8 ms·
Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter
- in9 9y agohahaha it's funny cuz it's still in beta
- speps 9y agoA few years ago, Farbrausch released a lot of the code for their demos on GitHub : https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public I think it contains .kkrieger but I didn't try it.
- JoachimSchipper 9y agoIt may be of interest to note that this includes their tools as well as the actual produced demos.
- corysama 9y agoYep. At one point they were trying to make their procedural modeling tool .werkkzeug into a commercial product targeting mobile game dev. But, I guess they didn't find an audience. If you find that interesting, you really should check out http://tooll.io http://tooll.io It's pretty much a more modern take on .werkkzeug with a focus on usability rather than compression.
- donquichotte 9y agoVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qrsHqDF4BA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qrsHqDF4BA
- masta 9y agoIt's amazing how many things the guy in the video gets wrong. ;)
- StavrosK 9y agoHah, this poor guy is reviewing a demo as if it's a game, and sounds hilariously clueless in the process. "I'm amazed they didn't finish this game, this plays really well." To be fair, a legitimate review would have just been "Holy shit, this is 96k. Holy shit. Just 96k. Jesus. That's less than the space taken than a single screenshot. Wow." EDIT: Oh, I see what happened. He thought "demo" referred to a game demo, as in a limited edition of a full game.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoThe archived site emphasizes that "this is a beta version, and there are a lot of known bugs." It's not unreasonable to assume they intended to do more with it.
- tripzilch 9y agoTrue, but I like how impressed he is by certain parts of the graphics/meshes :) The procedural generation technique, apart from saving tons of space, also allows for some pretty good+realistic tree trunk and rock objects (or "effects" as they'd be called if this had been a regular demo instead of a game). I do agree with him about the lack of gore. It doesn't necessarily have to be bloody per se, but there's a great short gamedev presentation called "Juice it or lose it"[0] with loads of basic little tricks to make a game "juicier". They already hit a bunch of them, but there could have been some monster bits flying from the explosion. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg (15 mins)
- wruza 9y agohttps://youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=2NBG-sKFaB0 For those who can't stand that endless stream of bs.
- atroll 9y agothose are real gamedevs
- golergka 9y agoNo, those are real demodevs. Games are not about technical superiority - they're about having fun and projecting stories and emotions, just like any other art form.
- Millennium 9y agoTell that to the AAA market.
- apk-d 9y agoAAA games often project emotions too - just a different _kind_ of emotions. Just because Modern Warfare is a different experience than Inside or Fez doesn't mean you don't feel anything when playing it. There's plenty of place in the world for all kinds of games.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI don't get the hate for CoD. I played all but last Modern Warfare installments and really liked the single-player campaign!
- ashark 9y agoI know the spin-offs catch a lot of shit—and the first Black Ops was awful—but Black Ops II, for all its problems, does more interesting stuff in both its single- and multi-player than I've seen in another console FPS since Perfect Dark. [EDIT] though, to be clear, still far less than Perfect Dark did.
- juliangoldsmith 9y ago>just like any other art form That implies that making something technically impressive, like .kkrieger, isn't an art form.
- masta 9y agoFabian Giesen aka ryg, one of the developers behind .kkrieger wrote up a post about how they crunched out the last bytes to get it down to 96k. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
- sp332 9y agoThis is definitely the interesting part. My favorite bit is the features that were coded in, but are missing from the build because they weren't part of a test.
- vog 9y agoSpeaking of Fabian Giesen, his whole blog is worth a read: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/ This is one of the very few blogs where I enjoyed reading every single article.
- heinz 9y agoUC8
- davrosthedalek 9y agoI wonder how many young people were inspired to take up programming because of the work of Future Crew, Farbrausch and the like. I certainly was, after experiencing what FC did with Second Reality. Props to Farbrausch for publishing so much of their code. In some sense, getting 1k colors out of a CGA is the contra-movement to node.js :)
- theandrewbailey 9y agoFarbrausch definitely inspired me to get into programming, just so I could program something 3D. Learning how to program was the easy part; figuring out how 3D graphics work was harder, because of all the complicated math/algebra involved. I eventually got some lit and textured polys going, and some shadow mapping (even wrote the Wikipedia article on it), then gave up and settled for web programming. (Hey look, WebGL!)
- jansenvt 9y agoI'm very excited and intimidated by WebGL and other graphics/animation platforms for the web. It's something I've always been very interested in but I don't have any clue on how any of it works. I think it will probably always remain mostly separate from the type of typical web dev work I do, but I still want to learn it.
