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Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

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Re: Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

#51

Post by spitfire »

Klinky wrote: post #46
josefonseca wrote: post #42

Does this give anyone else the sense that with amazing processors we have available that we're being really wasteful with these bloated apps we currently have? I mean if these guys are able to do this in 4K, what else could be done in operating system terms if we achieved that same level of excellence?

These demos rely on the OS to access sound & graphics, they could not reach the fidelity they do without the OS hiding away much of the file size. You could not do a 4K demo if you had to include the infrastructure to load a modern graphics driver & OpenGL/DX libraries. They are also only small in terms of package size. This demo for example uses about 550MB of RAM while running(Win7x64).

That's not true in the least. We used to do 4K's in dos. Which was a glorified executable loader.

Once your program started executing you were on your own, graphics, sound, memory management, everything. People still managed to get the first level of descent into 4K.

Re: Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

#52

Post by haberman »

z303 wrote: post #44
haberman wrote: post #39

I'm pretty proud of my programming skills. I've worked in everything from assembly to JavaScript, JIT compilers to websites to large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems. etc. etc. But demoscene programming is still the one thing that leaves me totally in awe, feeling like I wouldn't even know where to start to achieve what these guys pull off. Even if I could imagine fitting all those drawing and sound generati…

For a general discussion of synchronisation, Martti Nurmikari gave a talk at Assembly last year http://thedemoscene.tumblr.com/post/8659078065/martti-nurmik... Alcatraz use an interesting system based on Clang and llvm to export all that from Maya as source code http://thedemoscene.tumblr.com/post/22588846914/digi-alcatra...

Excellent links, thanks!

Re: Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

#56

Post by robertskmiles »

Iwaan wrote: post #6

I was an intern at a game company last year. I showed the CEO some of the stuff that is going on in the demoscene. He got really worried and told me to not show that to any of his staff. He was afraid that it intimidates his highly paid coders and designers. I found that rather disturbing. How are you going to kill Hollywood if you are afraid of algorithms?

s/intimidate/inspire/g

Re: Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

#57

Post by Klinky »

spitfire wrote: post #51
Klinky wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These demos rely on the OS to access sound & graphics, they could not reach the fidelity they do without the OS hiding away much of the file size. You could not do a 4K demo if you had to include the infrastructure to load a modern graphics driver & OpenGL/DX libraries. They are also only small in terms of package size. This demo for example uses about 550MB of RAM while running(Win7x64).

That's not true in the least. We used to do 4K's in dos. Which was a glorified executable loader. Once your program started executing you were on your own, graphics, sound, memory management, everything. People still managed to get the first level of descent into 4K.

I didn't say you could not make a 4K demo at all. I said you could not make one if you had to include an OS, drivers & DX/OpenGL libraries that most modern 4K demos rely on. You could probably make something like this demo in DOS, but it probably would look nowhere near as pretty.

My point was that modern 4K demos are still fun, but they should not be looked at as though they are great examples of efficient uses of resources. You have to watch out for Man on the Moon Syndrome where people start asking "Why can we get infinite 3D fractal explorations in 4K of space, but Ruby's binary is 10MB!!?".

Re: Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

#58

Post by georgemcbay »

spitfire wrote: post #51
Klinky wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These demos rely on the OS to access sound & graphics, they could not reach the fidelity they do without the OS hiding away much of the file size. You could not do a 4K demo if you had to include the infrastructure to load a modern graphics driver & OpenGL/DX libraries. They are also only small in terms of package size. This demo for example uses about 550MB of RAM while running(Win7x64).

That's not true in the least. We used to do 4K's in dos. Which was a glorified executable loader. Once your program started executing you were on your own, graphics, sound, memory management, everything. People still managed to get the first level of descent into 4K.

4K demos in DOS didn't look anything like these modern ones, they were much simpler. They were still very impressive for the time, but the grandparent-post's point is valid.

If you wrote a 4K DOS demo today against modern hardware you wouldn't be able to reach anywhere near the look of these other demos which sit ontop of OpenGL/D3D/Win32 etc, because you'd need to build the equivalent of those API's functionalities into your demo.

Re: Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

#59

Post by jacquesm »

Eduard wrote: post #2

Easily forgotten, a lot of today's demos' complexity lies behind API calls to graphics drivers and OS system calls, whose implementations don't count to the byte limit.

You should probably exercise a disassembler on the code for a bit and come away enlightened.

Re: Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes

#60

Post by rorrr »

haberman wrote: post #39

I'm pretty proud of my programming skills. I've worked in everything from assembly to JavaScript, JIT compilers to websites to large-scale, fault-tolerant distributed systems. etc. etc. But demoscene programming is still the one thing that leaves me totally in awe, feeling like I wouldn't even know where to start to achieve what these guys pull off. Even if I could imagine fitting all those drawing and sound generati…

Same here. 4096 bytes is just 64 lines of 64 characters. These guys are brilliant.
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