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Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)
- blinding-streak 4y agoAny idea how large the source code was before minification and Crinkler? In curious how much Crinkler actually compresses it. 25% ? 50% ?
- Shadonototra 4y agothat kind of careful developer is becoming rare nowadays, sadly.. all about slowing down the computer nowadays, including build time cough like rust cough
- corysama 4y agoThe creator's homepage is a treasure trove https://iquilezles.org/ https://iquilezles.org/
- badcarbine 4y agojust wanted to share: dwitter.net
- moralestapia 4y agoVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o
- Vladimof 4y ago4k intro available only in 1080p
- robin_reala 4y ago4k as in a limit of 4096 bytes of data for the whole demo. It’s a standard demoscene category: https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=4k&page=1 https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type%5B%5D=4k&page=1
- justaj 4y agoI'm curious, was the music included in that 4kb demo?
- brodo 4y agoThis demo marks the beginning of the SDF era in the demo scene. If you watch most demos from 2009 they still use solid geometry. elevated showed the superiority of just using fragment shaders for everything. By 2009 the GPUs where fast enough to do SDF and people had come up with the idea of ray marching.
- ogurechny 4y agoWell, not really, even its readme file mentions previous work. Look no further than iq's previous demos, for example. Also, anyone who is interested knows when the phrase “zero polys and shaders” was sung. However, “Elevated” had great visuals, great music, captivated people, and at the same time was a 4 kilobyte demo. It became a milestone instantly, as told by cheering on live video. And it became natural for 4K demos to implement everything in a shader to eliminate the rest of the code and be competitive on the new level of visual performance.
- bob1029 4y agoUsing SDFs and other pure maths to build these kinds of demos makes me wonder why we don't just build a whole game this way. Why not go one step further and just skip the geometry pipeline altogether? Most of the stuff I see on shadertoy has absolutely nothing to do with triangles.
- puddingcat 4y agoClaybook[0] uses SDF throughout. I don't think any of the game is conventional poly-based geometry. Having built with both SDF and conventional geometry, it's much easier to find excellent 3D modellers than it is to find people who can build with SDF though. [0] https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/gdc2018/presentations/Aaltonen_Sebastian_GPU_Based_Clay.pdf https://ubm-twvideo01.s3.amazonaws.com/o1/vault/gdc2018/pres...
- bob1029 4y ago> it's much easier to find excellent 3D modellers than it is to find people who can build with SDF though. Maybe we simply need to develop a more intuitive domain-specific language for artists to work at this level of abstraction? The benefits of working this way are incredible to me... Just in that one presentation you find quotes like: > Runtime performance not dependent on brush count > O(1) particle<->SDF collision detection > Perfect LOD
- cliftonk 4y agoAccording to the intro description it was made in 2009.
- mlyle 4y agoThe intro was made in 2009. The code was released in 2016.
- adzm 4y agoCrinkler, the compressing linker, is really interesting. This link inadvertently shows the file_id.diz for Crinkler rather than anything relevant to the rest of Elevated; but honestly I always found the Crinkler stuff to be fascinating. The project lives on today: https://github.com/runestubbe/Crinkler https://github.com/runestubbe/Crinkler and http://crinkler.net/ http://crinkler.net/
- ddtaylor 4y agoDo you know if anyone has a good write up of some of the advanced techniques crinkler uses? I started reading the manual.txt file but it's pretty big!
- djmips 4y agoThis is a write up. https://in4k.github.io/wiki/crinkler https://in4k.github.io/wiki/crinkler And some more info from 2005 seminars. (search for crinkler) https://files.scene.org/browse/parties/2005/assembly05/seminars/ https://files.scene.org/browse/parties/2005/assembly05/semin...
- brodo 4y agoIt is a very impressive pice of technology. The crazy part is the decompressor. It is ~200 bytes of handwritten x86 assembler, tuned for code smallness over 15 years. If you go to the release page, you see every time the shaved one or two bytes of of it. It’s also interesting how compression is done. They do only care about output size, not compression time. So it is possible that you just wrote a couple of KB of GLSL and the compressor takes 12 hours to squeeze that into your 4k demo.
