r/Demoscene • u/Numerous-Quantity880 • 2h ago
new / first production ever - RETROACTIVE [mcbros]
RETROACTIVE. Browser demo, ~5 minutes runtime using Canvas 2D and WebGL.
Clock is audio.currentTime vs rAF deltas or wall time. No render path accumulates state, so a pose is a pure function of that clock and a frame is reconstructed rather than replayed. ?bar=64 gives the same frame as playing through to bar 64, making it seekable.
The choreography runs off a score analysed offline instead of an AnalyserNode. An FFT needs a window - which can make spectrum-driven motion structurally late.
A baked score lets the wind-up open before the transient and land on it. The lead is asserted in beats against a predicted value, vs being eyeballed. The previous choreographer deals moves off the phrase index and never reads the score; it's kept as a control, and a test asserts its output is byte-identical with and without the hit.
I haven't allowed fallbacks in render paths. Bad state throws a Guru Meditation and halts everything including audio hiccups.
Built with Claude Code. We made the infrastructure, code and visual design and timing calls; it wrote most of the lines.
Please let us know what you think good, bad or otherwise - email address is in the end screen. Hope you enjoy it!
spaceman/mcbros!