Hacking Hi-Def Graphics and Camerawork Into 4Kb 255
TRNick writes "The old home-computing art of hacking elaborate graphics and camerawork into tiny amounts of memory has been lost, right? Not so. The demoscene is keeping ingenious coding skills alive, and TechRadar finds out the latest developments. Winner of the 4kb competition at 2009's Breakpoint party was RGBA's demo 'Elevated,' a gorgeous scrolling demo featuring photo realistic landscapes and music, which fits into the memory used by one of your PC's desktop icons. This is really impressive stuff."
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
It takes a 64MB avi to store the 4KB demo!
I wish (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish more developers would try doing things like this. I can imagine a game along the designs of Doom3 or Quake4 that would fit on a floppy disc with some proper code crunching.
Of course, the downside is that it'd be all too easy to snag tiny files like that on a torrent site.
Re:I wish (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I wish (Score:5, Interesting)
Try Left 4K Dead [mojang.com]
The fact is that cramming a lot of game into a small space is still worth doing.
Xbox and GameCube hit the brakes (Score:2)
Console gamers develop high expectations as the hardware reaches the end of its lifecycle
Microsoft and Nintendo virtually stopped developing and approving new software for their older consoles (Xbox and GameCube) once their replacements (Xbox 360 and Wii) hit the market. So I take it you're talking about Sony.
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Microsoft and Nintendo virtually stopped developing and approving new software for their older consoles (Xbox and GameCube) once their replacements (Xbox 360 and Wii) hit the market. So I take it you're talking about Sony.
That would be *past* the end of their lifecycle.
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That would be *past* the end of their lifecycle.
Which ties in with my point. Near the end of a Microsoft console's lifecycle, attention drifts toward Games for Windows. And at the end of a Nintendo console's lifecycle, attention drifts toward the handheld (Game Boy Advance between N64 and GameCube; Nintendo DS between GameCube and Wii). Only Sony consoles appear to get games that push the hardware in its last year, and that's because Sony overlaps its consoles' lifecycles.
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But the cramming rises the price drastically. So you have to find a balance. Which, except for rare cases, means next to no cramming.
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One problem that is easily foreseeable: this would require very distinct and very specific libraries to be installed on all computers you want it to run on. That may work if all you use is DirectX, but if you use any other libraries of code... well, this really severely limits it. (example: I the exe I downloaded for the 4k demo crashed).
I would rather have to have an entire CD (incidentally, I wouldn't be able to use a floppy anymore) and be able to run it without downloading this, that, and one other li
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Of course, the downside is that it'd be all too easy to snag tiny files like that on a torrent site.
That, and games would take 4 hours to start on today's processors.
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Would libraries on the host system count? I can see how it would be easy to make a really small game, if you have hundreds of megabytes of libraries on the host system to leverage. Much harder if you have to do it all from scratch. What are the rules for these kinds of things?
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No extra download on top of a fresh installation of your (proprietary) OS.
On linux, it's much harder to define what's in and what's not, so it's a genuinely less interesting playing field for competitions.
Roboblitz does this (Score:2)
3G (Score:2)
It saves transmission bandwidth, but doesn't do the end user any other favours.
Not everybody has the opportunity to live somewhere that can get cable or DSL. So a lot of people upgrade from dial-up to satellite or 3G Internet. These plans usually have burst performance not much better than ISDN and a 5 GB/mo transfer cap, which works out to a 14.4 kbps sustained throughput, for $60 per month plus equipment costs plus prohibitive overage fees. For them, saving transmission bandwidth becomes much more important.
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It's already easy to snag gigabytes of stuff on a torrent site, I doubt making games smaller is going to make people any more inclined to pirate them unless they were truly gargantuan to begin with.. besides, having all your games generate the levels, characters, animations, sounds, AI etc procedurally would create some rather annoying loading times - not worth it unless you then save the uncompressed game so you don't have to go through the same procedure every time you run the game.
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It's already easy to snag gigabytes of stuff on a torrent site
Even with a 7 GB/mo cap [wildblue.com]?
