The inspiration for the 2008 new year's demo was to go oldschool.
I had tinkered with using fixed function pipeline to generate old-school effects earlier (stuff like shadebobs, interference patterns, etc), and figured it might be a fun idea for a new year demo. I got !Cube to do the music, and he naturally produced something amazing. He was actually a bit pissed at the fact that he got so much positive feedback from a soundtrack written under another alias =)
The whole demo is simply OpenGL 1.2 stuff, mostly either filled or textured rectangles. The little bubbly balls in the background are actually directly from my 2d gl framework (even the texture); this is actually the only place where I've ever used the particle system code in said framework. Every other time when I've needed particles, I've re-written the code, because every particle system always has slightly different needs..
The tAAt logo and the scroller font went through my Koalizer, a "c64-like graphics" photoshop filter.
The scroller simply consists of thin high textured stripes that are offset by a few sine curves. The scroller is rendered twice with an offset to generate the shadow on the color bars.
Making the pumping effect of the tAAt logo was actually a bit funny - I wanted it to pump to the beat, so I wrote the code and set it to pump at a fixed interval, ran the demo and.. it was in perfect sync.
The color bars are simple horizontal filled bars that use gouraud shading to fade off to the edges and are rendered with additive blending. They move up and down, change colors and height based on some sine curves.
The greeting shooting stars are, again, simple particles. The texture in the stars is by tArzAn; I originally had little smiley faces in the stars, and he changed it (and for a good reason, the result is much better). Unfortunately, the texture he changed it to didn't have power-of-two dimensions, and made the demo crawl on the ATI hardware of the time. This was fixed pretty quickly, however.
The chorus during the greetings sings "tAAt hallitsee" (Finnish for "tAAt rules"). It's unfortunate that I didn't know this before the demo was released, or I'd have added a karaoke-like "subtitle with a bouncing ball" effect on top of everything =)
All in all, much thanks to !Cube, this is one of the better new year demos I've done.
Comments, questions, etc. appreciated.