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Demoscene: 64k Intros At Revision Demoparty
An anonymous reader writes "Last week-end at Revision demoparty, demosceners have pushed further the limits of what can be done in a single 64kb executable file. Using extensive procedural techniques and compression, Gaia Machina (video capture) and F — Felix's Workshop (video capture) are realtime animations, featuring high quality rendering, sound, 3D models, and textures."
Get off my lawn!
in Saarbrücken, Germany
For some reason they never have demo parties like this in North America. Why is that?
They put links in the summary for people like you.
Seven digit UID? Probably not.
Demoscene? Demoparty? 64kb executable?
Ya, i wish there was a website that you could like, search for the meaning of stuff and maybe websites about it and crap.
Be seeing you...
...you're not part of the intended audience. Admittedly, there's a lot of necessary hardware support to get these kinds of results, but still... full A/V in a space less than the banner image of most websites. Makes you wonder what could be done with similar techniques and, say, a megabyte of space.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I can't seem to make heads or tails of this post. It's techno-babble and word salad. I guess I should remember this feeling when I talk about programming with my non-programming friends.
Sort of sad as a programmer you have no knowledge of some of programming history.
Be seeing you...
Welcome to the world of computer nerds.
Do not be afraid to ask; once we too were noobs like you.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Makes me wonder if he really IS a "programmer" and not just a "HTML/CSS" scripter.
You would be surprised at how many HTML/CSS monkeys, calls themselves "programmers" these days.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I would give you 8 votes if I weren't such a coward!
Even if you somehow haven't heard of a demoparty (but this one is linked, and you are only a fingertap away from finding out what it is), or the demo scene, I would seriously hope that as a programmer you could understand what is meant by a "64KB executable file".
it's talking about how programmers manage to get high quality animations and sound from executables limited to 64Kb.
they use programming tecniques such as procedural generation and compression to achieve this.
i could simplify it even more for you if you like? maybe i could write it in crayon?
Sort of sad as a programmer you have no knowledge of some of programming history.
How else would marketing sell the same old idea as something new? That is about 99% of "innovation" in IT.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Oh, crap. You just called the demoscene "history". That means I'm old.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
It only shows me a black dosbox so i won't really believe it . it's so amusing that the 64kb demo comes in a 700kb zipfile to download. or maybe the multimegabyte big youtube stream..
I saw a couple of demo files years and years ago. DOS-based stuff. I think they were probably 16k files. I was amazed at how long the animations and music lasted from a 16KB EXE file. The demo just went on and on, for like ten minutes. Had some fairly impressive animations too. But it was all line-based sorts of things, like old screen savers.
But this... this is insane. I can't even believe what I'm seeing. I'm downloading the 720p version of the first video in MP4 format, and it's 91MB. A 91MB full-motion video rendered from a 64KB demo file. That's just nuts. It frazzles my brain to even think about how this is possible.
For PC based demos Win 7 is used. (Linux also available) The latest version of Direct X and .Net are present and available for use. Other OSs and hardware will have their own support packages as well. So yes, third party libraries are available but that does not make the outcomes any less impressive.
Here is a link to where the info above came from with additional details:
http://www.revision-party.net/compos/pc/
Yes it does make the outcome less impressive. It's easy to make small executables when you can shove off the hard work to the 100s of megs of libraries you use. Real demosceners were using their own rendering code in a tight executable not using bloated rendering frameworks like Direct3D. Lame.
/. is really making me feel old these days -- I was writing demos in the early 90's. I don't know if its my overall grumpy old-man mentality or not, but as impressive as these are, they're powered by a crap-ton of software running behind them. There's not 64k of assembly pumping bytes into a framebuffer and twiddling the PC speaker port to synthesize digital audio.
One thing I couldn't find in there (and I've been out of the scene for a LONG time, so I don't know how this works on new-fangled fancy computers...) -- do these write directly to the video hardware? Or do they use OS services like DirectX11, etc? When they say 64k, is it a 64k executable using up another dozen meg of OS DLLs?
I have to give it to them, they are very impressive. But are people still getting down and counting clock cycles?
Anyway, for you youngins, this might explain the demoscene a bit better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU
I remember the Fishtro from Future Crew exactly 20 years ago and it was 220k! (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1283) this is breathtaking stuff. Magic!
Because 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
And I'd bet that they had direct access to the hardware as well. Times change.....
So yes, third party libraries are available but that does not make the outcomes any less impressive.
Yes, it does. I don't mean to shit on their hard work, but if that is what kids today consider a 64K demo, I hope the previous generation of demo coders over there are appropriately mocking them.
I'm sure there are still copies of the 64k demos from 20 years ago kicking around online -- 64k of bytes, loaded into memory from DOS, with absolutely nothing else being used. No 3D hardware, no DirectX libraries, no .NET runtimes. That's tens of millions of lines of supporting code. So, what, they're using some procedural code to generate some textures and 3D objects, storing some sequence information, camera path splines, and pumping everything else to the OS?
