Making Demos

To make a modern demo, you need three elements: music, code and graphic art. These may all come from one person's creative outpouring or it could be the result of collaboration from several individuals.

As digital multimedia has become more commonplace, so have the tools for creating music and graphic arts on the computer. Programming tools have also become more commonplace and readily available.

We are working on assembling a collection of software tools and programming libraries to help make demo-building easier. We call this the 'demo starter kit'. Its a long term project that is part of Pilgrimage's mandate to assist in the creation of new demos in any way we can.

Below is a sampling of the software available on the internet that we intend to gather into the demo starter kit.

Coding Tools

Demos are generally written in C++ (you might want to search for assemblers as well, however). Most Windows software is actually written in (Microsoft's) Visual C++ (version 6 or 7 at the moment). Pilgrimage can help you obtain a copy of Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET 2003 Academic Edition for writing demos. Please contact us if you need assistance in this area.

• www.borland.com -- You can get C++ Builder, the command line version, for free here. This is a professional quality compiler, but you must have a good working knowledge of using the command line to build software. Probably the best you're going to do for free. Take a look at the downloads section.
• MinGW -- A free C++ compiler designed for making Windows programs. Might be difficult to use with DirectX.
• DemoGL -- This is a complete toolkit to help you write demos with. If you have Visual C++, this is perhaps the best and fastest way to get started. It's pretty easy to get going quickly, just follow the directions in their documentation.
• BASS -- A great programming library for using sound files in your code. It explains itself pretty well. Free if used in freeware.
• FMod -- An efficient, stable, highly portable (seven platforms) sound library that supports a wide variety of file formats. Includes excellent (50 lines of code) examples, and has some great tools for synchronizing tracked music to visual effects. The API is well documented and easy to use. Free if used in freeware.
• The NeHe OpenGL Tutorial -- Some very nice, step-by-step tutorials on learning to use OpenGL. These will hold your hand through every line of source code, and cover all the way up through advanced graphics concepts.
• 3d graphics concepts -- Covers all the important theory of 3d graphics. This isn't going to help you much if you're not reasonably good at math, but it does make an excellent reference for polishing up the spots where you're weak.

Music

There are a lot of good trackers around: Renoise, MadTracker, Impulse Tracker, Fast Tracker and ModPlug are probably the best known. Of these, I would most strong recommend ModPlug. For the others, go take a poke around here to find them.

• ModPlug Allows you to add and tweak atmospheric effects (VST plugins) by channel, import instruments from MIDI sound banks, read and write MOD, S3M, MIDI, and IT files, and export to a WAV file. The user interface, while occasionally awkward, is still probably the cleanest of any tracker.
• OccEnc -- A tool for creating Ogg Vorbis files, which are an alternative to MP3 format.