# PARADE
### A Software rendered Demo by MAJESTiC
Released at Evoke 2026

Parade is a software-rendered PC demo inspired by the golden era of the 90s demoscene and its awesome effect: the metaballs.  
No shaders, no GPU trickery — just classic CPU-driven effects, chunky pixels, tunnels, voxels, rotozoomers, plasma and scene nostalgia, all created using the technology
of metaballs, marching cubes and no more.

We salute the oldschool PC sceners, coders, graphicians, musicians and demo crews who shaped the underground digital art movement of the 1990s.

And yes — somehow we even managed to squeeze a few SDF scenes out of the CPU. And wrote the entire piece in C#.NET.

It is highly optimized for multithreading workhorses, so you might even get 1080p out of it on the latest Ryzen.

---

# Running the Demo

Simply start:

```text
Parade.exe
```

By default, the demo starts fullscreen and renders internally at `1280x720`.

Four launchers ship next to the exe, all rendering in software on the CPU, so cost scales
with pixel count:

| launcher | internal resolution | work vs. default |
|---|---|---|
| `Parade-640x480.bat` | 640x480 | 0.33x — the lightest, use this if the demo stutters |
| `Parade-720p.bat` | 1280x720 | 1x — same as starting Parade.exe with no arguments |
| `Parade-1080p.bat` | 1920x1080 | 2.25x |
| `Parade-1440p.bat` | 2560x1440 | 4x — wants a genuinely fast CPU |

---

# Command Line Switches

All command line switches are case-insensitive.  
Unknown switches are ignored silently.

---

## Window Mode

| Switch | Effect |
|---|---|
| `--fullscreen` | Force fullscreen startup |
| `--windowed` | Force windowed startup |

---

## Render Resolution

The internal software render buffer resolution.  
The display window is automatically upscaled using OpenGL.

| Switch | Effect |
|---|---|
| `--resolution WxH` | Example: `--resolution 320x200` |
| `--width N` | Set width only |
| `--height N` | Set height only |

Default resolution:

```text
1280x720
```

Examples:

```text
Parade.exe --resolution 320x200
Parade.exe --resolution 640x480
Parade.exe --width 1920 --height 1080
```

Invalid formats will produce an exception with usage examples.

---

# Example Invocations

## Default Presentation

```text
Parade.exe
```

---

## Windowed High Resolution

```text
Parade.exe --windowed --resolution 1280x720
```

---

## Retro Low Resolution Mode

```text
Parade.exe --windowed --resolution 320x200
```

---

## 4K Presentation Mode (not likely to run smoothly)

```text
Parade.exe --resolution 3840x2160 --fullscreen
```

---

# Important Notes

## Performance

`320x200` is the native tuning resolution for all scenes and effects.

Higher resolutions increase CPU load approximately linearly with pixel count.

Approximate comparison:

```text
1280x720 ≈ 14x heavier than 320x200
```

All effects scale feature sizes automatically, preserving the intended visual appearance across resolutions.

---

## Flash Compensation

For resolutions higher than 200 pixels in height, flash saturation is automatically boosted to preserve the intended whiteout intensity originally tuned for 320x200.

---

## AOT Build

Parade is distributed as:
- Native AOT compiled executable
- Single-file deployment
- No .NET runtime required

---

# Credits

## Code & Design
Kork / MAJESTiC

## Contact
lekorque@gmail.com

---

Making this made me realise how much I enjoyed the scene. And how much it meant to me. Thanks for watching!
~Kork.