tAAt 2020 new year demo breakdown writeup

Year 2020 started with something relatively simple:

The main idea behind this new year demo was pyrotechnics on a glossy floor.

There are no textures; everything is shader based. The text is drawn using a Hershey font, which means there can be a nice drawing action. There's some trickery to make it smoother, because Hershey naturally did not split long lines into segments; without splitting the lines into shorter ones, the drawing would jump wherever a longer line was hit.

The swirly patterns use an aptly named function "draw_line_badly", which has a start and end position and draws the line split into segments, aiming towards the target but missing by random number of degrees, until close enough to the target.

It needs to be said that youtube's compression really wipes out all the detail from the shaders. The above is from a raw capture. All that noise, tiny sparkles and a lot of subtle animations are gone from the youtube capture.

There's fairly little else to say about this one, especially since it's been a year since I made it and can't remember much of it =)

Comments, questions, etc. appreciated.