I watched those videos, and they're definitely cool, but they are dramatically less impressive than what people were doing in 64k 20 years ago.
My personal favourite is still farbrausch's "fr-08 - the product": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcrV_7JpXQ
It was amazing "back then" and even today I still think it's highly awesome. All of that in 64k.
And also what the hell happened that the first two comments are expressing confusion over what this story is about?
I was never involved in demoscene stuff (despite having an Amiga during the early 90s), but I certainly knew about its existence. Was it really so niche after all?
Demoscene? Demoparty? 64kb executable?
Here is a nice article on the subject. Now hand in your geek card.
Demoscene was not always about just making the most impressive output from a given piece of technology. As I recall, demoscene evolved from game pirates marking their cracked games with elaborate intros using only the available space unused by the game. I also recall hearing that some teams would occasionally use routines from the actual game as part of their animations. With that history in mind, how can one object to using libraries now? The original spirit of the art, where your own code had to fit into a small space, is perfectly intact. Today, you can expect DirectX and OpenGL just as much as you could expect a clock in older hardware.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I've not programmed properly since the 90's. The closest I get to coding at all is web stuff now, though I don't dare call it programming. I understood the summary perfectly. The OP just might be ignorant. Or an idiot. Or both.
Dan
The point is the libraries exist, programming does not need to be a 16GB Blue ray, code is so bloated and inefficient for the amount of processing power available.
There Can Be Only One...
I don't mean to shit on their hard work...
Yet you go on to do precisely that...
And people before that did it without DOS. Go all the way back and people where flipping switches to input their code. And they found it boring to rewrite the same stuff over and over again and so created common libraries that soon became an OS and everything else.
If you make a cake from scratch, do you grown your own wheat? Then you are using the library of nature/god! Slacker! I create my own universe for every sandwhich, Big Bang all the way or you are just a faker!
Personally I think 64k is to limitting, it was nice some years ago but today, it just isn't realistic anymore, not when your average PC has 8GB of memory PLUS video memory. Go crazy, go a full MB! Make that floppy work!
I can appreciate the skill but it is like seeing someone make a nice statue with a flint... nice... now here is a steel chisel. Enjoy!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oh, then the summary did both of those, and more, in only 698 bytes.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The terminology is not obscure. You are ignorant.
So instead of trying to make sense of it all by researching on the topic, you immediately start complaining because it assumed you had prior knowledge? I'd hate to see how you've reacted to the math and science articles here a /. .
What ever did happen to people involving themselves in /. because of an inquisitive nature?
But in your days it was easy, you could count the clock cycles on the fingers of one hand and if you wanted a bit flipped you just climbed inside the computer with a hammer!
Anyway, you weren't all that impressive, you relied on a blacksmith for a hammer and a miner for the coal to fire your machine. You were just the slave master benefiting from the slave labor of others.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
No, real demosceners make their own demo hardware. Those so-called "sceners" that use pre-assembled electronics are just lame.
Sorry, but just accept that the world have moved on. And you should also understand that these modern demos are just as impressive as ye olde ones.
And for that matter, people are still making C64 demos. Like Edge of Disgrace from 2008.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
64k? at least it will fit on my ssd..
The fact these comments appear on a demoscene note on /. says everything: slashdot is dying of ignorance, and the new generations are depressing.
I was wondering why it's "demoscene" and not "demo scene"
Because English puts spaces in its compound words more often than German does.
To be worthy of posting on slashdot? Yes.
Here's the blurb I posted on my facebook page:
I forgot to mention. This stuff is also all rendered in real time. It's not a movie. The music is also composed/tracked. It is not a recording. Here's another impressive entry in the 64K competition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CiF034IhgY&hd=1 It's mind blowing where these guys have gone over the years. I thought the demoscene would have died as computers became more powerful and anyone could create effects without having to be an artistic assembly programming god. I apparently, and thankfully, was wrong :-)
I doubt he ever had a geek card.
The two files linked in the summary are actually 709KB and 384KB zipped. They are using more than 64KB of data...
http://pouet.net/toplist.php?type=64k&platform=any+platform&prodlimit=9999&dayspans=9999
enjoy :)
If a modern day game company made that it would be a 500MB cutscene.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
http://www.scene.org/
I'm from Spain, and can perfectly remember the "parties" (like campus party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_Party) I used to go while I was on the university, about 10 years ago. They were not only to share games or movies (like most media thought at that point), but specially to share knowledge and compete. 64kb content was quite famous, but you even had contest where bots where competing against each other with rules defined during the event.
Oh, and case modding: I loved that the most. I had a friend that build up a colling system to overclock with the radiator of a car (Seat Ibiza), dyalisis tubes from the hospital, and a water pump from this fish tank.
Finally, as this events were normally subsidiced from the cities, it was a cheap way to travel and know new cities. A lot of people used them as a free weekend with their girlfriend/boyfriend (and thus, it smelled a little better than a pure nerd convention).
