Pilgrimage 2003 Party Report! by secnuop (secnuop at yahoo dot com) v0.1 (August 19, 2003) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday, August 08: My flight arrived into Salt Lake City around 10:30PM. I had some tentative plans to meet up with Sylphin/Suboptical when I arrived, but it turned out that it took a while to get a shuttle bus to the hotel so I basically just ended up crashing as soon as I got to the hotel. Not a big deal since the hotel I got was way out in the booneys, and I had no transportation downtown (no plans to get to the party place either, hrmm). It took a while to fall asleep in an unfamiliar environment, plus Utah is an hour ahead of California, so I was attempting and failing to fall asleep even earlier than normal. I set my alarm for 7:00AM and got as much sleep as I could. Saturday, August 09: Both the first and last day of Pilgrimage! The party was officially supposed to begin at 8:00AM. I figured I'd be somewhat fashionably late, so I was about right on schedule when I left the hotel just before 9:00AM. The taxi fare was $15 to get downtown from the hotel. Mental note for next time - pay a couple of extra bucks for a hotel nearer to the party place. The actual party place was pretty much optimal for the number of people that attended. It was at the Metro Learning Center Campus of the Salt Lake Community college, in basically the middle of downtown Salt Lake City. Interestingly I had to convince the taxi driver that there really was a part of the community college downtown. If I didn't write the address down I have no idea where we would have ended up! On entering the "lobby" of the Metro Learning Center Campus there was a sign welcoming Pilgrimage attendees and directing us up to the second floor to Salons 3, 4, and 5. So, I took the elevator up and found a the Pilgrimage welcome desk. The welcome desk had a signin sheet and some literature about the demoscene (including an original copy of the demoscene Wired article). Sylphin and TFinn/dc5 arrived about exactly when I did, and we set up in the salon nearest to the lobby. Each of the salons had a projector, four rows of tables, and enough seating for six people comfortably at each row. I sat down and opened my laptop to check my email and we hit the only real major technical difficulty of the party. Apparently, even though the Metro Learning Center was equipped for wireless internet you needed to be a student with an account to get on the wireless LAN. Oh well. Wired it is, I guess... I guess now would be as good a time as any to mention that I have been to demoparties before. In 1997 and 1999 I attended the Spring Break demoparties in San Diego, California. The Spring Break demoparty in 1997 was my introduction to demos. In 1999 I was convinced that I was going to enter a demo into the compo, but I pretty much completely underestimated the amount of time it would take to make a demo (even after a bunch of rendering routines and effects were already completed). So this time, I resigned to myself a few weeks before the party that a demo just wasn't going to happen and decided that I was going to concentrate more on the social aspects of the party this time around, since that's what I regret not doing so much of in 1999. If Pilgrimage 2004 happens I've convinced myself that I will have a demo to enter, done before the party starts, so hopefully in 2004 I'll have the best of both worlds! One of the coolest things about Pilgrimage were the various talks that were scheduled throughout the morning. I managed to make it to four of them. In the first, Russ Christensen gave a talk about a project he worked on in school where he designed his own game console (and wrote Tetris and Space Invaders clones for it). It made me wish I was still in school so I had time for wacky projects like it. The second talk was on programmable shaders by Thant Tessman. Thant works for nVidia in their "tech demo" group. Even though I knew most of the information he presented it was a pretty good talk. I just wish he his presentation used non-nVidia specific OpenGL extensions for those of us with ATI cards. The third talk was given by David Notario, also known as mac/xplsv^threepixels. David's talk was probably the one I was most interested in, since in it he described threepixel's 'Studio' demoframework. His talk was awesome, and gave me a bunch of good ideas to work on in the next few months. I figure if I can do a third of what he's done I'll have a demo that's at least competitive for next year. Very inspring. Somewhere during the morning Dan was interviewing people asking them a few questions about their experiences in the demoscene. I of course was lame and couldn't even think up three words that I associate with the demoscene. Can I retroactively say "awesome electronic art"? Sure beats what I said (I think it was something about lack of sleep - how telling). After a quick