Live-Coding at Revision 2025

Shader Showdowns are a high-energy, graphically impressive visual livecoding event. Since its inception at WeCan in 2013, the Shader Showdown format has grown in popularity amongst different demoparties across the world and has been a regular event at Revision ever since.

During the years of the pandemic the format of the event grew to less competitive jam-like formats also opening to remote networked participation. At this Revision, we will have 3 live coding events open for participation:

• 3-way Shader Showdown (live presence)
• TIC80/ ZX Spectrum jam session (live presence)
• Shader Royale VJ session (remote participation)

If you are interested to participate on one or more of these sessions, please answer this form or contact totetmatt or psenough or aldroid or RacoonViolet on discord or send an email to the Revision hotline.

Exact date per session will be known later.

3-WAY SHADER SHOWDOWN

Programmers face each other off, live on stage, coding GLSL shader effects from scratch with no outside assistance besides the DJ pumping some beats. The crowd gets to watch the code evolve on the big screen, enjoying the action and cheering on the participants.

The objective is simple: At the end of the 25 minutes, whoever gets more votes wins and goes through to the final. The winner of the final gets crown Revision shader showdown champion. We will have a bracket elimination tournament with rounds of 3 contestants per round.

Usual Shader Showdown rules apply:

• Every battle lasts 25 minutes, and you have to write all code from scratch.
• Battle timer will be paused for all contestants if there is some technical issue with one of the machines.
• All code has to be written in GLSL using the latest version of BONZOMATIC
• A set of textures will be provided for each round (including the Revision logo).
• Competitors are welcome to bring their own keyboard (without memory function), we will have different languages support installed.

Commentators will be discussing and explaining the code during the sessions. Audience will be able to livevote.

TIC80/ZX JAM SESSION

We will host a 1 hour livecode jam session on the main stage where participants can use the TIC80 fantasy console programming environment (special fork version with an FFT function to respond to sound): https://github.com/aliceisjustplaying/TIC-80/releases

The session is open to anyone onsite who can code LUA, you can bring a friend to help you and even swap out with someone else from the audience if you are out of ideas. Low pressure livecoding just for fun.

We also added the possibility to jam with ZX Spectrum thanks to Bazematic

SHADER ROYALE VJ SESSION

As part of a live concert or DJ set a Shader Jam VJ sessions will be held.

As visuals for this we will host a massive shader royale jam session, open to anyone in the world with a network connection and a copy of networked BONZOMATIC to participate remotely.

Expect dozens of participants live-coding their shaders and some pre-prepared surprises. Participants can also leave at any moment, and we will keep showing the latest version of their shader. The creations will be shown on rotation at the big screen throughout the DJ set, effectively working as a VJ system to the session.