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SyntherAugustus

3D Game That's Only 96k

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'doom 3 cancelled' is not an acceptable topic around here!!! (so I made it more relevant)

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What the hell? How is it that a 96k game can so mercilessly kill my computer? None of this makes any sense. Would somebody of a more technically-minded nature mind please explaining to me what the hell is going on? It's incredible that they can fit so much into 96k.

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I heard about this a few hours ago and downloaded it. Unfortunately it won't run on this GeForce 2 Go due to the high requirements, so I'll try later at home.

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BlackFish said:

It's a fun 3d game that's only 96k.

So? Battlezone was only 18k.

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Wow, i'm impressed. good looking, yet the architecture, level design and textures are fucked up to say the least...the cool music adds to that too...though for only 96k...wtf

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It's a virus from the Al Queda. The Western Satan will die as their filthy technology is torn apart by the righteousness of Muhammed's virus.

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This game owns. Glitchy though. I ran into a wall and flew to the ceiling and got stuck. Better try again.

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It's boring and crap to play IMO, but it amazes me that a game which looks better than most current commercial games can be 96kb.

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Again, it drives hope the point I made in the past that there's no reason why games should take up hundreds of megabytes.

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Ultraviolet said:

Filesize is a theft deterrent.

Heh, but that doesn't stop some people from downloading huge files. Some people can outwait eternity. Some people are like a rock, they can sit there and sit there and sit there some more, waiting for the download to complete.

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I first saw these guys' work last year on a couple 64k demos. My first typical reaction was "these guys could fit Quake III Arena on a floppy". It really all comes down to reaaallly tight programming, data compression and procedural content generation. But there's no way in hell you could procedurally generate something as detailed as a Doom 3 character model.

Anyway, if you're interested I suggest you check out some other nifty 128k-and-less demos at http://www.monostep.org.

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Ultraviolet said:

Filesize is a theft deterrent.

Sad, but completely true. I absolutely believe that developers intentionally make a game take up more space than it needs. There are at least a couple of reasons why:

1) More marketable -- people think that if a game is bigger, it must be better.
2) Harder to copy

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Ah, Blackfish beat me to it! Then my post gets swallowed. Argh.

I've been following this scene for a while now, it's really impressive with what they can pull off in just a small file size. Farb-Rausch, the group that made this little game have set themselves a reputation for pushing the edge. I didn't think they'd manage to pull this off though :D. Pity I can't freaking run it. Stupid GF2mx400! I get to upgrade soon though.

Those worrying about it's rather glitchy state, it will be fixed. These guys more often than not, are never happy with the result from the compo and go over it with optimizations and bugfixes. So it'll be faster in the future, Although when they'll do that is another matter. As far as I can tell, they recently hosted the most recent event, so they'd be pretty tired right now. A final version can often be very different from the original. THe best example of this that I can think of right now. Is a previous effort of theirs called Candytron. farb-rausch.de is their current website/archive. Move down until you see FR-30: Candytron and get both the party and the final version to see what I mean.

AndrewB and Ultraviolet: Heheh, File size isn't a detterent? *Laughs* I can think of three ways to copy a game straight off the top of my head. Doesn't matter how big the game is. theproduct.de = this site has all the information about how they do this stuff, it's fairly old information, but the concept hasn't changed. While it would be nice to think a full game could be done smaller, the work involved is far harder to do, they can't import images/3D areas in from photoshop or Max, they have to build their own tools to do this stuff.

Flathead: Monostep just hosts his own personal picks, he also does the larger demo style as well (10MB in size and normally more complex)(Although I will add that I don't think the 10MB ones are nearly as impressive as the tiny ones) I think a better site to go to for more of these is pouet.net Much larger, and comments on most products.

But there's no way in hell you could procedurally generate something as detailed as a Doom 3 character model.

Also, I think you will find that you are wrong, Kkreiger has bumpmapping and the like. Real-time lighting and shadowing has been done already in the demo scene as well, go look at zoom3, you'll find it on monostep.

To start, we have the ingame model, normally around 5,000 Polygons, yes, that is all. Create a high-res model, normally in the 100,000 polygon range and strip all surface data down into normal map and place over the original model. Then you use shaders to flesh out the finer detail in the model, like eyes/hair/fingernails. It's not actually that stunning a process, All the scener has to do, is take his generation program and make support for any of the techniques required and then give it to his artists to make the data. You must remember that all the textures in these are drawn in realtime by the computer following instructions, Shaders are just that, scripts that generate additional information for the texture, more work is needed for the computer and therefore, system requirements jump higher.

Polybump is actually a great advantage for stuff like this, but you have to make sure you can code it efficiently to make it worth it, and I think more than a few groups in the scene exist with enough talent to do it.

(If the pouet.net link didn't work before, it should work now)

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i couldnt get it to run at all. i more than meet minimum requirments, maybe only windowsXP, useing win2000pro

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DooMBoy said:

Heh, but that doesn't stop some people from downloading huge files. Some people can outwait eternity. Some people are like a rock, they can sit there and sit there and sit there some more, waiting for the download to complete.


Or they would do what a normal person would do, have the download running in the background and be doing other things. The only time I ever wait for a download is if it's a utility or something that I need.



This computer can't run the program... Intergrated Intel graphics processor. I think that what they are doing is far more interesting in trying to make the next standard in graphics. Although neither can replace aiming for good gameplay.

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What are your specs, sepiroth? It should run on your machine, the biggest factor for this is you need a Geforce 4. As stated in the readme.

Also, as I said, this is a party release, so it will get optimised, and probably made to work on older hardware, probably.

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LorD BaZTArD said:

and probably made to work on older hardware, probably.

Unlikely, they're going for DX9 hardware features for the final version.

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Lord FlatHead said:

But there's no way you could procedurally generate something as detailed as a Doom 3 character model.

I completely disagree. All it takes is a little determination and a willingness to tread uncharted territory.

Besides, there's a world of difference between "detailed" and "good."

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There are mathematical limitations to how much you can compress data. It is probably not possible to compress a Doom 3 character model that much. You could create a function that generates something similar, but it wouldn't be as detailed. And if it was as detailed, the detail would be non-sensical or the function wouldn't be as small. If humans (or zombies) were fern-shaped, however...

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It's not actually compressed though. The end data is compressed and compiled, but in the entire 96k of the program you probably won't find any artwork. You'll find the bare minimum commands. Each artist will go into the generator and create the texture in that, but the texture is converted down to the basic data that will be needed to draw the file again in the .exe, It's the same with all of the artwork, from the meshes to the sound and the scripting. The music in the farb-rausch products are all midi, written for a synthesizer specifically coded for these programs.

The links section of theproduct.de has a link to a video recorded seminar held at Breakpoint 2003, by the lead coder of this group, dierk "chaos" ohlerich. The video can explain it far better than me. It's quite an interesting video.

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