Ambience
- Initial Release Date
- November 28, 1994
- Color Palette
- 21b
- Max Resolution
- 312x199
- License Status
- Freeware © Tomasz Piotr Pytel
- Codebase
- x86 Assembly
- Platform(s)
- MS-DOS
- Author(s)
- Tomasz Piotr Pytel (Tran)
Description
Ambience is the second of Thomas Pytel's three trippy, infinitely running eyecandy demos, the others being: Timeless, and Luminati. It morphs constantly updated texture-maps in the background, while scrolling various sprites and other effects on top.
Thomas Pytel provided some advice for users with a projector setup...
So kick back, relax, and project it onto your ceiling... Or better yet, a building adjacent to your house! Share the experience with your neighbors. Best of all, on a cloudy night, project it onto the sky!!!
Ambience tried to simulate a hi-color (21b, 2m color) image by rapidly swapping between multiple images with each screen refresh. This worked very well on PCs with CRT monitors fast enough to output images near the 60Hz refresh rate. A combination of phosphor persistence and human persistence of vision would merge multiple 7b images into a single hi-color image. The effect still works with non-CRT displays, but becomes solely dependent on human persistence of vision to combine the images and tends to look rather flickery.
The closing image probably best demonstrates this, where each image consists of the name Tran covered in opposing, diagonal, rainbow stripes.
These, when overlaid, display hi-color diamonds.
I'm a bit unsure of the 21b claim. I've never been able to capture more than 2 8b images via DOSBox, so it would seem more like 16b.
The song Drops in Time by Ryan Cramer is used for audio. Alternate music can be specified with the "/s" command line. The Mod Archive provides a wide array of S3M files.
Video
Video captured /w VGA capture card capable of capturing hi-color effect rather than DOSBox.
Screen Shots
Download
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Ambience (Windows DOSBox edition)
A version compatible with Windows via DOSBox with emulated GUS music.
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Ambience
MS-DOS version.