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this seriously reminds me of http://www.theproduct.de/

a 64KB file that provided fully 3d rendered graphics and high quality music. this was obviously a static designed presentation so its easy to tune to that level, as well as being 3d graphics versus video frames.

i see it being possible, but more as a post-content encoding method, than an on-the-fly method.

Probable, MAYBE. Practical, prob needs high CPU/GPU acceleration to be able to encode on the fly, and possibly on decode too.

The famous production people usually refer to when it comes to small files with procedurally generated graphics is .the .product by farbrausch. If you read that site, you'll find out many of the tips and tricks that can be used to really pack down the size of executables and still make amazing 3d scenes.

Actually, I (and probably hordes of other people) was even more impressed by their demo Debris that won the Breakpoint 2007 full demo compo that allows filesizes up to 64MB with a 177kB demo that runs for 7:19... :)

(Posting anonymously so my mods here don't go to waste...)

np: Tosca - No More Olives (J.A.C.)

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, 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 format instead). So you have far more code space to play with.

There are other tricks; usually the thing is packed with a code compressor, as even tightly-written code is likely to have some redundancy. I haven't looked at this one, but it's likely that 4kb executable is the result of an exe-packer packing a 5kb-10kb executable.

The famous production people usually refer to when it comes to small files with procedurally generated graphics is .the .product by farbrausch. If you read that site, you'll find out many of the tips and tricks that can be used to really pack down the size of executables and still make amazing 3d scenes.

Hardly ever does even an expert assembly programmer do better than an optimizing compiler, but it does happen occasionally.

tell that to the guys who do those 64k demos, like the produkt (and there are thousands more, but this one is my fave)

http://www.theproduct.de/

Absolutely, Second Reality set the "Holy Shit" bar for me back in the day, and nothing has surpassed it to this point.

The only thing that has come close was the fr-08: .the .product demo in under 64k back in 2000.

There's no goddamn reason why you can't watch or archive DVDs on your PC. If it's for your own private purposes, I doubt the MPAA et al would give a fuck.

But the MPAA would give an intercourse if you sell already built PCs running MythTV software with full support for DVD Video.

Maybe it's a big file because FULL LENGTH MOVIES TEND TO BE MORE THAN A FEW MEG.

Machinima anyone? If a demo such as .the .product can fit into 64 KiB, imagine what can fit into 64 MiB. How much space do you think two hours of SWF vector animation and voice acting would take up? But for actual video shot with a camcorder or film camera, patents are still a problem for independent video distribution, as a lot of codecs' patent pools ask for royalties per copy.

Having moved to the Mac a few years back, I haven't found many demos which run natively on my machine. I feel like I've been missing out. Demos like the product are great.

Is this a sign the demo scene may just kick off big time for J2SE? I wonder if anyone has thought about J2ME.

With such a rich API available, we're going to see some great (playable!) demos.

Sure, music will probably be the largest assets, but there are nice ways to losslessly compress them.

Games already use lossy compressed music. For instance, Dance Dance Revolution Konamix and Katamari Damacy use Sony's VAG codec which is supported by PS1 and PS2 hardware, and Unreal Tournament 2003 and newer use Ogg Vorbis audio. Do you expect publishers to go below the quality of MP3 at 128 kbps on console games? The only music compression that can get really tiny and still be listenable is reorchestrating the soundtrack as tracked music, whether MIDI or MOD or XM or whatever, and nowadays only handheld games can seem to get away with real-time wavetable synthesis.

Textures tend to be bigger than compressed music, so unless you synthesize textures (as is done in .the .product), they tend to fill the disc. In addition, there's a tradeoff between raw loading time and decompression time.

Lots of polygons, lots of pixels. You can compress things to an extent; however you start trading off quality and CPU cycles to do so.

.the .product will make you happy. This demo by Farbrausch is only 64 KB in size, but it demonstrates the kind of procedural generation of content that programmers can produce if they put their minds to it. And you have to trade off CPU cycles in order to get to that sweet spot where the NOW LOADING screen is neither disc-bound nor CPU-bound.

(These aren't simply FMVs, either; Star Ocean 3 has a lot of large areas, voice acting, etc.)

Do RPGs released in Europe have voice acting in multiple continental languages, or is it just English or Japanese with subtitles?

The ability to play my own video from memory sticks isn't too bad, though, although I've never used it.

You're feeling the chilling effect of the DMCA, right?

However, I do find considering the entire handheld race won this generation because of something that's basically a tamagotchi to be a bit silly.

As I understood it, the point wasn't that one brand had "won this generation" as much as "won as of September 2005".

Hot Shots Golf rocks; don't bash it, people have bought PSPs for it, and I've spent far too much time in the past two days learning why. It's fun, and excellently implemented, with huge long-term value.

How does Hot Shots Golf compare to Mario Golf: Advance Tour?

This is like anything else entirely dependant on what you like to play.

