Chris Holland reviews a new cutesy French demo ... The Gloop Demo by Misfits This one had its first public appearance at the Birmingham Atari Show when Leon popped it unexpectedly onto my hard drive.. Even then, it was quite a nice little demo, although we only seemed to get half soundtrack due to a faulty connecting lead to the speakers.. Not unnaturally, it gets its turn for review in an issue largely dominated by French productions.. Gloop is another recent demo that falls firmly into the 'design' school as made famous by a thousand French coders before them.. This is definitely a 'good looks first, whizz coding second' production, although what they do with the Falcon from a metal bashing point of view is not too bad either.. The demo starts up with a jolly, jaunty, boppy sort of soundtrack that you will either love to bits, or burn the composer in hell for, fades in to a swirling lively 3-D starfield.. Whatever the musical merits, or not, of the audio, it certainly fits the intended mood of the demo perfectly.. Anyway, back to the starfield, and it certainly is spinning around all over the place and keen to let the next effect get on, which is a circles spinning in a lightsourced fashion in a manner seen in a DNT demo reviewed about a couple of years ago.. "Too slow, but nice looking" as Arto might have once said!! Some squiggly ST-inspired spirograph patterns are next, as these bounce up and down.. A little turtle then appears, and grows to fill the whole screen, and what has happened is that a fancy new way of screen clearing has been devised as the texture left by the 'turtle' now fills up the whole screen as a handy background, and some dot-spline globular objects wriggle onto the screen.. A window does a nice fancy fade in to the left hand side, and the first serious effect of the day comes into play.. This is a bijou (this one word of the month!) version of ye olde zoom and rotate, but it is with us for a brief moment only before Misfits decide to take things on a bit further.. They do a take-off of Exa, particularly a teddy bear related drawing by Flan, which is *not* called Ripley! This sits on the left hand side, and acts as the 'design' element of the forthcoming bits of the demo.. Another window pops in on the right, and this is where the remaining effects take place.. A rather nice polygon with multiple spinning textures mapped onto each face of the object is there for a little while.. The inevitable doughnut is in there next, as it is subjected to a ferocious asssault by a variety of effects and textures.. Initially we get a pineapple slice efect with some gold/yellow shading effects.. Then, it slows to a crawl to take on some kind of environment mapping that makes it look a bit more like bananas were involved in surface texturing the object.. Some colourshock type shading follows on from that, with the Falcon racking its silicon brains for some of the lesser known deeper shades of purply-blue.. A change in mood with a fiery vector cube spinning over a lake of fire, or something.. Another old effect, but again, works very slickly within the confines of its onscreen prison as the cube zooms right into the screen, and out again.. Finally, out of this series of effects, a double helix type 3-D dot spline object spins around on screen.. Quite a nice multicoloured effect too.. The screen fades, not a normal fade, but a 'spotlight' effect as the displayed area grows smaller and smaller, then it is gone altogether.. A change of music to a similar jaunty happy boppy tune later, and we are onto the end credits, which include a little effect in with the functional upward scrolling text.. This is a constantly mutating 3D bob shiny plastic look 'molecule' which floats around the screen as the text does its thing.. TECH VIEW: A very neat demo this, with a good deal going on beneath the surface than the (very clean) design suggests. The DSP is used only for the music, so the 3D is not cutting edge, but the ideas are new: using the phong shading technique twice, but altering the texture used in the r/g/b split section for a neat twist. It's just a shame the objects aren't a bit bigger, faster or more original. Most of the other effects are copies of other older demos, but it's all well coded. A decent Amiga style demo - something the Falcon really isn't suited to. [tat] Ratings.. Graphix:- 85% - Very good on presentation, a little bit of original hand-drawn material as well.. Sonix:- 78% or 8% - Depending on your point of view.. Do not judge the music until you've heard it though.. Gee-Whiz:- 70% - Not a lot new doing here.. Back to the presentation skills being the soul and essence of the demo I guess.. Overall:- 81% - Almost a classic cliche 'design' school demo.. (C) CiH, Dec '96