Cold Start

A demoscene film. Four minutes and thirty five seconds of real time graphics, cut to a 192 BPM drum and bass set, played start to finish by a camera that nobody drives.

There is no player and nothing to press. Open the world, press play, and twelve worlds build themselves in front of you one after another: a title sequence that tears itself across the frame, a lawn being mown into a logo, forty five thousand particles finding a shape, a plaza at an eternal sunset, a creature of black fluid hauling itself through a crystal cave, a wrecking ball taking a building down, a rider carving a sea of cloud, a skier on a real snowfield, a water show on an oval lake, a tesla coil in a dark hall, and a climb through cloud into a star field for the credits.

Every one of those is made in the engine, at runtime, from nothing. There are no imported scene meshes for the film: the grass, the creature, the building, the water, the arcs, the clouds and the type are all generated when the clock reaches them and released when it leaves. The score is generated too, written in code and rendered by a synthesizer that runs inside the engine, then analysed so that the lights and the action ride the music.

Watching it

Press play. The film runs from the top and ends on the card.

Every viewer gets the same film. One clock drives all of it, so the same twelve parts arrive at the same twelve moments, in the same order, at the same length, on every machine that plays it.

The twelve parts

#	part	length	what you are looking at
1	COLDSTART	25s	the title sequence, on black, magenta and cyan
2	FRESH CUT	22.5s	a bright estate, thirty thousand blades of grass, one mower
3	SIMULATION	25s	forty five thousand particles, four shapes, one field
4	REVOLUTION	22.5s	chrome and neon under a sun that never sets
5	CRAWLER	22.5s	something with ten arms, in a cave, coming toward you
6	COLLAPSE	22.5s	five storeys of brick and steel, and a forged ball
7	CLOUDSURF	25s	dawn, a sea of cloud, and a rider on it
8	SNOWLINE	20s	an alpine run, carved and jumped and slid
9	FONTAINE	22.5s	a hundred and seventy metres of lake, and forty nozzles
10	DISCHARGE	22.5s	a million volts in an empty hall
11	ASCENSION	35s	up through the weather, into the night
12	ENDCARD	10s	the card

Looking inside

Everything the film is made of is in this world and readable. scenes/main.scene/README.md is the map: the timeline, what owns what, and the rules a part plays by. preseed/MUSIC.md is the score.

Made with the Zero engine. origozero.ai