evoke 2002 party report by Flod/Mandarine

hello, just a small report written on sunday evening of my week-end trip to evoke. i decided to do it on ojuice, like the french old scene farts did it several times for their european trips in the past (made, chandra, nytrik, gandalf ..)

sorry no proofreading, i'm a lot tired ..

my trip started on friday. i left my work at 16:00 (last day of two months of summer work), drove to nanterre to pick up exel/mankind (optionally got lost there). we put his pc in my car, and we headed for porte d'italie to pick up sanx&gruik/epidemic. we of course lost one hour on the parisian ring and finally started the trip at 19:00.

the trip was okay.. several slowdowns in france.. sanx complaining that gruik hadn't fixed the last bugs of their demo. after some breaks and german eurodance on german highways, we entered Cologne and found the party place quite easily with printed indications from the party website.

we parked the car and went upstairs. ile/aardbei welcomed us shouting some "alleeeezzz!!", we said hi to him and he introduced us his dutch friends (avoozl, djefke & warp). we entered, said hello to a quite drunk cyclone/hjb paid the entryfee. we had an email exchange the days before with xxx/hjb, and he told us that we would get a discount, we actually then paid 10 euros instead of 20. actually the organizer didn't know how much we really had to pay. we found a cool place next to the sofas + screen + demo pc.

we asked the organizers where was shiva / kolor, because exel/mankind was supposed to use a monitor lended by him. we found him, and he guided us to his car, gave the monitor to exel and offered us our first beer, thank you man ! we then went upstairs, and started partying. actually exel was finishing his intro and gruik was fixing a bug in the epidemic demo on sanx's laptop. me and sanx were watching demos on the small screen with the 3d glasses. it was ABSOLUTELY awesome ! only clean coded directx demos with direct rendering were working with the 3d glasses, but it was very nice, and when we managed to get the keyboard we played some other demos than the farb rausch ones the german ppl seemed to love.

then started the good news, we met xxx and he told us that we could get refund from our 10 euros, it was free for long distance travelers, gruik finally fixed that bug and their demo was ready and submitted it. exel coded for the whole night.

i went to sleep quite soon and woke up on saturday at 10. we played some french & cool demos on the screen and went in the city to buy some breakfeast. went back to the party place, had some talks with german sceners (muhmac&yamamotoa/freestyle) who gave a wavelet-sample-compression-xm-minifmod-player to exel to help him to make his intro to fit in 64kbytes, that helped a lot, but too bad it was crashing at some point of the intro.. he finally couldn't use it. around 14 went to eat a BIG fresh hamburger with nice fries in a very decent & cheap fast food in the city. on the way there, we met ps, melwyn & daniel who were going to the party place. after eating we went to some supermarket and bought some food + 12 liters of beer.

back at the party place, we had some cool talks with ppl, watched some demos on the screen with the 3d glasses. after that i went to eat in a pizzeria with ps, melwyn, daniel, cyclone, shifter, avoozl + some others. pizza were tasty and cheap, only ps & daniel were complaining about the time they spend to cook the pizzas .. damn portuguese ppl allways complaining :)

we went back to the party place, had some beers, watched the crest's demoshow that was fucking cool.. i discovered a lot of demos i had never seen, like gamma/mfx. the demoshow ended with variform/kewlers & liquid wen/haujobb. it was soon time to the intro compo : two great entries : haujobb's one : kinda messy, using geforce4 possibilities, great original effects with artsy music/soundtrack. exel's one : sweet looking software effects with med's music.

the 4k intro compo was completely dominated by muhmac's intro. music, atmosphere, realtime radiosity. nothing else :) KILLER INTRO.

the democompo was nice. epidemic's demo was played first, nice stuff, really. then some weird b&w demo, fairlight's big 3d demo, some other ones, absolutely beautiful haujobb demo with such a wonderfull tune of melwyn, some big 3d flat 3d world demo of salva mea.

i went to sleep right after.

i woke up, had some food, and waited for the results.

haujobb won the two compos. exel got second place in the introcompo. salva mea got second place in the democompo and epidemic got 3rd place. we were kinda happy with the results since the two releases got a place on the podium and we got some cash from the compo =)

it was soon time to pack everything up and take the way home. we got lost in Cologne and finally found the highway. we had some massive fries+wurst in belgium and finally arrived in paris at 9, dropped exel, then i dropped sanx&gruik and arrived back home at 22:20.

evoke was a very nice party. definitely in my top5 demoparties as well with ltp, buenzli, mekkasymposium & assembly. the organizers were very cool, the place was nice, quite a lot of foreigners were here, events & compos were great. i'll definitely come again next year .. congratulations evoke organizers, your party is a very good one, we had a lot of fun.

i heard the day i was leaving to evoke that dialogos was cancelled, that's really too bad :( evoke was then the last party in germany..

i heard an even more sad news when i arrived home on irc, about gozer/condense who passed away .. too bad we never met, rest in peace, sincères condoléances à tous ses proches amis, sceners et famille.