I bought a GBA, and I'm considering buying a Nintendo DS, in part because of the ability to play a game called devkitARM where the object is to make your own game and brag about it on the Internet. Sony Computer Entertainment has shown itself to be much more proactive about thwarting homebrew than Nintendo is.

the voice files were too big due to the extra languages

Which voice codec did you use? Some generic ADPCM or MP3 codec, or a specifically voice-tuned codec such as Speex?

The entire thing was textures. Gigabytes and gigabytes of compressed textures.

You could have gone the path of .the .product and generated a lot of the game's textures procedurally.

> I've often wondered what execution time would be for something like a game coded in assembly language with no OS or other outside calls.

You are only showing your lack of understanding of the issue:

1) /implementation/ time would be measured in dozen of thousands of man-years.

2) It is *impossible* to a modern game without the OS, because register-level acces to video card is impossible (closed drivers).

3) Even if you had video board specifications, you would have to hand-code the game for dozen of different grahics cars. You'll end-up re-inventing something like opengl.

4) Video is only part of the problem. 3D sound card, network card (for networked play), with a full IP stack trown-in for good measure, and a file-system support. Oh joy of dealing with IDE/ATA/SATA/USB and FireWire drive at the register level.

Can we agree that you would need *at least* an OS and some APIs (like directX) ?

Then, you want to code your game in assembly on top of those APIs.

You'll end up with something like http://www.theproduct.de/ (http://www.theproduct.de)

But the truth is that you cannot beat Doom3. It may be implemented in C/C++, and you may get a few percent speedup by implementing in in assembly, but the time it'll take you to do that will get you beaten by Moore's law (ie: the C code will run faster and be compatible with the new machines).

Anyone remember The Product? It's a 63.5 kb first person shooter. Pretty neat.

Slashdot covered it a few months ago.

I think he got the wrong link.

The one the author mentioned is a demo of the same crew.
Check out the legendary 64K demo @ The Product.de

In a sense it is. I used to be an amiga scener back in the day, and recently wanted to see what the PC guys are up to these days. I can tell you, I'm pretty disappointed with most of what I've seen. I was very impressed by stuff like this, which, ironically, was coded by an ex-Amiga guy (dierk "chaos" ohlerich).

I don't mean to flame, but I've been much more impressed by what games companies are doing these days than by PC demos from the last two years. There was a time when the demoscene was ahead of game developers. I don't think this is still true.

TBL still makes demos for Amiga 1200 (060/AGA) that are quite impressive. Most PC stuff I've seen is mediocre.

They still do.


Just check out The Product which shows a complete demo contained in 64K!!!

I think they [the demo-scene] just went more 'underground', then they used too.

For those interesting in something else from the same people, check out this 64k demo which among other things, includes detailed 3d-models of nude women. :)

And yes, .the.product is (for the better part) playable under Linux with Wine's DX8 wrapper, if you don't mind the music being a tad out of sync.

There is no texture in that file, only code to generate it. This was done before.

• Yes, we are the same guys who are responsible for FR-08: .the .product and all the follow-ups (which you can find at our home page, http://www.farb-rausch.de).
• We don't use any hidden texture/sound or game generators in Windows. .kkrieger requires DirectX 9, but only to gain access to the graphics and sound hardware. OpenGL and whatever audio API would also work, we just chose to use DirectX. Maybe we will even release a Linux version in the future (which should be about the same size using X and ALSA), but as all this is done in our spare time and none of us has a linux desktop PC, it's rather improbable. So, the only thing where we "cheated" and used ressources from Windows are the Arial and Times New Roman fonts which we use as base material for our fonts (heavily processed tho). This and all Windows DLLs that are essential for running. We don't even use any external libc.
• All content, that is: the textures, the models, the map and part of the animations is generated procedurally. The basic concept is a modular graphics synthesizer which only stores the steps needed to opbain a certain image or mesh with their parameters. On www.theproduct.de you'll find a short explanation. .kkrieger uses the very same concepts, only in a really evolved and refined way.
• Also the sound is created procedurally by a virtual-analog software synthesizer processing heavily compressed MIDI data. It runs in real-time (for the music) as well as as pre-processing step (for the sound effects). Actual sound output is done via simplest DirectSound programming.
• The graphics engine is made for Doom3-style graphics, that means full Phong lighting model with various light sources and normal mapping everywhere, and of course stencil based shadows. It requires a PS1.3 level graphics card such as a GeForce4Ti or a Radeon8500 or better, though it's only fun on at least a Radeon 9600 or a GeforceFX 5700, we know.
• We also know about the insane hardware and memory requirements and all the bugs as well as the mostly missing gameplay, but we worked on it (partly) for about two years and we definitely wanted to get it out at the Breakpoint party on Easter. This meant lots of things we had to cut, this meant lots of thigs we didn't test, and we know this beta is far from perfect. But expect a final version in a few months (we'll definitely take some rest now) which will be about 128k and not only feature less bugs, hangs and fsckups but only vastly more content and hopefully an improved engine capable of real vs/ps2.0 support for more speed and quality. Oh, and gameplay. And monsters that actually DIE instead of just being turned off :)

I knew I'd heard the name before..yeah... http://www.theproduct.de/ that's where.

