The Assembly demo party is a demoscene and gaming event in Finland. The most recent Assembly was held from the 4th to 7th August 2011 at Hartwall Areena in Helsinki.
The first Assembly was held from July 24th to July 26th 1992, in Kauniainen. It was organized by the Amiga demo groups Complex and Rebels, and the PC demo group Future Crew. The staff grew into a large non-profit group of individuals known as Assembly Organizing. Through the 1990s, Assembly grew so large that even exposition halls no longer sufficed, and only the largest of sports arenas met the partygoers’ needs. In 1999 they rented the largest sports arena in the country, Hartwall Areena in Helsinki, with over 5000 visitors and 3500 computers on the ice rink and it has been held there ever since. As of 2011 the party has been held for 20 consecutive years.
Ever since becoming a Microsoft Student Partner in 2007 i have been helping out Microsoft to demonstrate it’s technologies for Assembly guests on the Microsoft stand. Assembly has always been great fun with interesting people so I decided to participate this year too. Microsoft also had a competition that was giving away a free Windows Phone 7 to the best entry made on that platform that was participating on the Real Wild competition. I figured there wouldn’t be many entries like that so i decided to also participate. 
I only had 4 hours to make my demo, so don’t expect anything spectacular (from which i was listening lectures for 2 hours).
Demos are basically a bunch of code put together that display graphics and music. Mine is called NeuralWorld and it’s a copy of a similar android screensaver, with some twists . It works on both Silverlight on the web and Windows Phone and should you need it’s source code for something feel free to ask.
It starts with flashing squares and does it for 10 seconds I’m doing this with a DispatcherTimer ticking every on 100milliseconds and then randomly selecting 20 background items to flash on random colour. After it becomes 8 differently coloured worms running across the screen. I did this by having 8 different storyboards animating the worms. Every time a worm gets over the edge i randomly select a new starting point and begin the animation again. Lastly my demo ends with all backgrouditems dropping in from the sky. I ran into some serious performance issues while doing this and it seems that DispatcherTimer cannot tick as fast as i would want it to. For better results i should have probably used XNA. Finally to make it better i should have also added some music in it, but i couldn’t find anything that would fit
At the end i missed the deadline for the competition with few hours so i couldn’t participate in it, but still learnt few things while doing it so there’s no reason to be disappointed. Here’s a video of the final demo!
PICTURES FROM THE EVENT
Loads more can be found from here:
http://www.assembly.galleria.fi/kuvat/Assembly+Summer+2011/
Cheers,
Petteri Lehtonen
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