A little animation for Deadline 2025’s Mate wall competition. The Mate wall is an array of bottles in crates illuminated by RGB LEDs – check out the project page or the live recording on YouTube and you get the idea!

Note: The animation is supposed to run in 50 fps, but at least my browser seems to struggle with that. Scroll to the bottom for a smoother simulation.

First words?

If you didn’t catch all the references or if you are less than a hundred years old, these are the Amiga demos whose famous first words I used:

• Dexion: Megademo 1 (1989, YouTube)
• Wild Copper: Megalo demos (1988, YouTube)
• Red Sector Inc. & TCC: Megademo (1989, YouTube)

After watching last year’s entries for a bit, I wanted to do an animation that somehow incorporates the structure of the crates – the Mate wall isn’t an evenly distributed “pixel” array, there are gaps between the 5×4 blocks. That’s how I got the idea to do something with the music channel visualization from Dexion’s megademo – the original bars are already 4 pixels high.

That quickly led to the idea of doing a little Mate wall megademo…

Another thing I noticed is that the Mate display is highly dependent of the viewing angle, and it’s really hard to make out subtle color nuances:

Simulator

I took some video stills from last year where all the bottles are white and used that as a poor man’s simulator, by multiplying the desired pixel/bottle colors onto the white levels. While not totally accurate, this helped gauging how much to turn up the contrasts and how fast things could move before everything gets blurry.

For the scripting, I added an ad-hoc text parser for a frame-based, um, script.

# boot
	+0	effect solid
	+0	color #000000
	+10	color #888888
	+30	color #ffffff
	+50	color #000000
	+4	NEXT
# dexion bars
	+0	effect dexion
	+0	decay 1
	+0 !sinAmp 16
	+0 !sinSpd 0.15
	+0 !sinInc -0.7
	#+0 !bg #0055aa
	+0 !bgPic wildcursor/wildcursor-0.png
# prelude
+0 !channels #.#.   0
+4 !channels ....   1
+4 !channels ....   2
+4 !channels #...   3
+4 !channels #...   4

It’s messy but it worked well to sync it all out, especially after I added keyboard shortcuts for playback and hot-reloading.

As a by-product, I had an approximate rendering how the final animation would look like on real hardware:

After I foolishly announced I was writing a Mate wall simulator some people asked me to release it afterwards. I intend to do that, but I have to decide on the format (probably web-based?) and I need to do some clean-up.

TODO Release it! :) Will post it on the blog and here as well.