That would be nice, but there's a catch-22: How are you supposed to find that website? Huh? How do you answer that, smartypants?
one. I met him once in a pub. he's a right cunt.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Here you go, the modeller:
http://pcg.wikidot.com/pcg-software:werkkzeug
An image of the game :http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12036
A wiki article: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/.kkrieger
You can make seamless tiles with it, export them to jpg and use them as normal.
start here: http://www.goatse.cx/
Ya, i wish there was a website that you could like, search for the meaning of stuff and maybe websites about it and crap.
Website? Search? Meaning of stuff?
There is one such website. Google for it.
I am not really here right now.
It's specific technical language. None of it is babble or word salad. All of the words have meaning, whether or not you understand.
The "libraries" only ever abstract away the 3d hardware. If you limited yourself to a single kind of hardware and it was documented, you could do pretty much the same things in mostly the same space.
Just downloaded the Felix demo and ran it on my PC. Even if it were 64MB I'd still be very moved by the skills and heart put into the artistic side of the demo. At 64KB I've been sitting in silence for 15 minutes now.
Some of the demo coders from years ago went on to start companies that created mass market hardware based 3D rendering. I doubt they'd be mocking at all.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
I remember an nVidia tech demo that was in a garden showing off whatever their latest card was at the time that was very similar to Gaia; However, by comparison, that was (IIRC) a ~1GB download!!
Damned nostalgics... ;-D
Demos in the 90s were impressive, but please look at what's going on today. The processors in 1995 were slow and the code so efficient yes, but the resolution of the display was typically 320x200 or 256x256 (an awesome resolution btw!), running at 8 bits per pixel, in other words, 64000 bytes of data to fill the whole screen with pixels. That's if you were running 8 bits. Demos would typically tweak everything tweakable to reduce the amount of data needing to be processed to make impressive stuff happen on screen. But in the end, pixelwise, not much was going on ;-D.
In 1995, 20fps was considered to be super-smooth. At full speed, 64000*20 means 1.28MB per second. That's direct memory access.
Today, 1920x1080 is standard, animations aren't smooth before they run at 60Hz, and anything else than 32 bit color depth is just silly.
1920x1080*4 (4 bytes per pixel) = 8.3MB per frame
@60Hz = 475MB / second.
These are all just numbers but IMO what's happening today is so much more awesome than the 90's. And the code that's written today, even with the backing of hardware acceleration APIs like DirectX and OpenGL, is at least equally awesome.
what makes you think CSS is not considered a program?
here's ONE definition of program (google define):
Provide (a computer or other machine) with coded instructions for the automatic performance of a particular task.
another (wikipedia):
is a sequence of instructions written to perform a specified task with a computer
what is yours?
And also what the hell happened that the first two comments are expressing confusion over what this story is about?
I was never involved in demoscene stuff (despite having an Amiga during the early 90s), but I certainly knew about its existence. Was it really so niche after all?
Yes, I think it was. There's Unix, there's PC/Mac, and there's the various home computers. If you were in one of these camps, chances are you knew nothing about what was going on in the two others.
The summary says 64kb (kilobits), or 64,000 bits. That's 7.8125 KiB (kibibytes), or 8,000 bytes. The competition is actually for 65,536 bytes, or 64 KiB.
they have been doing it for two decades ... you should forward this story to my mom, she might be astounded by it
ching chong ching chong! lei hao ma lau long? ching chong chopstick and rice time! >B
Then perhaps I was unclear: How should someone leave the United States without being groped?
These kinds of people need to get together and make games, or even better a game engine.
You mean like .kkrieger?
But seriously, a 20 hour game is a lot more work for a demogroup's graphician than a 20 minute demo. There's an amount of work beyond which a graphician has the patience to work for free.
'Lame.'
The reality is that even the initialisation code of modern GPU's is several MB in size.
And the hardware is propietary.
And it is so incredibly complex that you would need a serious team for a long time to make a driver for that specific piece of graphics hardware.
Writing your own GPU drivers for the purpose of demos goes beyond the purpose of writing demo's.
Mind you, where would you get the specifications of the diverse GPU's from?
It used to be relatively easy in ye old days where almost all available hardware was either documented or simple enough to experiment your way through.
Nowadays even the software interfaces to the drivers are dragons. You don't want to know what is actually happening on the bus level.
I mean, you're expecting demo guys to write their own GPU drivers while the OS community is struggeling with this despite a ;arge ammount of serious people working on the issue.
Go ask these guys if they would whip up a driver for the sake of a demo.
Then ask them if it would fit in any size below 1MB.
Note the strange looks and insecure laughs.
That is just the reality of computing these days.
I first noticed when i saw java vm bytecode demo's 10 years ago. The world had changed.
I purchased their subsequent game, Enclave, because of that demo
That's quite ironic given how the most exposure many people have to a demo scene is the executable that reads the NFO file that comes with a lot of pirated software.
This is just elitist garbage and could just as well be applied to anyone who doesn't code directly in assembly.
HTML/CSS last I saw was a large amount of text which a computer interprets to produce a specific result.
JAVA/.NET last I saw was a large amount of text which a computer interprets to produce a specific result.
Off your high horse old man.