Incredible coding skills - Demo Scene

Blackbadger · 24 Apr 2009 at 16:24

I guess many must be aware of the demo scene
Currently there is one newer demo that impressed me so much I had to share.

Elevated
Or watch on youtube - but that spoils the fun..

It's 4k.. yes 4096 bytes!! - Insane. truly madness.
It really does make me wonder how inefficient coders can be when some projects take up gigabytes.

Anyway enjoy, and be left in awe.

Hamish · 24 Apr 2009 at 17:04

His coding skills can't be that great... It won't run on Vista!

Is there anywhere we can see the code for this? I like it how the readme is almost as big as the program.

Blackbadger · 24 Apr 2009 at 17:14

Runs fine on vista and vista 64 on my systems here.
It does take a while to start though - allmost 40secs on 1 system, be patient.

I have no idea about the code. - as it's only 4k there cant be much although obviously compiled in some crazy way.

MikeHunt79 · 24 Apr 2009 at 17:15

I remember megademos on the Amiga, bloody great they were...

It's probably very highly compressed and self-extracting to be 4k...

Makes our 20k sigs seem bloated!

UK|AL · 24 Apr 2009 at 18:16

They code in c without the c standard library, and they dynamically link libraries rather than static. They also use procedural generation for content. The content not the code usually takes up gigabytes.

Draeger · 24 Apr 2009 at 19:49

I downloaded the file, opened it up and clicked on the 1440x900 one.

I got a black screen and my mouse pointer span around showing it was "busy".

Left it for about 2 minutes and decided to CTRL+ALT+DEL and kill it from the Task Manager.

Wouldn't even let me do that. :rolleyes:

Ended up having to reboot my system to get rid.

What gives?. :confused:

Hamish · 24 Apr 2009 at 22:17

Blackbadger said:
Runs fine on vista and vista 64 on my systems here.
It does take a while to start though - allmost 40secs on 1 system, be patient.

I have no idea about the code. - as it's only 4k there cant be much although obviously compiled in some crazy way.

Weird, when i opened it on Vista 64 it just crashed out straight away.

As for the code I guess the actual code will be very tight but there will probably be a lot of commenting as it probably won't be obvious from looking at it.

PsychoDuck · 24 Apr 2009 at 22:37

Works fine on XP 32-Bit, cant believe they can do that with a 4KB file.

Energize · 24 Apr 2009 at 22:48

Blackbadger said:
It's 4k.. yes 4096 bytes!! - Insane. truly madness.
It really does make me wonder how inefficient coders can be when some projects take up gigabytes.

Anyway enjoy, and be left in awe.

The gigabytes of space have nothing to do with the code, it's the files, like videos, images, music etc, the data not the program. This program simply creates that data in real time instead of loading it from a file, you could never do that in a practical program like a game because of the resources required to do so. Think of blender for example, the program itself is 35mb in size but it can create animations terabytes in size because it creates that data as it goes along, procedural generation as UK|AL said.

RobH · 25 Apr 2009 at 01:55

Hamish said:
Weird, when i opened it on Vista 64 it just crashed out straight away.

Same on Windows 7 x64. I've run them on XP before though and they are pretty impressive.

JIM_BOB7813 · 25 Apr 2009 at 10:27

Draeger said:
I downloaded the file, opened it up and clicked on the 1440x900 one.

I got a black screen and my mouse pointer span around showing it was "busy".

Left it for about 2 minutes and decided to CTRL+ALT+DEL and kill it from the Task Manager.

Wouldn't even let me do that.

Ended up having to reboot my system to get rid.

What gives?.

Same here.

reflux · 25 Apr 2009 at 10:43

Runs fine here in Vista 64. Well, it was a bit choppy first time and seemed to crash but I tried it again, left it 15 seconds to load......

....and wow, that is quite something!!!

yer_averagejoe · 25 Apr 2009 at 16:42

That is anstonishingly beautiful procedurally generated landscape.

xiphrex · 25 Apr 2009 at 16:58

Draeger said:
I downloaded the file, opened it up and clicked on the 1440x900 one.

I got a black screen and my mouse pointer span around showing it was "busy".

Left it for about 2 minutes and decided to CTRL+ALT+DEL and kill it from the Task Manager.

Wouldn't even let me do that.

Ended up having to reboot my system to get rid.

What gives?.

Same here

baz047 · 26 Apr 2009 at 00:26

Amazing, I love his sort of stuff.

SourChipmunk · 26 Apr 2009 at 13:50

Hamish said:
His coding skills can't be that great... It won't run on Vista!

Vista 32 = no go for me.

Edit: crashed cleanly on XP as well. Hmm.

rz30 · 26 Apr 2009 at 21:50

Doesn't work for me, win xp home. "The memory could not be read"....

drak3 · 26 Apr 2009 at 22:21

Excellent, my congratulations to the authors. However, this is very heavy on resources as expected. It took about 25 seconds to start, and I am using a Core i7 @ 4Ghz with Vista x64 1920 HQ.

Why people like these who can get so much out of 4K can't make a 4G game work faster though!