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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."
Demoscene? Demoparty? 64kb executable?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
in Saarbrücken, Germany
For some reason they never have demo parties like this in North America. Why is that?
I'm sorry, but I have to get this off my chest after all these years. I was...the one you gave Steve Jobs AIDS. I have been HIV positive for nearly a decade and I knew I shouldn't have had sex with him in the bathhouse that night, but when we started stroking my shaft and fingering my prostate I lost all sense of reason. I told him we should use a condom 'just in case' but he demanded that I plow him bareback and I couldn't help but to orgasm in his asshole. A few months later was when he first started having health issues and I've felt bad ever since.
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.
...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!
Yeah, so just their executable is 64kb, but what's the size of the code and memory usage of the libraries this is obviously calling to do the actual work of rendering the 3d images and creating the audio? I'm guessing far more than 64kb...
Not enough deliberately obscure terminology. .
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.
/. 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.
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 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.
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.
64k? at least it will fit on my ssd..
I was wondering why it's "demoscene" and not "demo scene"
Because English puts spaces in its compound words more often than German does.
The two files linked in the summary are actually 709KB and 384KB zipped. They are using more than 64KB of data...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.