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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)."
Not as impressive, but there's a software raytracer with shadows and recursive reflection which generates .PBM images - in 2K of C source, with no libraries required.
http://www.mrio-software.com/2k_raytracer.php
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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/
...Infinite Game Universe: Mathematical Techniques that talks a lot about how to have a varied game universe while keeping size requirements under control.
One of the techniques he discusses is using a psuedorandom number generator to create game objects and attributes and such, and shipping the game with a couple of pregenerated seeds to start up the generators. He uses the game Elite a lot in his examples, and anyone who's played that game knows what a good job they did in that regard.
It's an interesting approach, especially when contrasted with WAD files.
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According to the readme, the texture-maps are generated in real-time:
.not. have some kind of magical data compression machine that is able to squeeze hundreds of megabytes of mesh/texture and sound data into 96k. We merely store the individual steps employed by the artists to produce their textures and meshes, in a very compact way. This allows us to get .much. higher data density than is achievable with normal data compression techniques, at some expense in artistic freedom and loading times.
We do
The problem with this, of course, is that it requires major computational power, and you're limited with the type of textures you can produce. It's probably a case of this program specifying 'bumpy metallic texture' or 'smooth stone texture' on the fly.
I remember the old flight-sim 'Strike Commander' would generate the game's maps during installation based on fractals. It used take AGES... this program generates many more megabytes of graphics on the fly... very impressive.
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
I did something similar using OpenGL. It is a 3D asteroids game in which the action occurs in 3d, not in a 2d plane. The zip file for it is about 102 kb, but most of that is because I included glut.dll so that people wouldn't have to hunt it down. Oh, and by using OpenGL I have been able to run it on Windows, MacOS, and Linux.
Lasers Controlled Games!
1) get your cool geek game advertised on slashdot.
2) lots of people download it and run it.
3) bury some obfuscated language in a 30 page EULA [well, 30 pages that only show up 5 lines at a time in a tiny un-resizeable window]. The gist of the "I agree" button is that your machine will bootstrap into a nuke-and-pave Linux installation!
Ok, this is tongue in cheek, but seriously, do the slashdot editors evaluate things like this for viruses or other mal-ware? Where's the checksum of the one they checked?
Who downloads mysterious 100K executables and runs them on a live machine? [heh, especially from Germany, I mention this only because the last two unprotected Windows machines put on the net by some hapless aquaintences of mine were running German FTP sites so fast you'd think they were configured that way out of the box.]
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
No so much a compression algorithm as a way of procedurally generating textures. Theoretically using this technique a games company could ship a game and the user could decide at the other end what size and detail they want their textures to be. This would have benefits as the textures would be scalable to suit users hardware and only one set would need be distributed in a small vector/algorithm/macro form. If more game distribution was moved to online electronic form then this would certainly be something worthy of consideration by the developers.
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Also there may be a model for selling software online rather then on CD/DVD. Obviously this game would cost a bit less to host then say the 5CD farcry.
Also don't forget more portable solutions. Laptops or PDA's and other gadgets. They got extremely limited storage but my old calculator could hold this one. Not run it but hold it :)
Mostly however this is just a tech demo. Showing that you do not need a massive wad of textures just to make a nice looking game.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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. :)