Project:	UCM 15 (25) intro
Requirements:	(Mega) ST(e), Falcon or TT with at least 1MB RAM, colour 
                monitor
Start:		January 1999 (first code?), music is from Dec 1998
Release:	February 2004

January 23rd 2004:

The intro is years old in some places. Although I recoded huge parts of it
already. This week Seb completed his graphics for the tower part and I 
already included the background. The problem seems to be a few hickups. They
might be less innocent than they seem at first glance. There was a TIB
interrupt that didn't restore a messed up reg. That killed one hick-up, but
there still are plenty left:
1) fading from white -> tower palette in between tunnel and tower
   this shows the tunnel in b/w for just one frame before changin to the 
   tower screen. this might be an effect of really dodgy mainloop handling.
2) there are one or two hickups when the water is visible. this cannot be
   the speed of the ct2, since it is 3.12 times as fast as the ST's bus.
   only 1.2 ST screen is copied, so it should run easily within 1VBL.
3) after a few runs it hangs. the music keeps on running, but the whole
   thing freezes, along with the ikbd interrupt and everything.
UPDATE:	point 1 seems fixed, was just a problem of whiting the _whole_ 
palette, instead of the lower half. I don't know about point 3, but have a 
hunch that it only happens when the zooming or dungeon screens are entered. 
Maybe the bug is there.. Hhmm, tried running the whole thing, and still no 
hang. I won't be too optimistic, but it looks like that one went with the
fix of that interrupt.
 Now only for the hickups, and hell, I need to optimise that screen anyway.
It's good the scrolling runs in 2vbl, so we won't notice that it eats cpu,
but the nasty bit is I'd like to keep the 1vbl water. That might require
some the routine to work from within the vbl rout itself.. I hope it is as
easy to do as I think it is right now..

January 27th 2004:

Life is a bitch! I'm not kidding here! I'm surrounded by a bunch of 
bureaucratic blood suckers who'se sole purpose is to make my existance 
miserable. Fucking assholes, maggots, bum pirates!!
 .... *censored * ....
 So, that means not much time to code I guess?
 Indeed, there's not much time, but I promised Seb and Eric to complete 
this. I'm not backing off. I need at least a small amount of fun in my life
and worrying about the rent, working a little more in the future and the 
administrative mess at university isn't cheering me up.
 But let's get down to business. The greets are finally in there. I still 
need to make the appear routine though. At the moment it's just a blit.
Well I'm trying to work on some kind of 'dither' resolve, but it seems
trickier than I thought at first. Maybe I can better use a clipped moving
sprite, or a simpler appearance pattern (diagonal wipe?)
 Seb asked me to add some palettes in the dungeon part, but I don't know
what he means, really. Maybe he refers to an old version of the dungeon
with the rasters. Those were coloured I believe. At the moment the ceiling
and floor are grey and are painted: they don't use TIB.
 Eric also mailed and told Defjam was also planning something. Okay then,
it's likely he will whoop my ass, although nothing was heard from him in
a while.
 Okay then, off to work on the greetings. I hope to hear from seb when I
read my mail tomorrow.

January 30th 2004:

