by Sleeping Dog / The Natives
First I have to warn you guys... Sih'95 was in my opinion one of the
worst parties I've ever been to ... to be honest only The Meeting'95
was worse. (BTW I haven't been to Nexus (maybe luckily
Saturday morning around 10:00 we left at Uncle Bob's place to go to
the party place. After a short drive to Roosendaal (about 35 mins,
jeez... this party is in another country and it's that close to home !)
I found out I completely forgot any description of how to get to the
partyplace, I remembered some things of it and actually we didn't have
any problems to find the partyplace. We payed our way to high entrance fee
50 Guilders which is about as much as you have to pay for Assembly and
even more than we had to pay at The Party so that already was one
of the first sad things about this party. Don't get me wrong , I'd happy
pay 50 Guilders for a well organised party with lot's of people but not
for a party like Sih'95. Second thing was that originally women would
get free entrance, when we arrived at the pp this had changed... So some
people were really angry because they girls also had to pay this huge
amount of money ..
The organisation was expecting around 800-1200 people, actually I
was also expecting that the party would have been one of the biggest in
the Benelux. But it seems like only about 400-450 people showed up..
so the hall was half empty and everybody had lot's of space to put their
equipment. The honour of being the biggest party in southern Europe will now
go to Wired for sure !
Well the sleeping hall was really good... but probably a bit too hot... but
that's not the organisers fault. During the whole party is was
inside colder than outside, but I'm still wondering who wanted to stay
outside ...
Now some things about the really bad compo equipment. Actually it was
really good equipment but it wasn't suited for a democompo.
There are different styles of projectors. Some of them are rather for
still pictures than for animations. The Barco LCD projector that was
used isn't that good for animations. Because it's an LCD projector
you get some shitty delays that stay on the screen some seconds after the
picture has disappeared, this gives some demoeffects a motion blurr effect
which sometimes completely destroys the effect. So the organisation
payed already too much money for a high quality projector that didn't suit
their needs.
Next there was the audio equipment, there were 2 speakers in the
whole hall which looked impressive and could blow out your ears withouth
any problem. But when it came to play the music correctly without
too much extra sounds all problems began. It was impossible to get a
good sound in 75% of the hall, only the first quarter of the hall right in
front of the speakers gave you something that you could call 'music',
but it was too loud anyway. We sat on the first row with our equipment
and I had to leave my place several time because the music was simply
too loud.
The Laser show was one positive thing between all the negative comments
about the equipment it was really nice.
So far for the equipment, now let's get back to the party itselves.
The first news to be spread was that some dutch guys that were in
Bonzai , left Bonzai and formed Vivid. Now Vivid and Abstract Concepts
have joined in one group called Analogue. So far the team news for
Sih.
I had a irc #coders meeting sheduled at 19:00 and I had told it to some
people, some of them showed up but there was no real meeting actually
i think everybody knew everybody so there was no need. But here
the organisation already started to make me angry. I had asked to put a msg
"Irc meeting 19:00 at the Podium" on the big screen.
Now I only ask myselve why those lazy guys only put the message on
the screen around 19:10 ??? How the hell could someone
know that we had it sheduled at 19:00 if it was only displayed at 19:10
and I had given the msg to the organisation around 13:00 so they had
full 6 hours to put it on screen !
Saturday evening there was a concert from Fashion 8 sheduled.
You are probably more familiar with the names Lizardking and Deluxe than
with Fashion 8. Nice concert with some great laser show ! But
some people had to go outside because there was too much smoke in the
hall (the smoke was needed to give the laserlight more effect).
During the night some cool video's where shown like Duckman and other
cool animations.
A couple of hours later the in my opinion only good compo of the weekend
the GFX compo, there were no really bad entries. Some pictures
were too dark but no other comments could be given. During this event
the Barco projector showed it's powers 'cause it was used where it was
made for. But actually here the first big mistake by the organisation
was made. They showed both the name of the author and the name of
the picture (as they did with all the music compo's also) this way
people don't vote for the quality of the picture but for the name/fame
of the author/group. Of course not everybody does but there will always
be people that do it this way. So it was impossible from that moment
on to have a fair voting.
