!MatureFurk Interview
By Ghandy/Darkage^Scenet
MatureFurk GroupInterview

by Ghandy/Darkage^Scenet staff

Introduction

Who earned the crown of the combined Assembly 2001 democompetition? And this to the surprise of many visitors in front of many, many demos based on a real strong hardware. Who has shown the audience that art counts most, not the firm that pressed their logo on the motherboard!?

The answer is as obvious as puzzling, it`s MatureFurk. Who? What? MatureFurk - the average Scener should have never heard of this crew. But to resolve the riddle, the Jurassic Pack team investigated who the heck these guys are and what their`re doing if they`re not busy winning big democompetitions at parties in northern Europe.


Ghandy:
Please, dear Maturefurk members, introduce yourself! (each member please!!) Which handles did you use in the past, which commercial/scenerelated projects did you do with your new and old name? What are your hobbies, how do you earn your dollars?



Eetu/Maturefurk
Usually on the scene I'm Frank/Orange. I'm obviously not one of the core oranges (derpiipo+hoplite+dune) but I did take part in some great demos from them; "Supertv", "Megablast" and "Mr.black". In real life I'm a freelance 3d graphician.
             

Petri/Maturefurk
Also known as Aivo/Mellow Chips and past projects include mellow chips demos, some crappy PD games I won't mention here, and of course Maturefurk demos.

Most of my limited freetime goes to non-computer related activities such as body building, jogging, playing pool & drinking beer. Occasionally I play with Photoshop in the hope of learning to paint someday. I'm working at Madonion and I'm a programmer in the 3dmark team.


Captain:
I did some ProTracker mods about 10 years ago (has it really been that long?), if names like Space Debris or Beyond Music ring a bell, well, that's me. I have never been a real hardcore scener, and for me Lapsuus was the first "scene" production for a very long time.

Nowadays my "dayjob" is a web developer & programmer @ MadOnion.com, but music still is the most important thing in my life, and making music & sound for various hobby/commercial projects (like MadOnion.com's 3DMark2001) fills the other half of my time.. 



Ghandy:
Congratulations for winning the combined democompetition at Assembly 2001!! What feeling was it for you to beat all those PC demos and place your demo in front of them??


Eetu:
"HA!"            
            
I hope we helped show people that it's not 'all about the pentiums', that the art side of demos is even more important than the technology.
Ghandy:
Did you get any feedback from the Amiga or PC Scene concerning your release? How did your competitors react at the partyplace when they realised that something running with only fifty mhz has beat them?? ;-)


Eetu:
Everybody thought we would have a PC release so there was understandably some "whattafuk!" reactions from various people. fun :)


Petri:
We have got lots of emails concerning Lapsuus - thanks to all of you who have sent us feedback! Some of the feedback concerned about possible PPC/graphics card support but I have to disappoint you and say that we won't do this.
There are a number of reasons - the number one reason being that if we had created this demo for PPC + graphics card Amigas, it would have been essentially the same as making the demo for PC`s. Creating a demo for "obsolete" hardware was part of the fun.


Ghandy:
Your demo, "Lapsuus", was totally awesome but why didn`t you guys release it under the label of Mellow Chips, everybody would have known that groupname a lot better!


Eetu:
Hmm, only some of us are from Mellowchips - all of us are from Maturefurk :)
             
Also, Maturefurk never had a good "street credibility", there have been all kinds of frustrating accusations about us using company technology and whatnot. Releasing on the Amiga should make things quite clear on that front, heh.


Ghandy:
Maturefurk means Futuremark, as Teo of Kangooroo told me. What`s the secret behind this groupname and why did you all rename your handles? Isn`t that really quite confusing? But maybe that was your intention ??


Eetu:
Madonion used to be named Futuremark.         
              
And our 'new handles' are just our real names. I guess we wanted to keep these productions separate from our "proper" groups ;)


Petri:
Ok, here is the full story: it was an evening two days before Assembly99. We (Eetu, Petri, Janne and Timo) were boozing and having a great time in Helsinki. For some unknown reason we were talking about demos instead of booze, women, cars, the army and such and we realized how long it had been since any of us had worked on a real demo (instead of some commercial "demos")..

And then it came in a flash: We would do a demo for the Assembly, just for the fun of it.
              
Since none of us were from the same group (at the time), we had to formulate a great, memorable and perhaps funny name for this "cmon lets do it one more time" product. At the time we were already one of those so called old-beards of the scene, so making this demo was a moment of nostalgia for us, looking back at the early days when we were more active, proud and all.
Well it happened that someone came up with the silly name 'maturefurk' and our boozefumed brains interpreted it as something funny. To name the demo was a bit trickier. When we were making the demo (still talking about 'Virhe' here) the initial project name was 'empty' since none of us had any idea what the demo would be - we were just bashing things together as fast as we could, it was just 40 or something hours before the compo deadline.
              
(Interesting side note: The wobbling, flickering maturefurk trademark you see in the beginning of every maturefurk demo features the letters 'empt' - y was lost at some point)
              
At some point when we were quite drunk and tired some of us thought that it was a mistake to make the demo - and thus the name 'virhe' (mistake in finnish) came up.
              