I now know what Seb was talking about, he made reddish and blueish texture
to spice things up. I'll try to use one of those tonight. That is, if I can
get to grips with those age-old tools I made for this intro.
 I now got a stable and reasonable synced intro running. Still, it's not
fit as a preview since it needs 913KB RAM. This is especially required since
the tunnel table and the precalc animation for the wolf part are _huge_.
 I think it's a question of doing some good overlap. That's up after that
red/blue wall thing. I hope I can do all this tonight and send Seb and Eric
a preview on sunday.
 At this moment my life isn't easy. It's hard to find a job while I'm still
writing my graduation report at least 30 hours a week. I now work 10 or 11 
hours and ofcourse I need to do the household chores as well. The thing that
really bugs me is the lack of money. When doing stuff you don't like for 41 
hours per week you expect you may earn enough cash to buy some shoes. Not in
my case.. :/
 Anyway, I'm aiming to complete the report in the coming two weeks. Of 
course, this is largely dependent on my supervisor. He does a good job, but
never in a hurry (understatement of the decade!).
 Urgh! Let's just shut up and get on with it.
 UPDATE: Hey, Seb's new texture is great. It's 3bpl and the darkened 
versions still look okay. Also, the red/blue is very interchangable. But
most importantly this means it is possible to use rasters and a hand-
dithered background! Yes!
 The memory optimisations will be hard though. It seems like I'll need to
optimise the tower part to the max. For instance put the mask buffers and
everything for the fonts in the dynamic area. First, I'll try to find that
hand-dithered background.. Oh boy, where did I put that?
 UPDATE: found it, sadly it's 8 colours of course. And first of all, I need
to find out how to use it with just 2 colours and a raster interrupt.. Most
certainly I can't use over 2 colours per scanline. Yeah, got it: you have to
put the interrupt in between two dither sections. And the raster colours
will be 0 and 8. The problem, the texture must never use these, so the 
darkening in crackart needs to proceed differently. I prolly need to put
a bright color in 0, so that it never uses this.
 Oh well, that's for sunday or tomorrow or whatever..

February 1st 2004:

Damn! Succeeded in getting the intro to run on a 1MB STf. Unfortunately
though, it needs to run from the auto folder! I needed to kill the
appearance buffers and the 3rd screen to get it to work at all!
 The worst thing is that there still are bugs. In the tunnel screen the
palette changes color 0 at a very very nasty time. That really sucks ass,
especially on RGB. In the tower screen the 2vbl refresh isn't noticable
thank god, but the lower border color is unstable!! This must be the
movem.l copying causing jerky interrupt response! Or maybe even the SID
shit in timer A(rgghh!). That's most likely, cos the water worked fine
without that goddamn SSD.
 The tunnel bug seems like it would be easy to fix, but that border color
bug sounds deadly annoying to me. I hope some hbl vcount rout might do the
trick, otherwise I'm doomed!
 So, I'm not mailing the preview yet. It's just too crappy! I'm going to
check out the possibility of a fall-thru interrupt mode or the hardware
water rout..

February 2nd 2004:

Damnit! Yeah! Finally killed that color 0 bug. It was due to pure lazyness.
I didn't take the effort to install HBL's in the 'main' part of the tunnel,
meaning the whole thing had to put color 0 to black to avoid border color
shocks. We'd move from black top & btm borders to grey ones and that would
suck. At this moment, I just again installed a 1..199 raster that does 
respect the color 0 and leave the top & btm black.
 That did take some snooping around, though. However, I did get a chance to
kill off an obsolete event in the demo too!
 I mailed Seb I didn't get a chance to complete a decent preview. I really
do hope I can fix that bug in the tower raster this week. For now, it's time
to take a rest. It can't be too hard to fix..
 oOkay, blah.. I'm off to bed.
UPDATE: okay! I fixed that bug in the tower screen as well. Still, the 
raster is kinda jerky, but at least the btm border doesn't switch colors!
I guess it's the movem.l stuff, since in the tunnel screen also sid
voices are used (?!).
 Anyway, the tunnel movement is improved for 8MHz.. It was really too low
fps to allow fast rotation. I still notice a slight bug in the rasters of
this screen though. When doing the white out it's 1 scan too large, this
gives the same problem as with the tower, but only 1 frame.. It seems 
indeed the btm border switched color for 20ms.. Seems simple enough to fix.
BUT THATS TOMORROW!" GOTTA FUCKING$% REST!

February 17th 2004:

First of all, all those border bugs are fixed. Secondly, a preview has been
received by Seb and Eric. Eric just gave me positive comments, Seb had some
constructive criticism. I will change some colors and positions in the 
tunnel and tower. That will prolly be done swiftly enough.
 After this, the real work starts. I will actually try doing the dungeon
with the rasters. I will make a separate source file for this. The idea is
not to hyper-optimise the column painter (by pairing). This would simply
require too much changes: maybe a few days of work. A few days I don't have
so that's that. 
 I want to cut down the horizontal resolution by 8 columns. Yes, that sucks,
but I wonder who will notice. Anyway, using the rasters, the screen will
prolly look alot better.
 Okay, I'll get working on it now.