break for lunch at the local 'Crown Burger' (think cheeseburger plus pastrami - the ultimate heart attack on a plate) Dan from Fusecon gave the final talk of the party. It was basically a slide show and comments on his experience at the Breakpoint demoparty in April. It was interesting to compare and contrast his experiences with the ones were were all having at Pilgrimage. We clearly have a long way to go before we get a European-sized party in North America (not that that's a bad thing!). We'll also probably need to have the party in a different state than Utah if we're going to have a beer truck. Overall all of the talks were excellent and I'm disappointed I couldn't make some of the others. I spent the rest of the afternoon just hanging out, taking pictures, and watching demos. Sylphin took over one of the salons and played a bunch of demos that I hadn't seen in years. For example, I had almost completely forgotten about Replay's 'Fall Equals Winter'. We also tried to keep a connection to AssemblyTV, since the Assembly demoparty was going on simultaneously in Finland. We managed to catch a bit of the wild compo, but eventually the quality just got too bad and we had to disconnect. Next year I'm going to try to bring my oldskool demo machine (DOS + GUS) to watch some of the classic old demos. The Mindcandy DVD does a pretty good job representing demos that just can't be run on Windows PCs, but there are just too many good 1990s demos to fit onto one side of a DVD. Not to mention good intros, which aren't on a DVD at all! Still, the last few major modern demos have been pretty darn impressive. We watched 'The Popular Demo' several times and each time I notice something else that's just plain awesome. Somewhere along the line we decided to try out the video postcard software that had been donated to the party. The basic plan was to film some professional looking video clips, send them over to Assembly, and hope we could get on AssemblyTV. I don't know if we ever actually sent anything anywhere, but if nothing else it'll be amusing to see next year. I managed to grab mine on my USB drive before I left as a nifty souvenier also. Sometime during the afternoon we hit our second technical difficulty of the day. We discovered that it wasn't possible to share files across the network. Though this makes sense in an academic setting (where that last thing the community college wants is their students transfering MP3s on their network), it makes submitting compo entries somewhat difficult. Luckily campus IT didn't block FTP ports, so we were able to set up an FTP server to submit compo entries. Over the course of the evening I was very impressed with the number of entries in all three compo categories. When the compo deadline was reached at 8:00PM there were already four demo entries, four graphics entries, and six music entries, and two groups were still frantically trying to finish their demo! To allow the two groups to finish the compo deadline was extended by an hour. After all, it wouldn't be a party if the compos all started on time, would it? Finally around 10:00PM the judges had screened each of the entries and it was time to vote! The orgainzers used a pretty unique voting system, but I think it worked out pretty well. Basically, each attendee had a total of ten points to distribute in each compo, and judges had a total of fifty points. The points could be distributed however the voter wished them to - all ten points could be given to one entry, or they could be distributed among several (or even all) entries. First up was the graphics compo. All four entries were pretty good, and I think I gave points to each entry. Next up was the music compo. Again, each of the entries were pretty good. Last was the demo compo, which was the compo I was most interested in. I don't think I remember the demo order exactly, but one of the first demos was 'Fastmade', by 'Tres Beats'. I really liked this demo in a party setting. The soundtrack was upbeat and the demo was entertaining. About all I didn't like was the color scheme. Second was 'Charged', by 'OTM'. This was one of the two demos that were being worked on right up to the last minute, and unfortunately it crashed midway through the demo. Still, it was pretty neat, and I'll definitely download the final version. Next was 'K-Wak' by 'k-rad' and 'dc5'. Another very cool demo. It was pretty obvious that either this or 'Fastmade' was going to win. Next was a 16 byte (that's right, no typo) demo from the Northern Dragons, and a 4kb intro also from the Northern Dragons. The 4K intro was technically very impressive, but it's difficult to judge a technical feat like it in the same context as a full-blown demo production. I guess the only solution is to have enough entries such that intros can have a category of their own. Last was 'CursesDemo' by 'dc5'. It's a NetBSD demo, though I assume it'll compile on