No, they wouldn't (Score:5, Insightful)
While demos like this are extremely neat, there are also some real limitations to what you can do. This is by no means an all inclusive list but some of the major limitations of making something like this:
1) All graphics are completely procedural, as in mathematically described. That means you don't get to have an artist sit down and draw them. Puts limits on how they can look and demands a fair bit of self similarity.
2) You use a MASSIVE amount of memory in relation to your file size. You may have noticed it sits at a black screen for a bit before running. Why? It is doing all its calculations, decompressing in to memory. When running on my system, it took 350MB. Rather than storing lots on disk and streaming as needed, you store little on disk and have to use tons of RAM.
3) You can't have things like voices and such in the game, takes too much space. Even with extremely efficient compression (which produces audible artifacts) voices will quickly make your game larger.
4) All assembly coding. To do this, you are writing everything as efficient as you can. That's wonderful, but hard to maintain. For a large project that is going to need to run on a lot of systems, be patched and so on, you want a higher level language. Doing everything in assembly would be a nightmare to maintain.
I could go on, this is just an example. What it comes down to is that this is neat for demos. I -love- stuff like this, Farbrausch is one of my favourties for this sort of thing. However it is not a realistic exercise for normal applications. You do not want to sacrifice everything just to try and have a small program footprint. On the contrary, if increasing the on disk size makes it better or more efficient, then you want to do that. Disk space is extremely cheap. Better to use more of it than to sacrifice in another area.
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RAM comsumption isn't bigger than for other games. With more CPU power it should be possible to generate more things on the fly as opposed to precomputing them, reducing RAM comsumption.
As for voices, I guess we just have to wait for better text-to-voice synthesis algorithms.
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It is bigger than for something that simple. Sure, Mass Effect uses more RAM... However it does a hell of a lot more.
Again the real question is WHY. Storage is cheap. 9GB DVDs are less than a dollar a piece produced in quantity. Harddrives cost $0.10/GB and are dropping fast. Storage is just not a big deal. As such, it doesn't make sense to worry overly much about using it. I'm not saying waste space, but don't worry about trying to squeeze everything down to a minuscule size. Why would you want to waste CP
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Re:No, they wouldn't (Score:5, Insightful)
All graphics are completely procedural, as in mathematically described. That means you don't get to have an artist sit down and draw them.
Then give the artist a dataflow diagram, similar to GraphEdit, to build procedures.
Puts limits on how they can look and demands a fair bit of self similarity.
Nature is self-similar.
You use a MASSIVE amount of memory in relation to your file size.
But it doesn't have to be pushed over the wire or the optical disk, which becomes important as Xbox 360 games begin to run up against the 7 GB/disc limit and PC games begin to run up against monthly download caps [wildblue.com].
You can't have things like voices and such in the game, takes too much space. Even with extremely efficient compression (which produces audible artifacts) voices will quickly make your game larger.
I forget: how big was the S.A.M. synthesizer on the old 8-bit home micros?
All assembly coding. To do this, you are writing everything as efficient as you can. That's wonderful, but hard to maintain. For a large project that is going to need to run on a lot of systems, be patched and so on, you want a higher level language. Doing everything in assembly would be a nightmare to maintain.
Sure, demos aren't intended to be maintained much past the party, but some of the procedural techniques apply just as well to C or Lisp or ML or whatever if you want to trade off some efficiency to gain maintainability.
On the contrary, if increasing the on disk size makes it better or more efficient, then you want to do that. Disk space is extremely cheap.
Specifically, there are places where disk space is still a lot cheaper than bandwidth.
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And, of course, one can make the content procedural but cache the generated content on disk once it's generated. That way you don't even get the long loading times every time, yet still save bandwidth. If generation time is significantly shorter than download time (not unlikely as generating 300 Mi
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I think the sacrifice of RAM is an admirable goal, especially with 64 bit around the corner.
I associate bloatware more with large file sizes, disk thrashing, latency, and general sluggishness, more than something like massive memory hogging.
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But then there's the Hollywood studios that spend years and hundreds of millions of $$$ and multi-teraflop render farms to produce mega-blockbusters that only engage 4,096 of your brain cells. YMMV.
