and with music, too.

For those who cannot quite see the accomplishment in this video clip, let me explain to you that this is the result of a programming contest where people strive to achieve the audio-visually most stunning code within a storage limit of 4 kilobytes (code and data combined)Most modern games require 4 million times that size of storage, e.g. 4 GB on one DVD. Your flight simulator even takes 15GB of HD space after installation. Or about 3-4 million times the size of this little program.How was this achieved?a) Data compression. Lots of data compression.b) Procedural generation of content. In fact the demo code does not store any textures at all, it uses shaders to generate the "textures" on the fly. The music is generated by FM synthesis and filters, much like in old analog synthesizersc) most likely the use of assembly language or hand-tweaked low level routinesd) spending weeks and months of optimization to squeeze every little byte out of this code.This kind of programming competition takes place at annual gatherings of computer nerds. This kind of scene has been going on for at least 20 years now. It all started on VIC-20, Commodore 64 and the Amiga and Atari ST. It's about the same age as the Microsoft Flight Simulator. In that sense, the demo scene has survived the Microsoft Flight Simulator. It is still "flying", as you can see in this video.There are also 64k competitions with less relaxed space requirements, as well as entirely open competitions. The only rule is that your code has to render everything in real time. Just handing in an "animation", such as a pre-rendered video file is taboo. Some competitions still target vintage computers, such as the C-64, and even TI pocket calculators ;)Christian

Hello,Fantastic!Regards.Gus.

I saw this a long time ago posted on the site for the project I'm working on... It's pretty amazing actually. Just to actually see what kind of GAME can be made with this kind of technology, check this game out, it's only 96k in size, yet oh so worth it if for no other reason than to have a good shock as to how effective that kind of technique is.http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger