Live data from Hacker News

Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

files.scene.org

51–60 of 78 posts

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4k intro available only in 1080p

4k 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

ahhh 4KB...

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#53
post #15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demos 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.

The most impressive one for me will always be fr-08, the .product, released in 2000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcrV_7JpXQ Pouet link if you want the binary: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221 It blew my mind when I first came across it in 2003, and it's still highly impressive even now.

The most impressive for me, in a slightly different way, is A Mind is Born, because it manages to do some simple but impactful sound and video in 256 bytes, on a Commodore 64:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26511266

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#54
post #35

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o

This 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.

Well, 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.

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#55
post #8

Man 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".

I think Source Forge used to have that sort of a graph.

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#56
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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 imp…

I 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[ladd SoSs LoLslb2* SoSsLoLslbd -lu+Salv+Sbclad lbd +4 lbd* +4 0sr[1sr]st>tLrln;pPlilu+ Sulu2>h]sh lhx[]pljlv+Svlv2>f]sflfx

That got a bit mangled - proper version here[1].

[1] https://rjp.is/dcmando.txt

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#57
post #35

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o

This 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.

Using 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.

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#58
post #20

Maybe the universe is a demo written by the gods in <4kb

I 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.

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#59
post #34

Imagine if this beast did a “No Man’s Sky”-style game

If 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/

[1] https://iquilezles.org/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/InigoQuilez/videos

Re: Source code for 4kb demoscene production “Elevated” released (2016)

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4k intro available only in 1080p

4k 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

The size of the actual code is a small fraction of a single frame of the video stream it generates.
Post reply on HN