L3DT Users' Community

Hay all,

My programmer associate and I found this site:
http://www.maa.org/editorial/mathgames/mathgames_08_16_04.html

We would love to find out more about this stuff. anyone know about these formulas? Imagine creating trees and other objects in these terrains we make by simply using a formula, and build this all for under 64 K, WOW it makes my head spin, and my programmer really wants to get into this, but not alot of info that we could find. A well hid secret it looks like on the net anyway.

any math wizards out there that know how to do this? please feel free to contact my programmer at:

shon@theatomizer.com

Aaron I bet you would flip over this stuff if you have never seen it before? check out the 5 lvl game in 96K compiled. awesome grahpics for what it does.

DT

Yeah the demo scene is really quite interesting. It's amazing what can be done in such a small space by a talented programmer. Heavy reliance on procedurals because they don't store actual scene data, merely scene description and an algorithm to generate it. Some practically useful things have definitely come from the demo scene, but I was actually surprised how little it seemed to cross over. You'd think something so efficient would have important things to impart to process-hungry modern game development, but it doesn't seem to be that way often times.

- Oshyan

Hello,

JavaJones wrote:...but I was actually surprised how little it seemed to cross over. You'd think something so efficient would have important things to impart to process-hungry modern game development, but it doesn't seem to be that way often times.

Wasn't there an episode of 'yes, prime minister' where they talk about the perfectly efficient hospital? One with no patients, I recall.

My point is that something that is efficient is not necessarily useful. In this case, the code is space-efficient, which sounds good but isn't. What we want in games these days are speed, features, and pretty visuals - small installations are hardly a concern. Indeed, the trend is quite the opposite; game developers are turning to large game engines with all the bells and whistles, as it makes development much, much faster and easier. By contrast, these 64k demos have been generally written in assembly (or very minimal C/C++), include their own purpose-built and not-extensible 3D renderers, and are optimised up the wazoo. Many, many hours of work to achive graphics you could get from a simple OpenGL program in a mere fraction of the time. To quote the demo website:

The game .kkrieger is a first-person shooter game in 96K, which they released at Breakpoint 2004. It has the same look as some of the 1 Gigabyte games that are out on the market right now. Instead of five months, this game had been in the works for four years.

They're outstanding demonstrations of techical ability, but not at all practical for production software.

Cheers,
Aaron.

True enough Aaron. My thinking was more in line not with the demos that try to acheive small size but those that did things with graphics that no one else was doing. I suppose I was thinking more of the demo scene as a whole then. There actually was a demo group that turned into a game dev group to create "Into the Shadows", and the game did indeed look amazing for the time, but it was never finished.

Anyway, you're definitely right that a lot of what the demo scene strives for isn't terribly useful outside of that scene. But certain areas of it, where people are still pushing the realtime envelope and not just the size, seem like they would indeed be useful. *shrug*

- Oshyan

Hay all,

I will make this short for now on this. My associate programmer partner found some of the code to make this stuff work. We do have a use for it and have a idea or 2, but will keep them close to our chest for now.
But this kind of programming is awesome and I was impressed for sure with what I saw. Having said that I also agree with most of what you are all talking about.
I would love to be able to play a level with your huge Terrains Aaron and 64 bit looking graphics yet all the while under a meg to play. Also with the new plugin for Mozilla that is being done/developed for TGE/TSE you could very easily run a game very fast inside mozilla firefox/Netscape/Internet exploder. But your right as of now they are not going that way exactly I don't think. But it is new to us so we are checking it out and seeing what we can do with it. First off figure out how they are doing it, and Shon has started on that and is happy, he found a good chunk of info to digest for now. I like the idea of taking my art and turning it all into an algorithm to make on the fly graphics, cool. But then again I am a dumb artist and get sidetracked and stunned by tech easy here sometimes. HAHAHAHAHAaaa... ROTFL

DT

Hi DT,

DeathTwister wrote:I would love to be able to play a level with your huge Terrains Aaron and 64 bit looking graphics yet all the while under a meg to play.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but you won't be able to compress data from L3DT that far without severely reducing the quality. These demos don't store much data; it's mostly generated at run-time. For an example of procedural (run-time) terrain, check out this demo on Ken Perlin's website.

DeathTwister wrote:I like the idea of taking my art and turning it all into an algorithm to make on the fly graphics, cool.

I wish you good luck, but I get the feeling it's going to be mathematically quite complex to get a nice result.

Cheers,
Aaron.

Figures And it looked like such a great idea 2. DT

It is really??

Hay brother Mattozcul,

Please re-post those class notes they were not there in the LINK My programmer I am sure would love to look at them. I take it was on the subject we are on in this forum???? I hope a hope?? I am sure there are many uses for this kind of math, maybe not found the exact home yet, but I am sure it will find a bed somewhere.

DT

Hi DT,

My guess is that Mattozcul is a spambot, and soon to be deleted.

Cheers,
Aaron.

O, KK bro..........

DT