- Forge36 4y agoDiscussed originally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11848097
- thristian 4y agoElevated is one of the most atmospheric, cinematic demos I've ever seen, and the fact that it takes only a fraction of the disk space of the icon used to represent it in the file-manager is ridiculous.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- routerl 4y agoDemos of this caliber are like F1 cars from 60 years ago: a single genius, or small team, creating something totally beyond the reasonable expectations of everyone who is familiar with the technology in question. I really hope it continues to be possible for this art form to exist.
- rl3 4y ago>I really hope it continues to be possible for this art form to exist. Hopefully AI doesn't one day ruin the demoscene as well. Seems like a Pandora's box for cheating and/or asymmetric resource advantages.
- ygra 4y agoThe same may have been said about most other technologies introduced. The fact that a Windows .exe can do a lot more because it has access to DirectX doesn't invalidate the effort made in a demo of the same size made for the C64. There simply are different categories. I don't think they'll be much ruining going on. The people who make these demos use everything they can get their hands on, as long as it helps with cool visuals, a great soundtrack, and sandal executable size. In terms of how they get there everything seems to be allowed and even expected. And if one of those things is a trained network, so be it. Many groups have their own custom tools or even one-offs for only one demo.
- rl3 4y agoWell put, I think you're correct.
- PostOnce 4y agoMan that little "downloads in the past 30 days" tracker is cool. (HN made it a hockey stick.) It'd be cool if every indie/amateur website had that in lieu of the old "webcounter".
- marginalia_nu 4y agoI think Source Forge used to have that sort of a graph.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elliottcarlson 4y agoSource code can also be viewed online via https://madethisthing.com/iq/Elevated https://madethisthing.com/iq/Elevated , which is a platform made by one of the demo developers to share code.
- elevaet 4y agoMaybe the universe is a demo written by the gods in <4kb
- bemmu 4y agoI like to imagine the outside universe has no computational limits. When you write code there, you can init an array of 10*1000 elements and have a loop that does heavy math over every pair of them, but it still runs instantly.
- TuringNYC 4y agoI think that was one of the theories roughly suggested by NKS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science though the work seems to have fizzled out.
- mg 4y agoThe Mandelbrot set comes to mind. It has a many aspects one would want from a good universe. Infinite detail. But not "boring". The digits of PI have infinite detail too, but when you don't know the algorithm itself, they probably look just random. Which would be boring. But the Mandelbrot set exhibits many nice patterns one can learn and reason about. The algorithm that creates the Mandelbrot set can probably be implemented in less than 400 bytes.
- zimpenfish 4y agoI can do you a 276 byte version using `dc`? 2k64sw32sh7sz[.]0:p[,]1:p[:]2:p[o]3:p[]4:p[O]5:p[@]6:p[ ]lz:p5lw/si4 lh/sj0 2-dsxsu0 2-dsysv[0 2-dsxsu[luSalvSblzdsnSq[lqSn0Sq]Sm[laddSoSs LoLslb2* SoSsLoLslbd-lu+Salv+Sbcladlbd+4<mlqd1-Sq0<g]sglgxladlbd* +4 0sr[1sr]st>tLrln;pPlilu+ Sulu2>h]sh lhx[]pljlv+Svlv2>f]sflfx
- zimpenfish 4y agoThat got a bit mangled - proper version here[1]. [1] https://rjp.is/dcmando.txt https://rjp.is/dcmando.txt
- tomcam 4y agoImagine if this beast did a “No Man’s Sky”-style game
- vanderZwan 4y agoIf with "this beast" you mean Inigo Quilez, he worked at Pixar for a while, made shadertoy, and teaches the world maths via shadertoy, his own website and his yt channel. So he's doing pretty well I'd say [0] https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/ [1] https://iquilezles.org/ https://iquilezles.org/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/c/InigoQuilez/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/InigoQuilez/videos
- npteljes 4y agoJust in case you're interested, there's an FPS made with similar techniques, called .kkrieger. The game itself if <96kB, and won the team a competition in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
- tomcam 4y agoAstonishing. Thank you.
- pontusrehula 4y agoSorcery. This is not possible by mere mortals to do in 4kb.