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The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and pathtracing
- onion2k 6y agoNuSan (https://twitter.com/NuSan_fx https://twitter.com/NuSan_fx) does regular livestreams where he writes a shader from scratch in a couple of hours. They're always impressive and you can learn a lot from seeing his process. He also puts the code for his work up on Shadertoy which is really helpful.
- rustybolt 6y agoInigo Quilez does similar things on his youtube channel [1] and site [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdmAhiG8HQDlz8uyekw4ENw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdmAhiG8HQDlz8uyekw4ENw [2] http://iquilezles.org http://iquilezles.org
- codetrotter 6y agoevvvvil_ and Flopine also https://twitch.tv/evvvvil_ https://twitch.tv/evvvvil_ https://twitch.tv/flopine https://twitch.tv/flopine
- andybak 6y agoI do wonder how much my dislike of and inability to learn from video tutorials shuts me off from some wonderful content. But try as I might I just can't focus for more than 30 seconds and I can feel my irritation rising and my desire to find some non-spoken version of the same material increasing.
- jsjohnst 6y agoEspecially agree when it’s a ten minutes of talking and fumbling around on what really should’ve been maybe three photos and three sentences in a blog post. Go and watch almost any video on building or fixing electronics and you’ll see what I mean.
- dwrodri 6y agoI know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like "elevated" from 2009 [1]. I've heard Iñigo Quílez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene). 1= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE
- dwrodri 6y agoFor those who haven't seen his work already: https://iquilezles.org/index.html https://iquilezles.org/index.html
- jonnydubowsky 6y agoI enjoy reading his blog as well. One of my favorite posts is: https://www.iquilezles.org/blog/?p=4765 https://www.iquilezles.org/blog/?p=4765 "Though – at some level, all facts that you know are untrue. 1. To a toddler, Mickey Mouse dancing in a film is a character that undoubtedly exist in front them. 2. But that is false, everybody knows a film is just lots of “images”, right? 3. Well, that’s false too, to a nerd images are “a matrix of tiny colored squared pixels” 4. But that is false too, a professional programmer knows pixels are not squares but point-samples trying their best at filtering an analog signal” So, while all are partial truths in a given context, they are also false at the next level of understanding. These conflicts of false truths usually gets resolved easily: most of us rarely enjoy knowing more than one or two levels of truth to any particular topic anyways, and ignorance makes happiness. On the other hand, an experienced communicator can adjust her speech and pick the right truth based on the audience she’s talking to, assuming there’s little variance in the audience’s profiles. But, what happens when something needs to be communicated to a huge audience of varying levels of education or interest in a topic that is important to everybody? Say a nation wide message. When you address a disparate audience of millions that need an explanations, how do you choose the level of reality you going to operate in; which of all the false truths are you going to employ to convey your message?"
- pjmlp 6y agoNow imagine how the demo would look like if they were allowed to use Electron size for the executable/shader code.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoWhat’s the system requirements?
- aabbcc1241 6y agoAt least you need a Windows OS I guess
- capableweb 6y agoNot true, also runs via shadertoy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3sBBRK https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3sBBRK But it's missing the GPU Synthesizer
- Synaesthesia 6y agoOk thought it might need like a powerful nvidia GPU or something. Not the case.
- capableweb 6y agoIn the "Buffer A" tab there is a SAMPLE_COUNT variable. Turning that to 1 will probably enable you to run it on your potato of choice, as long as it has a browser.
- recursive 6y agoHow do you apply the code change? Nothing I do seems to have any effect, including removing all the code.
- capableweb 6y agoOn the bottom-left edge of the text area/editor, there is a tiny black play/triangle icon. Clicking that applies the changes.
- jacquesm 6y agoThese demos are some of the last arenas in software development where real skills can be displayed. Elsewhere it's mostly shuttling data from one field to another with some business logic, API glue and other cruft and to hell with the RAM footprint. Awesome stuff, thank you for posting.
- NelsonMinar 6y agoI agree that demos like this are a wonder of "real skill". But it's bizarre to assert it's the only place it's possible. Yes, most software development is boring business stuff built on unstable towers of boring frameworks and infrastructure. But there's plenty of room for art in your code. Either straight out art like this; generative computer art is a very exciting aesthetic area. Or just building elegant systems. There's no reason a network caching layer or a machine learning library can't be beautiful and skillful the same way a demo is. (The one exception is terseness; the tricks necessary to shoehorn a beautiful demo into 4k often make code unmaintainable.) Aesthetics matter.
- sp332 6y agojaquesm said it's where skills can be "displayed". I think the latest update I made to a CRUD app is pretty slick, but I can't really show it off.
- fenwick67 6y agoIMO there are still a lot of interesting problems being solved in gamedev, particularly in 3d rendering but also in defining game logic (3d follow-camera systems are particularly complex).
- aabbcc1241 6y agoAnyone able to run it from wine?
- deno 6y agoNo idea but here’s WebGL version: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3sBBRK https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3sBBRK
- jl6 6y agoHow much functionality does a demo like this get for free in addition to its own 4KB of code? For example, do modern GPUs have rich functions like createAmazingFractalGeometry() which these demos then piece together?
- solinent 6y agoIt's usually quite small--fractal geometry can be very succinctly described in a parametric way. The mandelbrot set can be described with just a small equation and a range of values to display. They're not getting much from the GPU at all. Procedural modelling Houdini style is very common and you will find that algorithms to describe models/textures are often quite small, especially when compressed. These days we do a lot of procedural generation of content, but then we don't make the user re-generate it because it does have a performance penalty--GPUs have plenty of RAM and tons of bandwidth, so it usually doesn't make sense. source: Did some dev work on Houdini
- bri3d 6y agoyes and no. the usual rule is that you're allowed the "basic installation" of the OS and GPU drivers present on a demoparty computer. the fractal geometry example is a poor one since fractal geometry requires minimal shader code to generate, but if you were to trace a modern windows 4k demo it does probably run at least a few MB (if not tens of MB) of executable code between the shader compiler, the GPU driver upload process, etc.
- thewebcount 6y agoA lot of the geometry looked to me like it was done using constructive solid geometry, which usually uses signed distance fields. These can be represented very succinctly. See [0] for details. [0] https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfunctions.htm https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfu...
- DagAgren 6y agoThe OS provides functionality to set up the GPU and to compile code for it, and to shove samples into a sound card. That is it.