As the FINAL version of Suicide Barbie is roaming the world for some time already, it is a time to send HUGE thanks to the whole PSPDEV community for great SDK and toolchain which made this demo possible, Chip for the libGU and TyRaNiD for the psplink which were essential in development of this demo.
If you have not heard about Suicide Barbie - it is a PSP demo by TBL which won Breakpoint'2007 Wild Demo competition (console and handheld compo).
Some new features you might find interesting in the final version:
. much smaller downloadable archive
. packed music
. new visuals
. improved framerate
. wider PSP firmware support - tested on 1.00, 1.50 and 3.x OE
. proper readme.txt
. also photos of TBL finishing the demo in Bingen are included
Some technical rumblings you might find interesting as well:
. all run-time and back-end code was written almost completely from scratch for this demo
. rendering loop of the demo had to be organized differently than in GU samples in order to achieve better parallelism between main CPU and GU
. probably the biggest challenge of the demo was memory and content streaming. Music and textures are streamed. Might have been a smarter move to write a better compression for animations, but we had no time for that ;)
. all scenes were created and animated in Maya. Scenes were exported first as an FBX - we had an idea of 'interoperability' with Lightwave first (not a great idea after all, FBX has tons of special cases and documentation is somewhat sparse), then processed with out custom tools to extract scene information, animations, meshes etc. and convert them into PSP friendly formats
. all resources were zlib compressed to decrease loading times (if you noticed demo starts almost immediately with virtually no loading time)
. lua was used (during export step, not at run-time) to add additional attributes for objects, setup materials and filter scenes
. originally we had an idea to define timeline in lua for faster iterations, however Louie did a great job with planning and direction, so minimum changes had to be done - as a result timeline was kept in the code
. bulk of textures are 8bit palette based, while some are 4bit
. most of the scenes exhibit no texture reuse - no texture caching in the video memory was required
. we did a DirectX9 backend to help development and debugging. Single ShaderModel2 über-shader was used to simulate GU behaviour
. VFPU was used for some special effects and skinning, mostly to spread workload across CPU and GU more evenly
. although post-process blur in production is done on GU, we experimented a bit with CPU implementation which looked quite promising if well optimized, but at some expense of video memory
This is a great demo (best demo on the PSP platform so far!). I do miss the voice samples from the party version a bit, but the other enhancements of the final are really nice!
Interesting technical info btw, I really like to read stuff like that to get an understanding on how things work behinds the scenes!
<3 this demo.
I'm also interested in the tech specs, mainly in the blur area though <3
Might have something more to say after running the final version instead of the vid :-)
skan wrote:Anybody tried this baby on a Slim with M33? Does it work?
Doesn't work on my Slim with 3.60 M33. Exits with the following error:
The game could not be started. (8002014C)
It's 1.50 fw homebrew, it won't run on Slim, until it's compiled for 3.XX core, or Dark_AleX (or someone else) integrates 1.50 fw part into the Slim custom fw :(
I've downloaded & watched this demo in the spring (a patry version - 100 megs of data, because of the wav musicfile o_O) - and it impressed me, almost blowed my mind! Grahpics, design, conept, music - everything is amazing! Best psp demo and one of the best and most beautiful demos ever created for all platforms (my absolutely fav demo is LifeForce by ASD (for PC) - 1st place at Assembly 2007)!
Barbie is a 1.50 homebrew, so it won't work on the slim normally. I tried running it with eLoader 1.0, but it fails that way as well. So at the moment, no, Suicide Barbie cannot be run on a Slim.
Be3f wrote:
It's 1.50 fw homebrew, it won't run on Slim, until it's compiled for 3.XX core, or Dark_AleX (or someone else) integrates 1.50 fw part into the Slim custom fw :(
Is that possible? I thought that 1.50 was incompatible with the slim hardware.
Be3f wrote:
I've downloaded & watched this demo in the spring (a patry version - 100 megs of data, because of the wav musicfile o_O) - and it impressed me, almost blowed my mind! Grahpics, design, conept, music - everything is amazing! Best psp demo and one of the best and most beautiful demos ever created for all platforms (my absolutely fav demo is LifeForce by ASD (for PC) - 1st place at Assembly 2007)!
Lifeforce is awesome. Actually, after watching Tyranid's BP'07 seminar I thought: Man, how cool is that for a demo platform. Coupled with the Suicide Barbie video made me want to start coding again. After leaving the Amiga some years ago the PSP is the first piece of hardware that I really find interesting for just-for-fun coding.