6 thoughts on “Demoscene Video – 4K Winner”

1. This is stunning, both audio and visually, a work of art, highly futuristic, suprised no other comments are here, perhaps everyone is speechless?

2. It most certainly is amazing, the demoscene has always just blown me away with the skill shown.

3. Simply amazing for only 4kb in size.

4. Wow, this blows my socks off. On most software even the simplest ‘about box’ might take 4 kilobyte in fonts, text, etc.

   1. Even programs with less fiunctionality than an about box might take this much or more space. But you must realise that what comes out of a typical compiler is laden with information that is not strictly necessary to run the code, so there is room for imrpovement. And then demoscene productions employ very clever tricks to reduce file size like using formats for data like the music (actually the score, something like MIDI or tracker files for the most part) that are (a) very space efficient (no bits or bytes needlessly wasted by storing a MIDI CC in a 32 bit word or something like that) and (b) very amenable to run-length encoding and other compression schemes. Usually, all geometry, all textures and motions are generated by relatively simple mathematical formulas (it’s amazing what you can do with some simple functions if you choose the right paramaters and combine them). Oh, and you would be surprised to see how much soft-synth you can pack into a few bytes (see 4klang for a very pertinent example, it’s also fun to play with if you’re a musician without connection to the demoscene). All of this sits ontop of very, very powerful platforms like DirectX and the Win32 API, and don’t forget the power of modern graphics cards and their drivers: you can do complete demos (without the sound bit for the most part) just using the GPU and those demos are sometimes even more impressive visually while being smaller in size than more traditional demos that create complex geometry and textures on the host CPU. Last but not least there is a lot of knowledge about compressing not only data but program code around in the demoscene. There are some talks on most of these aspects on Youtube or other sources, so you can — in principle — learn all of the trade secrets and create your own demo.

      Why did I just write all this? Because I feel that if you know at least the very basics about what 4k (and 64k) means you appreciate them even more. The technical aspect is as important, if not more so, than the aesthetic aspect with 4k’s.

5. Weird. I like it.