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Hacking Hi-Def Graphics and Camerawork Into 4Kb
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."
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.
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
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.
Does my bum look big in this?
It takes a 64MB avi to store the 4KB demo!
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.
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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
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.
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
Elevated by RGBA and TBC.
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.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
I don't deny these demos are impressive but the fact they use existing libraries lessens the achievement for me.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Remember also that, if the judges die of old age before your demo appear, you're unlikely to place well in the compo.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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
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.
Ok, you go do it and show us all how easy it is.
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.
You need d3dx9_33.dll, which is not included on 64 bit systems.
With that DLL it works fine on XP x64.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Last post!
Torrent anyone ?
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 display an icon. I used the term "source" in a video/audio context where there is usually a source involved in order to provide playback. I ain't stupid enough to ignore that the 4 KB must actually be machine code. I ain't stupid enough to ignore that 4*1024=4096 either...
2) "By the way, the article says it is 4 KB not 4 kb" in order to clarify apparent confusion due to some other posters mentioning 4 kb and also due to the fact that 4 kb was used in the summary posted on /. front page, not to try to prove the GP stupid.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Get off my lawn!
4K = 4KB = 4096 bytes. Always will be.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
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.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
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
I'd presume that there's a fair bit of self-modifying code in there, even if you don't count the almost-mandatory executable packer. Self-modifying code often gives virus scanners a woody. Or the willies, whichever. ;)
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