any OS that has the curses library. The music was played through a separate computer. Overall it brought back fond memories of the dc5 Spring Break 99 demo, where they hummed the music. While the votes were being tallied we all congregated in a fourth salon where Nullsleep/8bitpeoples was entertaining all partygoers with a live set of Gameboy tunes. It fit the mood perfectly and gave everyone a chance to hang out for an hour or so. You can download his live set on his website: http://www.8bitpeoples.com/nullsleep. Finally, Legalize announced that the results were tallied and were ready to be announced! First, though, there was a bunch of free stuff that was raffled off. I don't remember the details of all that was given away but ATI donated a bunch of stuff, including five Radeon 9800 Pro graphics cards (three of which were given as first prize in the compos and two of which were raffled away). The graphics results were announced first. Bruce won third place with his hilarious 'DemoWoman' picture. Clarissa won second place with 'Ronnas', and Oman won with his 'Wrenchman vs. Mothman' picture. This was the one compo where my opinion really differed from the results. I liked the fourth place picture, 'In Tolerance We Trust' by Fred. Oh well. The music results were announced second. Though I had the ordering slightly different, my votes went to the three productions that eventually won first, second, and third. Mr. Moses won first place with his nifty island tune 'Ipanema Sands', Nullsleep won second place with 'Her Lazer Light Eyes', and ChaoticOne and Troll won third place with 'Embraced'. The music talent was pretty good, and I liked a lot of the songs that didn't win also. Finally, the demo results were announced. As expected, 'K-wak' won first place and 'FastMade' won second. 'CursesDemo', the dc5 textmode demo won third place. Cool. I was a bit surprised that the Northern Dragons 4Kb entry didn't place higher, but I guess that just goes to show that it's tough to rank 4Kb intros in the same context as full-blown demos. It didn't help that the demo didn't run on the compo machine, but I still thought it was pretty cool. Just before midnight Legalize raffled off the final Radeon, thanked all of us for attending (though we really should have been thanking him for organizing such a successful party), and we left the Metro Learning Center and Pilgrimage 2003. Before leaving several of us made plans to meet up for a Pilgrimage afterparty at Troll and ChaoticOne's hotel room a few blocks from the party place. ChaoticOne and Obsidian went out to try to find some ladies while myself, Troll, Dilvie, and Dilvie's girlfriend went out to obtain some of the local fermented malt beverages. I thought that Sylphin and a few others were going to meet up with us as well but we never managed to cross paths with them again that night. At the afterparty Obsidian continued working on a song he began in the waning hours of Pilgrimage, and Troll, ChaoticOne, and Dilvie helped out to make a four-person collaboration that was, as I quote, a "total mindfuck". Cool. We even had some plans to do an extremely ghetto post-Pilgrimage demo, though the unfortunate realization that Troll's laptop had no OpenGL drivers and that my laptop had no sound code put a damper on these efforts. I was also starting to feel the effects of the four hours of sleep I had the night before and the realization that I was going to need to be at the airport for a flight out early Sunday afternoon. Man, I'm getting old. Interestingly we also discovered that Darwin and a few of the other Pilgrimage guys were staying in the hotel room next door. They were driving back to Oregon the next day so they weren't too eager to join in the festivities, but it did lead us to dub the Sheraton the unofficial hotel of Pilgrimage 2004. Finally around 4AM we decided to call it a night and I got a ride back to my hotel from Dilvie and his wife Maria. I finally fell asleep around 5AM. Sunday, August 10: I woke up just in time to catch the end of the continental breakfast, made it to the airport on time, and typed up most of this party report before I got back to Sacramento mid afternoon! Thanks (in no particular order) to... All of the Pilgrimage organizers, especially Rich (Legalize) and Adam for their awesome work organizing the party. All of the Pilgrimage sponsors, including ATI, Microsoft, FuseCon, and Serious Magic for the prizes and giveaways, and XMission for hosting the webpage and donating money to secure the party space. All of the Pilgrimage speakers for their excellent talks. Thanks especially to Mac for giving me ideas and inspiration for next year. Troll and ChaoticOne for hosting the unofficial Pilgrimage afterparty. Dilvie and Maria for driving me back to my hotel in the wee hours of the morning. Next year I'll get a hotel downtown! I'll see ya at Pilgrimage 2004! -- secnuop/Ingenuiti Productions