February 18th 2004:

It's 1:00 in the night and I'm tired. Some things got changed around a lot.
The positions of the greetings are improved. The white fade in the tunnel is
now a fade to blue, like the bg color in the tower part. The top & btm 
borders in the tower screen are completely removed. The zoom is now zooming
into a black area. All these things look a little better. Altho I think
the fade to white was really fine. Seb thought it was horrible.
 It's shit... I mean, coding like this. There's 0 to learn and it's tedious.
I can believe it cost a whole day. Up next is that horrible dungeon. Dog
knows I want this completed! I wonder if I have enough time. The fucking
graduation is still in progress, but my supervisor is a pain-in-the-ass.
He has a million things to complain about, but never mentions his own 
lazyness.
 If he'd hurry up that would make a lot of things clear, including whether
I can get enough time to finish this bitch this month. I'd rather work on
the ACP VLM, or even on the frontier clone. This ST stuff really sucks.
 About the dungeon screen: first I'll try to just make an alternative movie
with 8 lines less, and a dungeon4.so file. I'll use the bunch of NOPs to
simulate the performance loss of the 3bpl c2p. After that finetuning I'm off
to check if new c2p works at all. That will be the most of the work. Of 
course that's not counting the rasters, obviously good for an hour or two as
well. I might have this done before 15:00 tomorrow, but I'm not sure.
 In any case, I might have to wait till friday or something to mail this
to Seb and Eric... And... I almost forgot, there's a hang in the tower 
screen. It's right at the start and it seems totally random. Any way, it's
in the tower part 100% sure. So a ride with mon might solve it...
 It's 14:32 now and I succeeded in getting the dungeon part running in 
152x90. It now seems able to run in 4vbl all the time, even with ssd music
playing. I also prepared the original okay-ish looking dungeon in 160x90 
with the original texture.
 I don't know if I can manage to do the real 3bpl stuff right now. It's
worth a try anyway.. Only after that I'll try the rasters. Also, there are
bugs to fix. The fatal one in the tower screen and the bottom raster bug
in the tower screen is back due to changes in the TIB interrupts.. bah..
 17:01 now, and I have made a small breakthrough. The 3bpl c2p is working!
It uses alot less mem and is just slightly slower than the 4bpl one. I
will now try the 1bpl background idea! After that it is the main task to
make it bugfree. That nasty bottom border is still slightly unstable. I
think I have to hack up those movem.l's. That's a bummer, but what the
hell. It won't cost too much time compaired to the rest.

February 19th 2004:

0:57 now.. I've put in 100% today, but I also got 100% output in return.
That is a rare thing! Mostly I put in 50% and get out 20 or something. ;)
Well.. I was coding from 11:00 to just about now, so 14 hours in a row. I
think that is about enough.. *phew*
 What has changed: the background in the 3bpl screen is there!! Also all
the screen transactions are 100% correct now. The shaking bugger raster in
the tower (greet) screen is still there, but I'll fix that soon. That's
about the only thing left.
 The dissapointing thing is that the dungeon still drops to 5vbl a few
frames... Suck ass... Ah well, the ST just wasn't made for this shite..
That's for sure.
 The whole thing is bundled along with the request for improved wall 
textures. So, the wall texture and the shake will be fixed pretty soon and
then this bugger will be shipped to Eric and that's that..
 14:05 now, I just messed with the graduation report again. That's that. So
now I'm hacking on the intro again. I managed to get the worst instabilities
out of the greet rasters by replacing movem.l with move.l. The frame rate
didn't drop so I'm happy. However, I now am sure ssd causes additional
instability. It is probably a question of allowing other interrupts. Maybe
hacking the ssd up. If it uses div I'm in big trouble. I'll seek some advice
from Defjam.
 Anyway, the bundle is off to Seb and Eric in a few hours.