- mrdoob2 9y agoThat's what three.js is for <o/
- irascible 9y agoDude. Three.js has done so much for me, I can barely begin to describe the impact it has had on my career and life. You are literally responsible for enabling me to pursue what I love to do, and put bread on my table in the process. Thank you SOOOO much for your work.
- davrosthedalek 9y ago
- smrtinsert 9y agoI remember playing this on a fantastic 12 fps, but still being blown away. I was heavy into demoscene at the time so it just added to the wonder of it all. Inspiring stuff.
- theandrewbailey 9y agoMy graphics card at the time was too shitty to even try to run this (Rage 128). One of the first things I ran after getting a much better card a few months later was play kkrieger.
- pointe 9y agoMy friends and I used this for benchmarking new PCs. Hardly anyone got over 20fps consistently back then.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoI had seen a few things from the demoscene where I nodded saying, "Impressive coding," to just move on to next interesting thing in a feed. Kkrieger was the first one I saw that blew me away to the point I played it a bit extra just impressed by what it was doing. I also sent it to a bunch of people. Awesome project. :)
- bobsam 9y ago96KB? A guy I know wrote a Minecraft clone, a left 4 dead clone and a populus clone in 4KB each. (he also wrote the real Minecraft)
- svenfaw 9y agoWasn't aware of that. Reddit thread (2011): https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/fhdlp/minecraft_4k_a_minimalist_minecraft_made_by_notch/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/fhdlp/minecraft_...
- rounce 9y agoRather unfair comparison IMO. All of the '4k' demos you mention rely on the Java runtime and lean on the big JRE stdlib. That's not to their detriment, just that they've had some rather large hurdles overcome for them compared to the starting point of produkkt/Farbrausch. > (he also wrote the real Minecraft) So what you're /actually/ trying to do is namedrop, and say "I know notch". Good for you. I find it funny that you felt the need to add this footnote, given anyone who is wise to these prods (or just googles them) will be aware of the author.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoIIRC, the "Left 4 Dead clone" was a single-player top-down shooter with sub-Atari 2600 graphics, and the "Minecraft clone" was basically a screen saver, zooming non-interactively through endless raycast cubes. Much respect for doing that in 4K, but it's not directly comparable to a fully textured and lit FPS.
- ythn 9y ago~96 KB on disk, but how much in RAM?
- ptha 9y agoFrom the wikipedia article: The entire game uses only 97,280 bytes of disk space. In contrast, most contemporary first-person shooters fill one or more CDs or DVDs. According to the developers, .kkrieger itself would take up around 200–300 MB of space if it had been stored the conventional way [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger#Procedural_content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger#Procedural_content
- msl 9y agoI just tested it with Wine. The process seemed to consume about 320MiB of RAM.
- SurrealSoul 9y agoDoom is 4196KB. That's pretty crazy
- tripzilch 9y agoThat's still only roughly the size of a single mp3 file or one digital camera picture! :) And of course, the biggest trick in .kkrieger is that everything is procedural. A choice made because of the goal they set out with. There's assets in Doom that just couldn't have been done with tiny procedural texture descriptions and still represent quite the same thing. For .kkrieger such assets were simply not an option and the game was designed around it. Also, I always liken the graphics in .kkrieger to Halflife 1, not Doom, which is quite a bit different. Objects in Doom were all billboarded sprites, afaicr.
- dreen 9y agoHas anyone yet succeeded in running it on a modern computer? Last time I tried it I had no luck.
- lnx01 9y agoIt's runs fine on Wine, albeit in the top left corner of the screen. You could probably get it to run full screen with the right wine startup parameters. edit: wine-stable on ubuntu17.04
- sp332 9y agoI don't remember having any trouble. I just tested again and my Win10 laptop ran it just fine. Edit: Just make sure it actually closes when you close it. I checked my task manager and it was still running!
- kuroguro 9y agoJust ran it on win10, works fine :) A friend of mine needed to tick winXP compat mode to get it running but it ran out of the box for me.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoSo where can I actually download this? Wikipedia links to an archive of the original page, and the download wasn't archived.
- tripzilch 9y agoCan a mod maybe edit the title to ".kkrieger — (...)"? :) I'm fairly certain that Farbrausch made it a point to have many of their releases begin with a lowercase 'k' (for no other reason than style, afaik). You can choose to omit the dot if you really don't like it, but it's just not spelled with an uppercase 'k'. And these people are German, where nouns are always capitalized. So when they do not, it's very much on purpose.