First Person Shooter - Under 100KBs of Code

Cariad Ilmara writes "For those of you old-timers who spent days & nights trying to get your code fit into 64Kb, here's the first beta of .the .produkkt's next FPS: .kkrieger. Moderately beautiful, what's impressive is it can fit inside the UT2004 readme. The demo is 96Kb zipped. All textures are procedural and generated at startup. Screenshots available here, here, here, here, and here. You still need a relatively recent computer (~1.4Ghz, 512MB RAM) and a DirectX8 GPU (Windows required)."

Comments

Anyone remember omniscent?

[teejie]

Omniscent, is the first level of Descent (you remember, the first 360degrees shooter) in 4kb (4096 bytes) with music and textures. Non-playable, but still really cool. It was released in 1997.

Re:zipped doesn't count for size

[br0ck]

Informative?? It unzips to exactly 96k.

Re:Amazing Screenshots

[eddy]

Google 'Perlin Noise'. Read 'Procedural' as 'described mathematically'.

Re:100KB, please

[faxe]

this guys ARE demo scene guys, also known as Farbrausch.

Mirrors

[dbloodnok]

Trust slashdot to kill a website hosting a 96k file.

try here and here or for a complete list here

Farb-Rausch do some nice demos... worth checking out.

Explanations!

[kb]

Hi...

As I'm one of the guys responsible for this game, let me explain a few things.

First, to all the people saying this is senseless etc.: Please watch every second story posted on /. - most of them are about people doing something nobody in their right mind would ever try. So come on ;)

Then, a few clarifications:

• 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 :)

Hope that clears up a few things...

Tammo "kb" Hinrichs
Farbrausch Consumer Consulting
freelance audio programming guy for .kkrieger
shocked that our server is still alive.

Another interesting game

[ynnaD]

Noctis (http://anywherebb.com/noctis.html) is less than 1mb but lets the player explore a whole galaxy. It's an interesting game where you have total freedom to fly anywhere and do anything. No fighting, just exploration.