March 12th 2004:

22:22: Got Seb's redone texture and it looks really terrific! I mean, 
especially when used in the screen itself! I guess this is the last entry in
the log. Eric wants the intro by March the 20th, and there is not a hell of
alot I can do except for some slight size optimisations. 
 The dungeon screen suffers from ugly colors in the side borders, but this 
can't be removed unless I put the whole thing into sync lock. In turn, that 
implies the development of an ST and non-ST version. I don't even want to 
know how to remove the borders on falcon (highcolor rendering perhaps ;)).
 I'm off to try different palettes on the sky and walls. That's the last
thing that will change in the look of the intro. After that I'm off to bed,
cos I need to get up early again tomorrow.
 22:56: I think I'll stick with the blue version of the wall texture. I've
made the raster colors to match. Although the sad thing is, the poor old
STf needs adapted raster colors. The ones I have now look all cool Amiga
style. Quite smooth and dark. The STf turns this into a mudbath, i.e. crap!
 The STf could either do with interlacing, or a lighter palette. 
Interlacing, I think, is too much work. It would cost me hours perhaps.
Using the light version for both STf and STe is an option, but the dark
version really looks better: much less artificial, and the border colours
are less prominent! 
 So, that's that: I'll try to find a good STe check and then make a switch
between the colors. So maybe this is not the last entry in this log.

March 13th 2004:

What a day.. Work wasn't exactly stimulating today. I need some good news
quick. The last chance that I'll be able to work here in my hometown will be
next week. If that fails, it's off to Utrecht, and even worse.. I'll have to
get a job in ICT again. NOOOOOOOO! I hated that shit. Routine work. People
with suits for brains. Totally useless companies and a ditto job.
 I just hope the job here will happen. I can still try to complete the VLM
to catch some money, but even if it all works out, that will only keep me
safe for a couple of months. In any case, the employment offices totally
suck. They couldn't help you find a job in a million years.
 *Sigh* To keep it safe, I'd better start looking at the employment offices
in Utrecht. And maybe I should start calling an ICT company there. If they
offer the possibility not to get detached to some far off region, it sounds
better than being unemployed. I'm wondering at the moment whether leaving
Philips was the smartest or the stupidest thing I ever did.
 Cut the crap, doggamnit! I did the STe check and everything. I decided to
use different palettes. Now it's time to check if it runs on the STf and on
steem. Write you later.
 14:08: It crashes on steem! Means I did at least something right ;) Now I'll
try on a real ST. On my 1040STf (tos 1.2) it runs fine from the auto folder.
I'm now trying to run it from the desktop: everything went fine. Maybe steem
hanged cos the intro was run from c:\. The virtual harddisk driver (I wonder)
might have caused it?? Steem crashes no matter what, from auto, a:, whatever.
I don't know the solution and really, it's not my job. The authors should do
proper emulation. Fuck it.
 I'll try now to shift the dungeon 8 pixels to the right, which is exactly
the last thing I'm doing on this intro.
 15:13: Forget I said that. I'm not doing it. Just discovered it'd cost
me an additional code generator. I'm sick of those. I'm not doing this for
perfection. It's not a masterpiece, and doing this modification won't turn
it into one. I think I'll just UPX it, replace it in the zip and just mail
it on monday. 
 Good riddens, I hope I never have to code on ST again. You don't learn 
anything. Except maybe if I tried sync lock. However, that would require
an additional version, etc. I'm very pleased to go back to the VLM.
 BTW Defjam couldn't complete his intro for ucm (I think) and I'm happy,
cos everything, except the music and graphics of course, really is shitty. I
think this intro would have come out rather poorly in competition with a 
Defjam-tro. Howevr, the gfx by Seb really give it the atmosphere and some 
ideas of my own too, but the code: I'm not satisfied with it.
 But that's just life. I think I can release it and be happy that it didn't
go to the trashcan. It's cool of Seb to have been so helpful. He really is
a good friend.

March 22nd 2004:

That's it. The final version, including Havoc's pic is mailed and this 
project has come to a more or less succesful end, which is more than I 
thought possible some years ago. Havoc's pic had the Plastic Surgery girl in
it. Well ehm.. Actually, it was originally meant for this intro! How about
that!? The EIL version was just an adaptation of what he did for this intro.
 Nice, since that picture really beat up the competition. Well, except for
Sts's graphics I think.. However, this guy just hasn't got the public on his 
side. Anyway, in terms of graphics, there is no way this intro can lose. It
will probably be appreciated. End of transmission.
