Techno-utopian Edict

by jobe

Cart #techno_utopian_edict-1 | 2019-04-13 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA

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Demo for the demo competition at the Instanssi 2019 demoparty, held in Jyväskylä, Finland in march 2019. Won first place.

Again, it might run correctly in a browser but there might also be some sync issues (specifically in Chrome, in my experience). The cart runs just fine in PICO-8 itself, of course.

UPDATE: Now fixed for 0.1.12! Which means it won't run correctly in older versions anymore, since it depends on time() for sync.

:O

Holy cow this is good. I watched it 10 times and it got better every viewing.

Now I'm off to study those kicks and snares.

Not just sync issues, Pico-8 crashed with an Out of Memory error for me while running it in Chrome on Windows. But it's DOPE AS HELL.

EDIT: Happens consistently when the words "The Future Is" appear.

@zep Wow. Thank you so much :)

@WingedRobot Thanks for the feedback! I'm not actually surprised there are memory issues as well, the demo precalculates very near 2 megabytes of data in _init() so any effect running just a bit too long without old data having been purged would probably cause the demo to crash. I'll have to make a habit of clearing out arrays as soon as they're not used in future demos.

This is amazing! These top-tier demoscene demos always make me equal parts intimidated and inspired. As for browser issues, the cart works perfectly in Firefox for me. All the effects sync up perfectly and no crashes.

E L O N M U S K I S M Y F R I E N D

dag yo

whoa! this is insanely cool! it gave me some nick land's meltdown vibes.

This is amazing. What about turning it into a video and putting it on YouTube or something? Might expose more people to it

@Maximilio64 I already put all my demos on YouTube :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRthrQlSlL4

Trippy as all heck, in a good way. Also, how'd you get green instrument numbers, and what purpose to they serve?

@Trianull click the little circle next to the waveform selection icons in the SFX editor, and you'll notice that the waveform icons change into numbers. This way, you'll get to use sound effects 0-7 as instruments. Really handy for doing drums in particular :)

New to Pico-8 and yours was the second cart I pulled from the BBS – loved this! Had to run it a second time to see whether the sloganeering was procedural…😉

This message makes me sad and horrified. I will be disposed of callously, according to your edict.

@delphiusextempor I'm sorry if I made you feel distressed with my demo. If it helps, though, the message isn't really intended to be taken at face value.

I don't want to explain my demo too thoroughly, or get preachy here, but I find that technologically minded idealists don't always factor human beings into their idealism, and they sometimes fail to consider the far spreading social implications of their ideals. Also, those ideals sometimes walk hand in hand with blind libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism.

This is what I was hoping to satirize with my demo.

@jobe The word "satire" is encouraging! There's no need to apologize for your excellent work. I was being a flaky pink wafer of raw nerves at the time of my comment. I can definitely see this demo playing on a vid screen for some Brotherhood of Nod training facility. I immediately thought of Mr. Wordsworth in The Twilight Zone: "I am a human being!"

Ok so I got a new computer, but this was still a little slow in Pico-8 itself, but it runs fine on web???? Is there a way to get Pico-8 to stay at a consistent 60 fps I wonder...

I was expecting to see a subliminal message that said,

LICK THE FROG

Fortunately not. Every other message is in there though. :)

Nicely done ! Quite a presentation for the eyes and ears. Definitely gets my star.

@Trianull that's interesting, my experience with my own demos has been exactly opposite - ie. everything runs smoothly in the desktop software, but when I try to run them on a browser I get timing issues. Which browser are you using? I'd like to investigate if it runs my demos better than the others.

Overall, I'm using a lot of dirty tricks that abuse the stack, and unfortunately that seems to lead to performance issues on some platforms. I ran some of my earliest test effects on a PocketCHIP and some of them ran at a snail's pace. My guess is that the memory reading speed couldn't keep up, since I had problems with effects that used a lot of precalculated data in particular.

@jobe I'm using Google Chrome, I also have 8 gb of ram if it matters. I'm not sure if there's something in the config files I touched that slowed Pico-8 down by a bit or what exactly.

The elon musk part hasn't aged well, however this is a great piece of art

The libertarian messaging is so cringe lol your perfect society was 1920s America when corporations had no regulations and thus used child labor, the weekend didn't exist, and the stock market crashed causing the Great Depression. You still worship people like Elon Musk whose family owned a ruby mine and made their money off apartheid in South Africa. He bought the title of founder of Tesla and does publicity stunts like the vacuum trains just so (to put it lightly) gullible people like you will boost Tesla stock prices. Weird that a company that only survived by begging the US federal government for funding has become an icon for libertarians. You're all hypocrites and your whole political ideology is blatantly fraudulent lol

@qashto And if you'd scroll just a little bit up, you'd find that the reason that it's cringe is that it's supposed to be.

Honestly, I thought I wasn't even being subtle with this demo.

There are a lot of impressionable young people that use pico and where I'm from in the US a lot of people actually believe in libertarian Ayn Randian ideas. You should make it more obvious you're making a parody.

@jobe ohhhh wow this is sooooo cool, reminds me of the good old days when I used to use the AVS visualizers in Winamp, I love it! Great work!

@qashto

Get over yourself. It's a demo, an artistic expression. Even if jobe were being serious, it's none of your business to come in and say it shouldn't be done.

Stop acting like a fascist who has to disappear anything that disagrees with their worldview, even if it's in jest.