Easter Sunday, 27 March 2016, Saarbrücken. Twenty entries ran in the PC demo competition at Revision, and one of them made the room lose its composure. "Revision went off when this came on," wrote a visitor that night on Pouët, and added, "Hard earned win!" The demo was Shapeshift by Cocoon, and the count at the end of the weekend gave it 1,298 points, with instant god by cncd and Fairlight second on 1,153.
Watch it first, it runs for about six minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8Uaoidr9FE
Four names and a french group
Cocoon are an all-French PC demo group, formed in 1997, with a catalogue that reaches from MS-DOS demos of the nineties to recent work on the Amiga and the Atari ST. The nfo of Shapeshift credits GUILLE for the codework and NTSC for visuals and direction, with TINEIDAE on the soundtrack and, according to Pouët, Rork on graphics. The same file asks for a fast DX11 card on "64bits windows only"; the sound runs through the FMOD library.
No limit but the clock
A PC demo carries no limit on its size. The final version ships a data file of 140,192,083 bytes, and nobody at Revision would have counted them. Plenty of the scene's finest work lives within 4,096 bytes or on a single floppy, and this one had the opposite freedom. Its limit turned up somewhere else.
On the evening of the competition, ntsc told the story in a comment on Pouët. "I have to change the soudtrack 2 Days before the party," the comment begins, and goes on, "the new music did two minutes longer than the old and in a rather different style." The team arrived in Saarbrücken with the intro and the city scene in the timeline, and the rest had to be built at the party. "I let you imagine all the work done to complete 6 minutes," ntsc added, and then the detail that says the most: "the skull part was done in less 20 mn from scratch". A fellow scener replied that people watching the demo could not imagine how much work had gone into it during the party.
The new music is a track called Shapeshift by Tineidae, from the album Shadows, released on Tympanik Audio on 2 December 2014. Demo and track share a name, and the visuals were cut in a hurry to a piece of music that had been out for some sixteen months.
A city with a tyrell sign
The scene the comments keep returning to is the city. "The 'chinatown' scene alone deserves a game spin off," wrote HellMood within the hour, and cce put it more simply: "The Neo Tokyo cityscape made me weep." The nod is deliberate. When a visitor spotted a borrowing from Blade Runner, ntsc was plainly delighted: "there is also a tyrell logo in the background", came the reply, which is the sort of thing one only finds on the third viewing, mind.
The rest of the demo turns to abstract shapes, and there too the comments dwell on the light. Cocoon render with their own engine, and the comments of other coders say more about it than any description could. cupe wrote that "your tech is probably the most mature in the scene", and Zavie, after the final version, singled out the global illumination: "the possibilities offered by your GI are really cool." The team worked on Titan cards, ntsc added, and there had been no time to try others, so a final release followed for everybody else's machines.
Revision
Twenty entries, and a winning margin of 145 points over a joint production of cncd and Fairlight, with Still placing twice in the next three. On Pouët, Shapeshift stands at 107 thumbs up against a single one down, which says a fair bit about the hall.
The final followed at the end of the year. Its executable carries the date 27 November 2016, and Zavie wrote at the turn of the year that "the final clearly improves over the party version". The note on the video describes the requirements with the same cheerfulness as everything else about this production: tested on a GTX 1080 and on a laptop with a GTX 960M, "slow but it run".
A demo without a limit on its size found one on the clock, and still finished first.