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This is clearly highly optimized for a certain OS, it doesn't work on windows 7. Probably XP?
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It looks like someone is confusing demos to mean game demos or somesuch. Demos are supposed to make your jaw drop with four kilobytes, not demonstrate what future games might look like or show you good coding practices.
Of course they could have had some artist sit down, draw beautiful pictures, integrate voice, write it in a high-level language. But that's completely not the point.
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Honestly not trying to troll, but seriously, how much of that ram and loading time is taken up by the 4K demo and how much is actually DirectX libraries being loaded?
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What you forget, is that that much optimizing of the code, takes a multiple of the time, that the whole game making usually takes. Also, you would have to do it after the playtesting, because much changes there, and you can't possibly debug that ultra-dense code. I think working with some real designers, who are no programmers, would be very hard too. :)
If you find a million people wanting to pay for that extra work, I can find you the developers do to it.
Also because you do not want to generate all the tex
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What you forget, is that that much optimizing of the code, takes a multiple of the time, that the whole game making usually takes.
Usually, optimizing just 5-10% of the program can result in significant improvements in terms of memory usage, size, execution speed.
About the file size: I don't think anybody cares for the size. I downloaded a 33 GB torrent (65 GB unpacked) a week ago.
Good for you.
But, you know, there are people who care about download size.
Me, for instance.
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It's not the executable size of most games that takes so much space on your disk, it's all the pictures and sounds.
YouTube version (Score:5, Informative)
I strongly suspect my video card won't be up to this, so I seeked out a capture of it on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE [youtube.com]
Re:YouTube version (Score:5, Funny)
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Wouldn't it be more appropriate to post a tinyurl than the direct youtube link?
no, because then you wouldn't know what you are clicking on
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why?
Re:YouTube version (Score:5, Informative)
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I watched the YouTube version, and all I can say is... fuck me, that's incredible.
For those w/o Windows - video (Score:4, Informative)
Elevated by RGBA and TBC [youtube.com].
Impressive, though it seems the demo scene has evolved to include the use of platform libraries (graphics/synthesizer.) Impressive anyways - I'm assuming the imagery is all algorithmic.
When I last paid attention to demos, it seemed to be all in the executable, code dealing directly with hardware.
Re:For those w/o Windows - video (Score:4, Insightful)
On second viewing, two things come to mind:
1) the opening scene from LOTR: The Two Towers, an amazing piece of design and rendering.
2) Audio player visualizations. The giveaway is the contrails appearing in sync to the music.
Is it possible RGBA are using a built-in visualization library, possibly from WMP? That would explain the high level of detail and apparent use of texture maps, which I'm guessing wouldn't fit into 4kb, algorithmic or not.
This (admittedly weak) theory can be verified by disabling the visualization library for Windows Media Player [techspot.com].
Anyone want to volunteer to verify this?
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Sheesh. Kids these days...
Go read up on MOD files [wikipedia.org]. (Then go add Scenemusic.eu [scenemusic.eu] to your playlist.) Visual synchronization to MOD files has been going on for over 20 years. It's a solved problem.
Schwab
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I recant my rant. It really does look possible to do what RGBA did in 4KB. This thread forced me to go learn up ...
Producing mountain-like terrains with Perlin noise [iquilezles.org].
More by the same author (Inigo Quilez.) [iquilezles.org]
Truly awesome and impressive. My eyes are opened, and I'm intrigued enough to try my hand at an implementation.
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Re:For those w/o Windows - video (Score:4, Insightful)
You were actually serious about the WMP thing?
It comes down to a few things:
- those common device drivers can do a hell of a lot these days
- that 4k executable expands to over 300 MB in memory when you run it
- these techniques have been perfected over decades of work
- mountain landscapes are one of a handful of real-world things that can be realistically generated with small equations
- these people are exceptionally talented
You are right to notice the similarity as there is a lot of overlap between music visualization and demoscene work. I would guess that the former arose as a result of work being done in the latter.
It's 4096 bytes, whatever you want to call that. A typical (self-imposed) demo limitation.
These things were being made long before there was a Windows or a WMP. And there are always those ones that make you feel like "this shouldn't be possible," but I suppose that's the point.
