patsie75 / awk-demo

old-skool demo in awk

Old Skool demo in AWK

Since I have been making all kinds of different graphical things in awk, I thought it would be time for me to finally try and make a real old-skool demo. So I got some of my better looking effects, made sure they worked in all major awk releases (gawk, mawk and nawk), slapped some timing code on it and voila, here's my first demo!

awk-demo-sm.mp4

(Better quality version at: https://youtu.be/j5aEjfBSQRI)

Code that I've done before and reused after serious modifications

• https://github.com/patsie75/awk-plasma
• https://github.com/patsie75/awk-fire
• https://github.com/patsie75/awk-3d
• https://github.com/patsie75/awk-glib

The startfield and metaballs effect were not published previously and made especially for this demo

Dependencies:

• A relatively recent and fast enough CPU (duh!)
• A terminal with good UTF-8 and true-color/24-bit ANSI support
  • Gnome Terminal (some other LibVTE based terminals might also work, like Termit)
  • xterm
  • mlterm should have a bugfix on the way (arakiken/mlterm#39)
• A recent version of a modern awk (tested with):
  • mawk (1.3.3 and 1.3.4)
  • gawk (all versions from 4.1.4 till 5.1.1)
  • nawk (20121220)
  • goawk (v1.18.0)
  • (!) busybox awk technically works, but the performance I got was horrible
• If you want music to accompany the visual effects, one of the following:
  • ffplay (part of ffmpeg)
  • mpg123
  • cvlc (part of vlc)
  • mpv
  • mplayer

Credits:

• Music (Lose Your Head) by Eggy Toast, used under the Creative Commons License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) https://freemusicarchive.org/music/eggy-toast/game-music/lose-your-headmp3

awk-demo's Issues

What makes a demo “old Skool”?

When these were mentioned on comp.lang.awk a few weeks back, several responders didn’t know what you meant by “old skool”. (I don’t know either.)

• Can you explain what the characteristic(s) is/ are that distinguish an “old skool” demo from whatever other kind(s) of demo you apparently have in mind? Part of that explanation might be to tell what is the reason for not spelling “school” in the standard way.

• It might also be helpful to readers if you state clearly what the thing(s) is (or are) that your demo is intended to demonstrate.

If you can do these two things, perhaps the readers at comp.lang.awk will be more interested, IF what you’re demonstrating is sufficiently interesting to them.