Then the 4ch music compo started. I missed it, as I missed the PC Intro
compo. As far as i have listened to the modules now I don't think I
have missed anything. Neither for the Pc intro , there wasn't any
mindblowing new production, just the usual stuff.
Acme found it funny to release 3 intro's, one of them simply stated
Acme Sucs, and nothing else maybe it was just to tell Valhalla if you can
do 2 at The Gathering then we'll do 3 at Sih. (I hope Valhalla now
releases 4 intros at some of their future parties
In the meanwhile I learned a new way to meet people. If you know
the music artist from group X is walking around at the party place
you simply start to play the work of the other music artist of the same group.
In my case I was playing Smells Like Bananas (Big Jim / Valhalla) when
Holywood came to ask me where I got the song ;-)
It was time for the real problems : The Multichannel compo. The
first thing that went wrong was the delivery of the modules.
Some people of the organisation did not know that you could only
put one module on a disk. So some people were so unlucky to bump
into an organiser who didn't know it wasn't allowed to put 2 modules
on 1 disk. This way some modules got lost and were never played.
(2 modules from a different author from the same group that is.)
The second problem was that there was a problem with the disks themselves.
Someone had put them somewhere near a speaker (a magnetic field you know.)
or some coffee was spoiled over them , I don't know which explanation is
the right one but the disks were unusable. Now everybody had to redeliver
his module to the information desk.
A couple of hours later again some disks were damaged so some people had to
deliver their disks again (that's 3 times for one module !!!) this time
it was because of the temperature in the comporoom.
We had the amiga intro compo which wasn't that interresting and then
the Multichannel compo began. The modules were played in the exact order
as they were delivered. Sometimes 5 modules of the same group had been
played. It was quite obvious that there were no preselections so we thought
that they were going to play all t he modules. After 30 modules, where
more than half of them was just crap they stopped playing.
Quite obviously about 15 really angry people showed up at the information
desk to ask why there were no preselections. A couple of them was
so angry they left the partyplace and didn't want their modules to be
played anymore.
Dope (main organiser) agreed with us that it was unfair not to play the
other modules. He picked out someone to go upstairs and discuss the problem
with the other organisers. So I went upstairs to discuss the problem with
the organisers. They decided that all the modules would be played but it
not sure yet when they were going to do it. (Nice restaurant for the
organisation they had there upstairs ;-) (dunno if other people were
allowed there... but who cares everybody was going to the Mc Donalds which
was only on a 5 mins walk.))
I'm still not sure if the voting for the Multichannel compo was done fair.
There were quite some good modules in the second part of the compo but
none of them scored in the top 30 as far as I know, so It's possible they
simply din't count votes on modules above nr 30.
The deadline for the PC Demo compo was delayed about 4-5 time 'cause
there were not enough entries. So a couple of groups decided to enter
the compo with some fake releases, some of these fake releases were
nice pieces of code without design or music just running some parts
from a batch file. This way we got about 12 entries.
The average quality of the releases was rather low. The Kip Brigade
did a rather remarkabe 'The Easy Way Out' and Analogue showed their
3D engine again and their new Gfx artist. Sih was won by the French
group Realtime with their demo Goldorak which had a nice story board.
During the pc demo compo one of the compo machines got overheated and
the compo had to be paused. It was about 60øC in the compo room according
to some people.
During the weekend also the Anarcy awards were given away. The winners
of the Anarchy awards for Amiga were the organisers of the Party '94.
Strange enough we couldn't vote for any pc nominees, the organisation
told us that they didn't have enough time to find some so they simply
decided to give the award to Lizardking, I really don't understand what
he has done so special for the pc scene, I think there are lots of
other people that deserved the award, i've got some sysops in mind
and also some organisers of great parties like X'95. I'm not stating
that Lizardking didn't do anything but I don't think it was a good
idea to give the award to him without any opponents.
There was no party network from the organisation so I set up my own
server. The only problem was that we constanly had a collision between
the 2 networks we were running. We constantly had problems with the net
from the dutch people and we still don't know why.
Well... I'm probably forgetting lot's of things.. but I gues this won't
be the only Sih report so you can read the other stuff from other people
that were there ;-)
Wired is going to be much better ... much much better...
And much more fun.... much much more fun ;-)