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Thanks for the gentle clue - chalk it up to ignorance, I haven't worked in graphics in over a decade.
See my recant [slashdot.org].
Truly impressive work. I am embarrassed by my comments now.
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>The only way to access fancy features like shaders is through the driver's API.
The API gets there somehow other than magic.
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Yes, through a secret and hardware-specific way. Not exactly very useful for anybody else.
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Yeah, and Elevated *has* to be using platform libraries, no way to fit such detailed 3d rendering and audio into 4k. Probably just high-level invocations of Win/WMP libraries, though impressive they fit that much direction into so little space.
Sequential - very nice. Any idea how big the program is?
Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
When DirectX basically has it's own 3D engine, you're basically turning the task of creating a demo into generating sounds, textures and models from formulae.
Libraries used should be limited to the minimum needed to create a window or change the display mode and shouldn't do any real grunt work or, there should be a second metric of RAM and swap files used.
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It seems to me you would also forbid a demo to use a 3d accelerator in the name of having a metric you can understand.
That's alright, but that's not really pushing your hardware to its extents.
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Yeah, I'll have to agree. It's still impressive, but when using DirectX it just isn't the same. I don't have the D3D SDK installed now, but I recall it was possible to get a teapot to render in a few lines of code, so I'd think by not including any dependencies in the binary the filesize could be very small without getting into any extreme measures.
A few more things:
Re:Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it just raises the bar. Back when all you had to work with was CGA in 320x200 it was impressive to show a rotating cube in 4k. Today, this demo nicely shows where the virtual bar is when even considering making a 4k demo. As you couldn't do "Elevated" on your 100 MHz 486 in *no* condition or with any libraries, so would you be laughed at if you presented a rotating cube or a wormhole today.
Here's an excerpt from TFA:
If you can do better, show your work :)
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Well, you're really wasting space there. With a default compile and link, you've included crt0.o which sets up the default C environment, and sections to command the dynamic linker to link in references to printf().
If you read this tutorial on the ELF format [muppetlabs.com], you'll find the smallest valid Linux x86 ELF file that sucessfully does nothing is 368 bytes (although this demo is for Windows, so will be using the Portable Executable [wikipedia.org] format instead). So you have far more code space to play with.
There are other tric
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Ouch, i thought the formatting would be preserved with tags. Posting as plain old text now :P
----- test.c
const char msg[]="Hello World\n";
void _start(){ // write (1, msg, 12); // exit(0); ./test
asm("int $0x80;"::"a"(4),"b"(1),"c"(msg),"d"(12));
asm("int $0x80;"::"a"(1),"b"(0));
}
---------
$ gcc -m32 -Os -nostdlib -nostartfiles -s -o test test.c
$ wc -c test 436 test
$
Hello World
And this is just scratching the surface. Of course, in a real 4K you would wa
libraries (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone going on here about how stupid it is that they used existing libraries mind you that typical compo rules state that it must run on a base install. Nobody here is linking to myuberleetcode.dll or anything. That and think about the freaking sound for a second or better yet try and write a 4k and then come back and talk about how stupid it is
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Listen to the demo, and then come back and tell me that it's canned MIDI. It's got a bunch of analog synth goodness going on, which simply isn't a function of any stock MIDI synth library (which, as a rule, resemble simple sample-playback machines). And, sure, it loops - but then, so does almost everything else we call "music."
It's actually very similar to old PC demos in the DOS days. Back in the day, they had a set of hardware with a set of APIs (between MS-DOS and BIOS), and they got to use all of it
It's not only about techinical skill (Score:2, Insightful)
While i certainly admire the technical skill involved, the demoscene is more than that. It's a form of art.
Just look at http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31571 [pouet.net]
Luxury! (Score:2)
Elevated is packed down into a 4k package, but it clearly uses many many times that space when it runs. That's practically cheating... a real 4k demo would run in 4k of memory, total, usually including the screen buffer.
