Welcome to Spontz's Quintessence, a demo we tried to present at the Breakpoint 2009, but that had so many technical problems in the compo machine that we resisted the temptation and reserved the code for a future event.

And that event happened in Arles (France), within the MainParty IV party. Although not all the problems were solved (we still had some shaders that were only working in ATI cards and not nVidia) the demo was in a condition good enough to be shown in the big screen.

The concept behind this production is a bit diffuse. It started as a elucubration of several space scenes in which there were some physical laws that were distorted, but then was slightly moved to a concept involucrating the mind and the creative process. Then came the last scene, in which the human being evades the limits imposed by the beliefs and religions, while elevates itself higher and higher, leaving behind the world in which he born. So, it's really a mixture of excuses in order to test several massive particle routines we are working on.

Finally, already in the party, xphere and drumu added some final touches, like a fading transition between two scenes and loading and ending screens while I (merlucin) improved and accelerated some of the slowest effects.

This demo was entirely coded using a MacBook Pro from 2006 with a cracked video card, which means that the machine was freezing every 15 minutes more or less. This computer features an ATI Radeon x1600 video card, that is far away of the Intel GMA950 cards present in lots of MacBooks. This is the reason that could cause the demo not to run very well in current machines using the GMA950 adapter.
Some of the effects also use the Computer's CPU heavily, but this sould not be a problem since my computer is a bit old.

The music was composed by Dynimix, before leaving the demoscene. It is one of the last songs he composed , and this will be probably the last demo using Dynimix's tracks since a hard disk failure ended with the small collection of songs he leaved to me.