Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter • Hacker News Board

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#71

Post by lightedman » Wed, May 24, 2017, 7:55 PM UTC

ygra wrote: post #35

lightedman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're real gamedevs. Much like Richard Garriott, they built their own tools, unlike every AAA company out there using someone elses engine. These guys did the ALL of the work from the ground up. That's REAL development.

So real real game developers should ship their own operating system to run the game on. As well as their own hardware. Because all the others are just using someone else's and are lazy. Sorry, but doing more work just for the sake of doing more work is not something that's impressive. It's merely a waste of time. For .kkrieger the technical achievement of fitting that much in so little space is definitely impressive,…

"So real real game developers should ship their own operating system to run the game on. As well as their own hardware. Because all the others are just using someone else's and are lazy."

I believe there's rules on HN regarding unwarranted snark. You very obviously missed the entire point of what I said so there's no point in trying to explain.

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#72

Post by andreareina » Thu, May 25, 2017, 3:51 AM UTC

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #37

andreareina wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical quality and artistic quality are orthogonal, though the former can have an influence on the latter.

I'm not sure I'd agree there. Both programming and traditional art are creative disciplines. I'd argue that any creative discipline can be treated as an art.

I may have misread the comment that you originally replied to; my reading of golergka's original comment was simply to put .kkrieger in the correct context.

We expect certain things from games, and .kkrieger doesn't deliver on that front. In the context of the demoscene, it delivers in spades.

I thought you were originally objecting to the reclassification of the .kkreiger developers, gamedev -> demodev. A second reading suggests that maybe they don't consider .kkrieger to be art, in which case I disagree.

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#73

Post by pointe » Thu, May 25, 2017, 6:02 AM UTC

smrtinsert wrote: post #13

I remember playing this on a fantastic 12 fps, but still being blown away. I was heavy into demoscene at the time so it just added to the wonder of it all. Inspiring stuff.

My friends and I used this for benchmarking new PCs. Hardly anyone got over 20fps consistently back then.

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#74

Post by amagumori » Thu, May 25, 2017, 6:42 AM UTC

cazum wrote: post #34

lightedman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're real gamedevs. Much like Richard Garriott, they built their own tools, unlike every AAA company out there using someone elses engine. These guys did the ALL of the work from the ground up. That's REAL development.

I don't want to start a philosophical argument here about what a "real dev" is, but I do want to provide a counterpoint to any potential gamedevs who may be reading this: While writing your own engine from scratch can sound tempting, and absolutely is a rewarding excercise, if your goal is to publish a game, it's probably wise to not do this. Pick up gamemaker or godot or unity and start prototyping right away. I mig…

I 1000% agree with this. At the same time, I think developing your own engine is immensely empowering and helps you "level up" in some fashion. I'd recommend doing both. But, of course, just use an existing engine and make a game first. The engine is a long haul endeavor. It starts very slowly, but eventually, you'll be able to roll your own games with it. And there's something about that that's very cool. But don't write an entire engine for your first or even second game.

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#75

Post by tripzilch » Sat, May 27, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

jasminz wrote: post #49

davrosthedalek wrote: post #11

I wonder how many young people were inspired to take up programming because of the work of Future Crew, Farbrausch and the like. I certainly was, after experiencing what FC did with Second Reality. Props to Farbrausch for publishing so much of their code. In some sense, getting 1k colors out of a CGA is the contra-movement to node.js :)

Future Crew and their Second Reality got me into demo scene back in 90s! Those were the days when we coded proof of concept demo effects which we later optimized using inline assembly in Borland C++. Shouts go out to Asphyxia for great demo-programming tutorials. To stay on topic, what is the true news value here?

Anyone know of some good/great demo-programming tutorials of similar quality for the modern age? I teach kids programming (and math and stuff) at a youth centre, and some of them are wicked smart and would dig this like I digged it when I was their age.

But I can't really expect them to go pixel-bashing in the ancient Turbo Pascal IDE (regardless how great it is), nor do I believe that `mov ax, 13h; int 10h` still even works on modern OSes, without an emulator ;-)

I got one of them coding a cool interference circles effect and a Mandelbrot-zoomer in Processing. It's Java without the boilerplate to get a window and gfx primitives, which is just great. But afaik nobody in the scene uses it. It is used by digital/generative artists, but they often have the hardware power to get away with inefficient Java implementations (nor is their work always as "shiny" as demoscene productions, demoscene always[0] aims to impress, digital art can have diferent motivations).

BTW--just to gloat a bit here--I saw .kkrieger at the big screen on BP04 when it was released whoohoo ahem

[0] yes there are exceptions but no they don't win parties :-p

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#76

Post by tripzilch » Sat, May 27, 2017, 9:50 PM UTC

Can a mod maybe edit the title to ".kkrieger — (...)"? :)

I'm fairly certain that Farbrausch made it a point to have many of their releases begin with a lowercase 'k' (for no other reason than style, afaik). You can choose to omit the dot if you really don't like it, but it's just not spelled with an uppercase 'k'.

And these people are German, where nouns are always capitalized. So when they do not, it's very much on purpose.

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#77

Post by tripzilch » Sat, May 27, 2017, 10:01 PM UTC

SurrealSoul wrote: post #20

Doom is 4196KB. That's pretty crazy

That's still only roughly the size of a single mp3 file or one digital camera picture! :)

And of course, the biggest trick in .kkrieger is that everything is procedural. A choice made because of the goal they set out with. There's assets in Doom that just couldn't have been done with tiny procedural texture descriptions and still represent quite the same thing. For .kkrieger such assets were simply not an option and the game was designed around it.

Also, I always liken the graphics in .kkrieger to Halflife 1, not Doom, which is quite a bit different. Objects in Doom were all billboarded sprites, afaicr.

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#78

Post by tripzilch » Sat, May 27, 2017, 10:36 PM UTC

kbutler wrote: post #39

golergka wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, those are real demodevs. Games are not about technical superiority - they're about having fun and projecting stories and emotions, just like any other art form.

> No, those are real demodevs. You say that as if it is a pejorative. In many ways, the demo scene is more demanding of excellence than game development. Yes, there are differences in priorities between demos and games, but by creating a technically excellent demo that is also a game that "plays really well", they've shown that they are "demodevs" who are also "gamedevs". And art comes in many forms. Besides the obvi…

"Demodev" is not a pejorative? I didn't read that into it. Although the proper term would be "democoder"! :)

On the other hand, yes of course demos are also about "technical superiority", as well as "having fun and projecting stories and emotions". Just in a different sense than games are, which is the part that's "just like any other art form" ;-)

Re: Kkrieger – A 96KB first person shooter

#79

Post by tripzilch » Sat, May 27, 2017, 11:00 PM UTC

masta wrote: post #8

donquichotte wrote: post #4

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qrsHqDF4BA

It's amazing how many things the guy in the video gets wrong. ;)

True, but I like how impressed he is by certain parts of the graphics/meshes :) The procedural generation technique, apart from saving tons of space, also allows for some pretty good+realistic tree trunk and rock objects (or "effects" as they'd be called if this had been a regular demo instead of a game).

I do agree with him about the lack of gore. It doesn't necessarily have to be bloody per se, but there's a great short gamedev presentation called "Juice it or lose it"[0] with loads of basic little tricks to make a game "juicier". They already hit a bunch of them, but there could have been some monster bits flying from the explosion.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg (15 mins)