When we did our entry for the BADGE killer demo contest in the '80s (a version of Lunar Lander that ran on the Amiga workbench and required you to land on top of your open windows) I felt we were already pushing the envelope of what was really "fair", since we were getting the "terrain" for
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Never heard of pouet, and never been to a demo party, but Google brings up the first BADGE killer demo contest [pouet.net]. Badge was the Bay Area Amiga Developer's Group (don't ask me about the acronym). Our unimpressive demo was entered in one of the later contests.
I'm not much of a hardcore demo hacker, but I am a hardcore real-time programmer who started on a machine with less than 512 bytes (that's just plain bytes, not kilo, mega, or giga bytes) of memory. So when I see someone talking about fitting something int
Link (Score:5, Funny)
Torrent anyone ?
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Explanations (Score:5, Informative)
Hi guys. I'm one of the programmers behind Elevated, Inigo Quilez. I was responsible for the programing of the visuals. Christian Ronde made the music and Rune Stubbe made the synthetizer and music player.
Apparently some people cannot believe this, but I will say it myself so there is no more useless speculation going on: this is a 4096 bytes executable demo. Not 4096 of source code. ItÂs a 4096 bytes executable (actually, a few less bytes), x86 binary, with plays a realtime animation and music demonstration without using any external data file. It uses a few d3d functions to generate a rectangle, to compile a hlsl shader and to set a projection matrix. That's it. I have read some people claiming there is "3d engines" built in in directx; I must presume those were assertions coming from people who actually know little about computer graphics today. Also, obviously, Microsoft didn't make any RenderCool( D3DX_MOUNTAINS, D3DX_PLEASE ) function in any of their APIs nor LoadTerabytesOfTextures( D3DX_ROCK_AND_SNOW, D3DX_FROM_HIDDEN_SYSTEM_FOLDER );
The demo doesn't use any external library for sound or whatever. The demo could be recompiled in OpenGL/Linux very easily (it was Opengl in fact, just ported to DX in the last minute), and be something around 4300 bytes. We went for DX to fit in 4096 bytes to complain with the competition rules of Breakpoint, the party where we presented Elevated.
Regarding the music, the demo not only encodes the music track, but also implements the instrument synthesis and track playback. The complete sound system takes about 900 of the 4096 bytes, it's mainly FPU code. To see how this is possible, you can have a look for now to sound synthesis and DSP.
The "textures" are infinite, just as the terrain itself. You can travel as far as you want on the terrain, this never ends, and same for textures. The rock, vegetation, snow, texturing takes about 100 bytes, although it uses some Perlin noise functions that take about 350 bytes. So in essence, we encoded mega, tera, peta and hexabytes of texture in few hundred bytes. The prize, of course, is that they are just too fractalish. But it made the job. Cameras are based on simple sinus and cosinus functions, the playback code is 150 bytes or so, and the camera data itself is exactly 4 bytes for each shot (a 16 bit random seed to feed the sin/cos functions with random frequencies and phases), a velocity and a FOV value. The rest of the sequencing data and playback code (to fade in, fade out, summer/winter transitions, brightness/contrast and color correction parameters) are around 400 bytes. The rendering is done in a "deferred" way, for those who know about computer graphics a little bit, which means the zbuffer if filled first and then a full-screen rectangle is drawn with a shader invocation. This shader computes the surface normals, does the texturing (lakes and sky included) and then does some tonemaping and motion blur. The shader is huge, around 1500 bytes. Another 800 bytes are used for basic operations as opening a window, initializing the rendering surface, sending the synthetized sound to the sound card, implementing the rendering loop and listening for the ESC keypress.
All this code is written in assembler (nasm), for those who were saying we donÂt know what hardware means. We spoke to the machine in this demo, as much as you can do in a modern OS at least from user code. The C version of the demo (which we used during development and debugging) is close to the 4200 bytes. The demo is also selfcompressed, and in fact the first thing the demo does at runtime is to allocate some memory (350 megas), self decompress there, and ask windows to run from that memory location. The uncompressed demo as it comes from visual studio (cl+nasm) is 7 kilobytes if I remember well.
