Hey PC Techies, how in a flying newts bridal bath is this possible?!!

[Traianvs]

fiver2 had the idea not to store the pixel data of the textures, but the commands that were needed to create them. by using this method, we were able to recreate natural and artificial reality in 64 kilobytes, instead of creating abstract blob and envi textures.

[Thorn]

That still doesn't make sense... you would need lines and lines of code in order to do this that would take up huge amounts of space...

[Sarxis]

Sounds like a game demo, where the saved recording isn't anything but basic instructions, and the game itself later regenerates all the necessary graphics and sounds.

[Traianvs]

yeah but 64kb lines of code is a a lot already I think

[Az]

don't forget that you need a compiler for that code, too.

[MattH]

Read the FAQ:

with your technology you could compress a dvd to a floppy disk!
you got it all wrong. .the .product is not about compression, it's about generation. we can only "compress" data generated with our tool.

edit: oops, missed Combat.

[Wraith]

Their compression claims are bull****. That level of compression isn't even theoretically possible. It's probably a hand-coded assembly demo that's generating the graphics on the fly.

There's actually a contest for this sort of thing. I don't have the time to track down the link right now, but I'll try to do so tomorrow night.

Wraith
If it were easy to understand, we wouldn't call it code.

[Thorn]

Their compression claims are bull****. That level of compression isn't even theoretically possible. It's probably a hand-coded assembly demo that's generating the graphics on the fly.

Yeah I know, it makes no logical sense how compression like that could work unless it was some sort of organic program that could grow itself (by randomization??) back to form perfectly with minimal coding (sorta like a special kind of virus I forget the name).

As for generating the graphics on the fly, it would take an excess of processing power to do this in a reasonable amount of time (and this demo which utilizes graphic abilites that consume all the resources on a video card) does it faster then most 3d accelerated games load. However, if it is assembly it still should be ****ing huge (not as big as mapped textures) not 64kb....

[Q Classic]

it's a big thing in europe from what i remember. it was in a scandinavian country this year.

[Urban Ranger]

I don't have time to look at this now, but I agree with Wraith. If it sounds too good to be true, it is very likely that it is.

[Sarxis]

I showed it to a programming friend, and he says its just Assembly.

[Hurricane]

Look for "Combined 64k intro" to get some files. Or why not look for something even smaller. For example, this file is only 4Kb

[laurentius]

ftp://ftp.edome.net/events/assembly03

Take a look at Zoom3 at the combined_64k_intro folder

[Mr. Harley]

Actually, windows has all kinds of embedded applications. Microsoft generates wads of money selling programmers the tools to use them. Microsoft's tools tend to produce bloated programs. All this company needed to do was program in assembler language while making the correct system calls to Windows to generate much of their output. Please understand, "all they needed" is still pretty impressive. Coding in assembler is slow, boring, and tedious. 64kb of assembler is alot of assembler coding. If Microsoft wasn't interested in extracting every last dime out of Windows, instead of making a good operating system, they could pull things off like this too (generate something like 1.9 billion in profits on 2.1 billion in revenue - figure the markup).

[Urban Ranger]

shawn,

You have to understand that a lot of MS employees are at least partly pay by stock options and/or certificates, and this does not go against their expenses at all.