I love that effect that I call city skyline as I find it so gorgeous yet unfortunately so rare at the same time even though there sure is no link between these 2 statements. I believe it was first seen in an Amiga demo, not sure which one but if you know the name of that demo, please drop me a line. 🙂
Trying to describe this effect should find me telling you that it features a city-like shape with outlined buildings set on the foreground of a coloured skyline. The buildings are mere dark columns outlined with some coloured motion blur (see below) yet it looks pretty cool when the whole thing starts moving as if the whole scene was set onto a « rotating dish« .
Alas I could only find 3 examples of city skylines. The first, as seen above, comes from the fast paced and visually storming Virtual Escape demo released in 1999 by Equinox. A demo that fully deserves a coup de coeur.
Then nothing for about 10 years and in 2009 Dead Hackers Society brought us Cernit Trandafir. This time the city skyline effect has been updated as the window size is a lot bigger than usual (what is called overscan) and the blue dithered background looks really awesome and adds even more beauty to an effect that I already loved !
Five years later Dead Hackers Society released a new demo called Sea of Colour and guess what? Yes, it features another version of a city skyline! This time the effect is displayed in overscan (even fullscreen that is to say covering every pixel available !) and the buildings aren’t dark columns any more but real buildings mapped with windows and other details. This brings the city skyline to another unseen before dimension!
I don’t know if we will see more city skylines or what we should expect from an effect that seems to improve with each appearance thanks to highly skilled coders but I’m definitely in love with this effect so let’s cross fingers and see what happens next time. In the meantime let’s have a look at a couple of videos :
The Encyclopedia Of Atari ST Demos 