e. SW environments tend to change a lot over the course of a decade, so I may not be able to execute this piece of code a few years from now…)
Overview
First up, a text scroller over raster lines and a starfield:
Then, more rasters and a sine scroller with typical chrome-like font:
3D tunnel (slightly modernized with 3D text scroller):
Variation around rasters gone wild and a 3D sine scroller:
Anyone remembers when vertical rasters were a wow effect ?
Twist scroller and sine deformation over a rotozoom:
And finally rising water with bubbles, as a (remote) tribute to the legendary fishtro!
Reviving the source code
The implementation is in C++, using OpenGL for graphical rendering, and the BASS library for playing a soundtrack.
The source code is very poorly written, it has all sorts of “wow, I would never do it this way nowadays” parts, but it did put a smile on my face after 12 years (nostalgia!), so it deserves to end up in my github repo if only for that reason.
The code was originally developed in 2004 with whatever version of Visual Studio I had at that time. To rebuild it, I downloaded the latest free version of Visual Studio, i.e. Visual Studio Community 2015, and was pleasantly surprised that the automatic project migration worked just fine !
Only two settings were modified to get the code to build & run:
- remove
glaux.libfrom the kiner dependencies (this library is obsolete and does not exist / is not necessary anymore) - disable the
SAFESEHoption (in Linker advanced options), since the old BASS.dll library I am using is not compatible with this option.
There is an additional compilation option issue while building in Debug mode, which I did not care investigating.
Video
The soundtrack is “Fellowship” from 1994 by Lizardking, possibly one of the greatest demo music composer of old days.