Making a full selfcontained 4 minutes audiovisual piece like this is possible if you know computers, progaming, maths, rendering technologies, you apply a bit of imagination, and you are lucky to be the first to do it. So, those who
Re:I assume the SOURCE fits into 4 kb (Score:5, Informative)
If you're not going to read the article, maybe you should at least have some idea of what the demo scene is about before rushing to first post.
What it is saying is that the executable file is 4096 bytes. The source code has little relation to that. If the program asks to use more memory beyond that after it's loaded, that's fine.
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"4 kilobytes of storage" is hard enough to pull off a
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What is wrong today with this burst of people taking others for imbeciles ?
I did not quote the GP while saying it was 4 KB ! There was some confusion on this thread about 4kb vs 4KB so I just mentioned:
"By the way, the article says it is 4 KB not 4 kb".
You need to understand that some people may write comments in a different way that some others do when they try to prove the other poster is stupid.
To summarize I wrote :
1) The "executable" is 4KB but it must require much more memory than what is needed to di
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You assume correctly, but in no way does that detract from how impressive their work (and others' in the DemoScene) is.
Here, read up some more about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
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Even smaller - the BINARY is 4k (Score:5, Informative)
The source is much larger. The size counted is the size of the executable. Write as many comments as you like in your source code.
You can use as much memory as you like, but it's a very boring pile of memory if you don't then precompute a pile of pretty pictures using algorithms and data, which is what the 4kb is really counting.
You can use as many external libraries you like, as long as they're public; so you don't have to write your own OpenGL implementation, but you can't hide 200kb of your latest cool code somewhere other than the 4kb executable.
Feel free to hack the executable format to remove unnecessary headers and sections that an average compiler or linker would generate.
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Compression does not work that way.
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What the poster wrote is not compression. I could easily create a 4K program that can generate every possible 1MB long byte sequence (it may take a while to run). Heck, I can write that in well under 64 bytes. The rest of the 4K can be used for hueristics to stop the counter when needed and run the resulting program.
Your failure is you assumed the poster meant to compress every 1MB program into a 4K one.
Of course stopping at an arbitrary one is a problem. But of all 1MB sequences the one you may want to stop at could perhaps be identified using some heuristic or other identifier, making the original posters idea still valid.
This whole post seems to me an odd and convolute definition of compression...
BTW, information entropy prevents just what you are talking about (most of the times)
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every possible 1MB long byte sequence
So every possible bit combination in 2^8388608 ???
Can't you see that your counter to tell it when it's got the right one has to be at least 1MB ?
UNless of course you are going for the classic vids like "black horse in a coal mine" or "white horse in a snowstorm", which of course could in principle be represented by just 1 bit of counter information ?
KC explored (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and that'd be very neat and much much harder than you seem to think. Try it, go looking for that magical random seed that creates a 1MB blob of code that does something impressive. Maybe you should expand your idea to first generate a filtering program that can determine if a code sequence, when run over some data, creates a demo? :-)
4K demos are sort of an artistic exploration of Kolmogorov complexity [wikipedia.org].
Remember also that, if the judges die of old age before your demo appear, you're unlikely to place well in the compo.
Its easy to do with quantum computers (Score:3, Funny)
Try it, go looking for that magical random seed that creates a 1MB blob of code that does something impressive. Maybe you should expand your idea to first generate a filtering program that can determine if a code sequence, when run over some data, creates a demo? :-)
Its actually much easier than that with quantum computing. All you need are some trivial modifications to the Quantum Bogosort algorithm and some way to let the program know whether it has won the contest or not.
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How else do you expect people to access the graphics card? They're cheating if they don't write their own GPU driver and OpenGL implementation? Should they even be allowed to run on an existing OS, or should they have to write their own?
To be fair, the old C64 demos probably overwrote a lot of the OS with their own code. DOS demos wrote directly to the graphics hardware (and hence often had very specific hardware requirements).
However, I think it's entirely fair to set competition rules that allow you to use OpenGL / DirectX etc.
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The difference is, the old C64 demos would run on any C64.
This '4K' demo requires gigabytes of other code to run, so you need to install a hell of a lot of other software before it will work.
It will only work on certain PCs with the right configurations too, and will break when the external libraries it uses change.