I just looked through my archive, and I wrote about it on the 30th October 2001! That was nearly three years ago :o/ Mein gott I feel old.
Anyway, those guys are simply amaaazing.

Are they related in any way to these guys that released a 64kb demo in 2000 called .the .product?

I love 64kb demos. Sure it might not make the best games, but it means they are looking at all aspects of the code. Now if other programers for all apps would be that meticulous.

Demoscene, I guess. I'm not really in the know, but theproduct.de (from farbrausch) was the first thing that sprung to mind.

For those of you who don't have a GPU with pixelshaders, you can try the original which started the whole thing, the 64kb fr-08: http://www.theproduct.de/

the article mentions that this party is one of the biggest (or THe biggest) ever to take place in North America.

You must remember, however, that these parties have been going on in Europe on an incredibly larger scale for over ten years.

To them, 1,000 people is nothing, and they do so much more at their parties (Demo Competitions, music compos, and even some good ol' fashioned C64 compos. In fact, gaming (and warez trading) is outright banned in some of the parties. You've gotta have respect for these people who see the parties as a chance for social interaction, learning new stuff, meeting new people, and writing kick-ass code. I just don't get why we (americans) just like to shoot stuff - how unimaginative! Probably has something to to with the present administration....

This looks a lot like Woodstock for computer geeks.

Well, actually it's a Woodstocks for sceners. If you want to become one, too, click here =P

Maybe they're all making this.

OMG you are clueless.

As I wrote above, Farbrausch pulled it off in .the .product.

If game makers don't provide some way for people to try out a game with demos, etc., that's their problem if they want to lose money.

Are they right to expect all users to have broadband Internet access in order to get the demo? Why can't they make a demo in 10 MB? Farbrausch made one in 64 KB.

But that still doesn't give you the right to download the ISO freely off of Kazaa

I didn't claim that piracy was the answer. I just want some half-playable demos, please.

.the .product, while not a game, is a demo in 64kb. 7 fully 3d scenes, 12 minutes of music, and a cool scroller. It's amazing enough to look at on it's own, but when you consider it's only 64kb, and runs on today's computers, it's unbelievable.

If Intel really wants to push sales of their chips, the best thing they can do right now would be to encourage developers of applications do default to using encryption, a CPU intensive process that hasn't yet been offloaded to dedicated hardware. Games are intensive but newer video cards dedicated in design to rendering outpace even a CPU with SIMD. Increasing CPU speed might be able to get you a faster load time, but you'd have to switch to something like generating textures on the fly

This may not appear immediately relevant, but bear with me.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with ZeoSync's claims, but if you can impose a semblance of order on something that only appears chaotic, you can do some pretty cool stuff.

Take for example this little demo at this website in germany. (I realize what the domain looks like, there's nothing for sale or license, trust me). The actual download link is about halfway down the page.

This isn't "compression" in the conventional sense, but they still manage to contain a demo that contains hundreds of megs of textures and samples, in addition to the engine itself in *64kb*. Now thats a hell of a ratio.

They do this not by storing the raw data, but instead storing the instructions needed to reconstruct the data as it is needed.

Granted, I realize that they only accomplished this with their own data, but I don't think taking this a step further to an arbitrary set of textures and sounds is impossible. Granted, this idea won't work for all types of data, and also can not be considered "lossless", (hell, it's not even strictly compression) but I still think it's incredible that you can get this high quality results out of something this small.

(Disclaimer: The above link is to a demo that requires directx 8.1 and I sincerely doubt will run under wine. It also doesn't work with every video card out there. I've scanned the binary, and it doesn't appear to have any viruses or trojans, but I won't guarantee it. If you can't accept the risk, don't download the binary.)

Speaking of small demos, there is an execellent, high quality 11 minute 64 kb pc demo called the product. (sorry, windows only, DX 8 required).

Yeah. Check out .the .product - it can be found here. A five-minute long 3D-rendered demo in 64k... compressed 30,000:1

i dont think that anyone could squeeze anything of value into 64k.

.farbrausch has.

.the .product will make you believe.

.the .product is a 63.5 KB demo that uses directx7 and uses 16 MB worth of algorithmically generated textures.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what's the beef with a 100K program?

You can't enter a 100 KB program in a 64 KB demo competition. However, you can enter a well-written 64 KB demo in an 8 MB demo competition.

Its a 10? minute long realtime rendered video.

www.theproduct.de

It's really amazing, and it would seem that what they were describing in the article is already here, but maybe im not quite clear on what they meant.

Malcolm solves his problems with a chainsaw,

8-fold compression by only storing the difference between words... could someone tell me how this is possible? Now, I know some amazing compression things have been done (.the .product) but this is just text.. I don't understand.