A lesson for game coders.

Ace Modder

Ace Modder

Ace Modder

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loving some of the music from these. Id definatley be up for an 'amiga dance music' type night! ha ha

I remember playing KKrieger and wondering why some games i had on my amiga like mortal kombat 2 required 4 disks?
 
It ran super smooth for me on my 3yr old rig (sig) @ 1680x1050 on high - no mutlisamp.
Pretty impressive for the file size.
 
Ran fine on mine too with 4x Multi Sampling and ultra settings. A few bits you could tell were less smooth than others though.

E6600 with a 7800GT here 1680x1050
 
What the did isnt completly unbelievable.

From a performance stand point getting that sort of stuff to render on that modern a pc is entirely possible. Getting the textures and that down to such a small size is also possible with some vector graphics tricks and some on run time generation.

But it always amazes me how they fit the engine and movement into such a small size and yet still look complex.
I've done simple java programs that ended up bigger then that, and all it did was play cards.

Demosceneres ***!, but when they have actually gone and made computer games, while looking great and being small, they usually suck. The only good ones i know of were Zone66 and Max Payne1 and 2.

You know those dream sequences and hallucination sequences?, they did some funky stuff with frame buffers to make that run with no peformance hit. They also made the bullet time work nicely. But at the end of the day, Max Payne used raster textures so it didnt take months to develop, and the games now look like pants like most other fps games.
 
That demo is very impressive, but the tech probably isn't as useful for games as you might think. It's not like you can just do a little clever coding and shrink the whole thing down like sticking it into a zip file. The game content is made in a completely different way to traditional methods. If you need to tweak a texture you can't just load it up into photoshop and change it because the whole reason it's so small is that it's procedurally generated. If you are making a game where everything is planned and designed down to the minutest detail (if you listen to the HL2 commentaries you'll know how much detail they go into) it's not going to be easy to get it exactly how you want using procedural generation. Also many types of data don't lend themselves well to it. We're quite a long way off having procedurally generated speech that comes close to being as good as a recording of an actor.

However maybe games developers could use similar ideas for some things. Clearly it's pretty good at generating believable brick textures and things like that, so they could use it when it's useful.
 
I've still got a couple of 64k files from years and years ago, and they go on for absolutely ages...
 
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