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Re:Trojan (Score:5, Informative)
The compression techniques in demo code drive AV products nuts, that's just the way it is. They're not going to infect your system -- that would add too much bloat.
Shame it doesn't work on Win7 64-bit tho.
Re:Trojan (Score:5, Informative)
You need d3dx9_33.dll, which is not included on 64 bit systems.
With that DLL it works fine on XP x64.
Re:Trojan (Score:4, Informative)
The loaders they use to uncompress the image are routinly also used by virus writers for their own non-3d distructive payloads. Sometimes the people adding the virus signatures get lazy and just target the loader rather than the payload.
I'm just happy these demos run with DEP enabled.
Re:TROJAN?! (Score:5, Funny)
Funny is 4 KB app manages to do HDTV and your AV solution being thousands (if not millions) times bigger can't figure the difference between a trojan and packed executable. That is in case it is even packed.
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Indeed, it's not exactly hitting the hardware at a register level like all the proper old-school 8/16/32 bit demos in the 80s and 90s.
It's an OpenGL or DirectX demo at best, not a hardware demo.
It is still impressive of course. Especially when you consider the music engine that's taking up some of that 4KB.
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I've often thought the same. However...
Even those "old skool" 80s and 90s demos had their own "graphics libraries", just on lower level - BIOS routines to switch graphics modes, and if there was music, it was usually done using MIDI or GUS, which had hardware mixing routines. Add all DOS interrupts on top of that and you had plenty of "libraries" also available back then.
So while there is difference (back then you had to do your own polygon filling routines), even old-timers had some help, and you could ev
Re: (Score:2)
And yet still requires a DirectX DLL to run ... damn those Microsoft people, they even lock you in at assembly level :-(
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Ok, you go do it and show us all how easy it is.
Re:finally! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, don't. Then we'll have to listen to the "THEY JUST USED BUILT-IN DIRECTX FUNCTIONS FOR THIS THEY TOTALLY SUCK" crowd all over again. There's no lack of people around here who don't have a single clue what it takes to do something like that, but will yak on and on about how it is nothing impressive.
Re: (Score:2)
I've been an active coder within the demoscene since 1995 and I don't have a friggin clue how they can get all that content into 4k. That is how hard it is. Amazing stuff. And I even know the people :-)
Re: (Score:2)
But you have no idea yourself how they did it in a standalone 4KB executable, do you? Your comments on this article indicate you're as in the dark as everybody else (e.g. "a secret and hardware-specific way" [slashdot.org] -woo, technical!)
I'm no demo joe, but do have some idea what it takes to render 3D in realtime, having written a really basic game engine. A mode-X DOOM engine-alike, with back-traced texture maps (aliased), simplified BSP, all walls and sprites, no atmospherics, yielding decent framerates on early 10
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks, slackito - see my recant [slashdot.org], I stumbed across Quilez's work while answering my question. Consider me both convinced and hooked.
Re: (Score:2)
No, don't. Then we'll have to listen to the "THEY JUST USED BUILT-IN DIRECTX FUNCTIONS FOR THIS THEY TOTALLY SUCK" crowd all over again. There's no lack of people around here who don't have a single clue what it takes to do something like that, but will yak on and on about how it is nothing impressive.
This is surprising to me, frankly. I thought this is something that is, at the very least, worthy of praise and interest, especially from a supposedly technologically familiar crowd. How many posers have comments on here claiming they can do better? I mean wtf? Give some credit where credit is most definitely due, or shut up and do better.
I agree (Score:2, Funny)
I was still impressed, but the demo is heavily dependent on existing libraries. If there were an OpenGL function to draw_glorious_mountainscape_and_fly_around_it_while_playing_majestic_music(), they could have packed this into less than 100 bytes.
Re: (Score:2)
I imagine their EXE packing is what is setting it off. NOD32 had a real long hard look at it before it let it be copied to the desktop, longer than I've seen for much larger programs. I guess it had to see what was in it before it made a decision. It gave ti a clean bill of health.
Re: (Score:2)
A/V scanners are just too fucking stupid to see past the fact the executable has been compressed.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Get off my lawn!
4K = 4KB = 4096 bytes. Always will be.