So, Maturefurk name was actually intended to be used just for the one-time project, but since the success of the demo was quite nice (we won the democompo back in 99) and since working on the demo was great fun, we really had to do the same next year. Now it is more like a tradition to gather together and create a new demo once every year.


Ghandy:
We heard that some members of your group are working for the Software firm "Madonion". Which projects did you realize, which projects are in the pipeline?

Eetu
Yep, most of us are working on 3dmarks, past present and future.



Ghandy:
Did this company ever plan to perform anything for the classical Amiga platform, or for the new Amiga series, if it ever comes out??


Eetu:
Of course we are not in a position to discuss future plans of the company (yadda yadda..) 

..I wouldn't hold my breath ;)

Ghandy:
You have already brought out two demos for the WINtel world, namely "Virhe" and "Lapsus". Is "Lapsuus" the continuation of "Lapsus" on PC?

Eetu:
Well, quite clearly not a direct continuation except the name. Virhe and Lapsus both mean "a mistake" in finnish. Lapsuus means "childhood" in finnish and as most of us have a past with the Amiga we thought it'd be a fitting name.



Ghandy:
Which advantages and disadvantages do you see while programming on Amiga respectively on PC !??

Eetu:
The basic issues are quite clear: No 3d hardware, a lot less memory and cpu power. I'm not a coder though, can't say anything about the specifics..
              
Petri:
Advantages: Direct access to hardware so you can do all those nice things that are not just possible on modern pcs. The ability to tweak individual pixels in the framebuffer is veery nice indeed. Amiga also has sprites, bitmaps and copper which enable coders to do tricks - in Lapsuus we had sprites running at 50fps on top of 3d scene running at half the fps or so.

Lowres can also be a good thing: running something on 1024x768 or higher on the PC requires so much detail on textures and geometry that is really time consuming to create and take a couple dozen MB of memory and diskspace.
              
Disadvantages: low polygon processing power, low quality sounds, no memory protection, quite bad development environments.




Ghandy:
As you are active on both platforms, how would you distinguish the scene of each computer?

Eetu:
Personally I've pretty much lost touch with the amiga scene, I'll let the others elaborate :)
            
Petri:
I wouldn't say we are active on both platforms. Old amiga days are sadly gone for me...

Ghandy:
You wrote in your scroller that "Lapsuus" is probably your last production for the Amiga, why that? Is it maybe because you do not believe in a future of the Amiga demoscene??

Eetu:
Probably because making a demo for the amiga is harder :) On PC there are a lot less restrictions and we can put more of the effort into the "art" and not the technology.
             
Petri:
Very few people have amigas nowadays. If we create something, we want lots of people to watch and enjoy our products.



Ghandy:
Maybe you want to loose some words about the technical aspects or the storyline of "Lapsuus"? The 3d engine was already used in Rise, what about the other effects? Some of them were so fast that I thought the whole demo must be an animation! Luckily some coders affirmed me that they`re not!

Eetu:
Some of the speed can be attributed to ripping out unnecessary stuff from the engine. Best example of this is that there is actually no realtime lighting whatsoever being performed in the 3d scenes!

All static lighting is 'baked' into the textures, the couple of moving lighting effects are done via multiplicative projection textures. Very low resolution of course helps a lot with the polygon filler and the blurs help to hide the low res (in addition to looking good:)

Also the polygoncount of most of the scenes is probably lower than people would guess, pretty much of the stuff is in the textures.

(I guess the code is pretty optimised too, heh)

All the 3d content was created with lightwave 6.5 in the couple of days before assembly.



Petri:
Now that Eetu has revealed some dark secrets ;-) let`s reveal some more:  
             
Actually the 3d engine was coded just for this demo. Only polyfillers were used in Rise. Internally everything expect the polyfillers use floating point values which helps with accuracy problems. It is a shame that the polyfillers have some inaccuracies and we did not have enough time to polish them. On the 3d pipeline side the code is quite optimized - we used pretty much all the usual tricks of the trade.
             
I have to disagree with Eetu to some point.. My worst fear at the beginning was that the graphics guys would create monstrous scenes for the little amy that would run 1-2 fps but I was actually pretty much suprised how many polys we could have in a single scene with all those facial anims, dual texturing, projected lights, post processing and stuff.
             
Captain:
A few words about the music: Due to Amiga's technical restrictions and memory limitations, the original "cd-quality" soundtrack had to be converted to 8 bit mono 22 kHz. I naturally knew this from the beginning, but still it's always a little sad to say bye bye to all nice stereo fx, dynamics and treble.

I did most of the music "blind" without any picture, just following the coders' and gfx guys' descriptions of each scene. In the end, it worked pretty well - they did great job syncing the picture to the music.

I don't know how people like the movie / classical -influenced soundtrack, but at least I hope it's little bit different from the usual techno stuff. Oh, and let's not forget this: Mikko (the coder :) actually composed the "Waterroom waltz" part, so let's give him some credit too!