Demoscene High-Quality Videos (Annikras)
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2013–2025
3:36 · 317K views · Jun 26, 2011
Elevated by Rgba and TBC, the winner of the 4k intro compo at Breakpoint 2009. It is a realtime procedurally generated 3D flythrough with music, all in a 4096-byte executable.
Held up as the landmark demoscene production and a counterpoint to software bloat.
15 comments from Hacker News
Those who don't see anything unusual or wasteful about an 8KB+ executable whose only action is to exit and return a value are recommended to watch this demo generated in realtime by a 4KB executable: this video There's more here: [LINK] The demoscene is basically the exact opposite of mainstream software culture, and although it's focused on multimedia shows, I think some of their techniques and underlying motivation could be applied more generally... I wonder if /bin/true and /bin/false in their most simplest forms even meet the minimum "requirement for creativity" to be copyrightable, and if the reason why it has bloated significantly is so that it could be.
When I want to show people what an intro is and tell them a bit about the demoscene, I usually show them the intro Elevated, which won the PC 4k compo at Breakpoint 2009. For me it really shows the talent of Iq and the other people who created it. It’s truly amazing what can be done in just 4 kilobyte! Elevated by Rgba & TBC: this video Iq's slides on the Elevated intro: [LINK] Sourcecode: [LINK]
Inigo Quilez, a demoscene programmer who does amazing work - of a very high technical and artistic standard, often in painfully tiny sizes - and then writes lucidly about it: [LINK] Here's 'Elevated' a four-kilobyte demo he did (along with others): this video And here's the writeup: [LINK]
The 4k category was blown wide open in 2009 by rgba/tbc with Elevated [1] (live reactions: [2]). It demonstrated that 4k was more than sufficient for impressive effects and music -- suddenly, 64k was no longer an interesting constraint. [1]: this video [2]: [LINK]
Release info: [LINK] Binary: [LINK] Video: this video Everything you see and hear is procedurally generated by the 4096 byte executable, in real time. It still blows my mind 7 years after release...