Beautiful Pixels in Post-It Notes and Assembly

Previous readers know about the Beautiful Pixels API game jam concept. I'm tickled whenever I see others with the same idea. Such as

Post It Shooter, an experimental game by Petri Purho:

A Space Invaders mini game rendered with a post it note style. ;) Well worth seeing it in motion... download or youtube video (it lessens the effect since it's a downsampled resolution, at least watch in HQ).

Frameranger, the winning demo at Assembly 2009 by CNDC, orange, & Fairlight:

At 5 minutes in, there's a great shift to 8-bit music style and a block push pixelated render target. Check out the capped.tv video.

oh, demos... i love you, you make the most beautiful pixels.

Link dump: 3D Sketching, 4k intros with Distance Fields, Level of Detail, and Input Director

It's been a while since I've dumped some links. If you haven't already noticed these, take a look:

I love sketch
Check the video, scroll to 5 minutes to see curve sketching in 3D, that just makes it look too easy.

ILoveSketch from Seok-Hyung Bae on Vimeo.

Rendering with Displacement Surfaces
Iñigo Quilez is a great demo-maker. He's recently been making some interesting images in 4kb executables. Shown here is "organix".

At nVision this year he gave a nice presentation discussing graphics in tiny executables, and displacement surface raymarching.

Level of Detail: Blog you should read
If you're not subscribed to Level of Detail, let me call it out for you. Jeremy Shopf has some great posts, such as
Keepin it low res
and
Non-interleaved deferred shading of interleaved sample patterns

Input Director: Software KVM
This year I started regularly running multiple machines on my desktop, including my laptop. While doing some CUDA development I had was using another machine across the room, with an HDTV I could see it from 10 ft. I needed something to simplify input.

I used synergy for a while, but it was a bit buggy. Tim Preston suggested Input Director, a great solution if you're running only Windows. Some key features:

• Works before you log in, so you can log into a machine from another.
• Has an alias for CTRL-ALT-DEL, so you can lock other machines from your master.
• Easier config than synergy
• Less bugs with being in "stuck" keyboard modifier states
  

nVidia is hosting a Demoscene party

nVidia is hosting a Demoscene party!
...at their nVision conference/event, August 2008.

I've evangelized the demo scene quite a bit, at Siggraph, Game Developers Conference, on TV, and at universities. So, I'm of course excited.
(I ran the Demoscene Outreach Group, and have a small demo scene info page as well)

North America doesn't see too many parties.

In other Demoscene news, looks like Sony had some involvement in commissioning a demo on PS3 (Kotaku link) named Linger in Shadows by plastic.