** Maggie / Gloop demo / 755 words **

The Gloop Demo by Misfits

Chris Holland reviews a cute new French demo ...

This one made its debut appearance at the Birmingham Atari Show last summer when Leon unexpectedly popped it onto my hard drive. Even back then it was a nice little demo, although we only seemed to get half the soundtrack due to a faulty connecting lead to the speakers...
Gloop falls firmly into the 'design' school made famous by a thousand French coders before them. Definitely a 'good looks first, whizz coding second' production, although what they do with the Falcon from a metal bashing point of view isn't bad either. The demo starts up with a jolly, jaunty, boppy sort of soundtrack which you'll either love or hate fading to a lively swirling 3D starfield. Whatever the musical merits - or not - of the audio, it certainly fits the intended mood. Anyway, back to the starfield, it certainly spins around all over the place - obviously keen to let the next effect on. Enter circles spinning in a light-sourced fashion in a similar manner to the DNT demo Maggie reviewed a couple of years ago. 'too slow, but nice looking' as Arto may have once said!
Some squiggly ST-inspired bouncing spirograph patterns appear next followed by a little turtle which grows to fill the whole screen - it's a fancy new way to clear the screen as the texture left by the 'turtle' becomes the background for some dot-spline globular objects to wriggle in front of.
A window does a nice fancy fade-in to the left hand side, and the first serious effect comes into play. It's a bijou version of ye olde zoom and rotate - but after a brief moment the Misfits move things on...
They do a take-off of Exa, particularly a teddy bear related drawing by Flan, which is definitely 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 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 while then followed by the inevitable doughnut. This is subjected to a ferocious assault by a variety of effects and textures - initially we get a pineapple slice effect with some gold/yellow shading effects which slows to a crawl to take on some kind of environment mapping which makes it look a bit like bananas were involved in surface texturing the object. Some colour-shock type shading follows on from that, with the Falcon racking its silicon brains, to come up with the lesser known deeper shades of purple-blue..
A change in mood sees a fiery vector cube spinning over a lake of fire - although it's hard to be sure! Another old effect, but again it works well enough within the confines of its on-screen prison as the cube zooms right into the screen and out again. Finally, out of this series of effects, a double helix type 3D dot spline object spins around on the screen featuring a nice multi-coloured effect in the process.
The screen fades - not a normal fade - but a 'spotlight' effect and the displayed area grows smaller and smaller until it is gone altogether. The music changes to a similar jaunty happy boppy tune later and we are into the end credits which include a little effect in with the functional upward scrolling text - it's a constantly mutating 3D bob shiny plastic look 'molecule' which floats around the screen as the text does its thing.

Tech watch

This is a very neat demo with a good deal more going on beneath the surface than the (very clean) design suggests.
The DSP is only used for the music so the 3D effects are not cutting edge but does include one new feature namely the Phong shading technique is used twice - altering the texture used in the RGB split section for a neat twist. It's a shame the objects aren't a bit bigger, faster or more original.
Most of the other effects were copies from earlier demos, but it is well coded - reminiscent of Amiga demos - something the Falcon really isn't suited to!

** Boxout **
Ratings
Graphics: 85%
Good presentation, even a little original hand drawn material.
Sound: 78% or 8%
Depending on your musical taste!
Gee-Whiz: 70%
Not a lot new in here. Firmly relies on presentation skills.
Overall: 81%
Almost a classic cliché 'design' school demo.
** end boxout **