By Jim Rossignol on April 15th, 2009 at 1:13 pm.
These things pop out of the demo scene competitions all the time, but they’re as seldom impressive as this: Elevation is landscape and music generation in 4k, and it really does blow away any of the mathematically generated cleverness I’ve seen before. It’ll black out your screen for a couple of minutes while it loads. Thanks to Tom for the tip. (Video embedded after the link, in case you can’t get it working.)
So that’s procedurally generated and only takes up 4k? Holy moly. It’ll make current level creation look like making the pyramids by hand.
How much system resources does it use up while it is running?
Also the music and light show suggests they are from Northern Europe. No-on else could be so straight-facedly cheesy, surely?
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Saw this the other day. Nifty stuff.
Shame my monitor resolution isn’t quite large enough to do the high-quality version though. :(
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Stuff like this is why I check what demoscene parties have happened and what the competition winners were every couple of months. Technical wizardry at its best.
I would like to reiterate that the above music video is – lanscape, lightnig and music engines combined – a total of 4096 bytes. 4kb. MINISCULE.
It’s kinda sad that most people don’t even know what the demoscene is. It’s been around longer than I have!
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Disco mountains. Fantastic!
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Antivir finds a virus in every exes.
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Kinda compensates for uniformly bad level of PC demo compo. Amiga demos were cool tho. And that dude, who soldered himself his own tiny computer off single microcontroller then wrote good demo for it.
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Shame, looks like my graphics card (GeForce 7800 GTX) is not powerful enough to make this work. I get the black screen for a while, then the music starts, then every now and again I get an image like a photo of the sun, then it goes black again. Rinse repeat until it ends.
Pretty impressive stuff if it works though.
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That is fucking amazing. To think, the code to generate that fits into four times as much memory as my ancient 1K Sinclair ZX81.
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Wow. That is astonishing.
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Very impressive.
Now imagine this tech being used in EVE or Elite 4.
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Between this method and SpeedTree, the next Elder Scrolls game practically makes itself! Just need procedurally generated people and quests… I hope it fits in 4K too.
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It’s not that impressive when you realise how little is done by the app and how much is done by the directX libraries.
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Robin nod laughs at your false positives
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My anti-virus found a trojan in each file?
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stilgar comodo laughs at your false positives
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I only get a slide show. I haven’t got that d3d9_33.dll but my DirectX is up to date (or as up to date as XP can get), or is it?
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I call shenanigans.
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Run the 1920x1080HQ version if you can, when the snow turns to grass it all looks so nice.
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@Pod
Bear in mind that the DirectX SDK’s “Empty Project” sample compiles to 123KB. It isn’t the most efficient way of doing nothing, but still…
@Muzman:
It’s updated regularly, latest release was last month (somewhere around version _40).
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Pod: do you think these mountains and music are somewhere in DirectX? Or microsoft hid there spiffy nice softsynth and didn’t tell anyone? Tiny demos with procedurally generated content (including software synths) were produced back in 90s, in DOS, that’s not that new.
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Any suggestions for good demos to check out?
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Just go to pouet.net, click “prods”, then check windows/4k intro, windows/64k intro and windows/demo for highest rated productions. Lots of awe to be inspired.
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This represent what you can do with a PC, wen you ignore things like standard librarys, bugs and uncompatiblities, rare hardware (these people with puny laptop video cards), netcode, inputcode, support for X, Y and Z, menus, etc…
This don’t make it a small feat, It make us visualize the cost of these features. Supporting rare hardware cost us Frames Per Second and eyecandy. Having a netcode. Using Direct-X. Etc..
You can make a engine that support everything, or a engine that fit on the L1 cache of the CPU, you can’t do both. Games are more or less doomed to go the bloat way.
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That’s seriously amazing stuff.
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Dear surs: consider my mind blown.
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If this causes your anti-virus software to whine, you might want to switch it for something that won’t cry wolf every time it stumbles upon a generic exe packer… (Which is merely a piece of code that does on-the-fly decompression for the rest of the code, and not harmful in any way)
Also yes, they do use the DirectX libraries… Which isn’t exactly new when it comes to demos. After all, they also use drivers, microcode, firmware etc. – This remains true even for low-tech platforms like the C64 (still very popular as a demo platform).
It’s just unavoidable.
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Impressive.
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ZeeKat the fr demos on there rule and there rly old, now to dig through the 2009 stuff.
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This guy is obviously aimbotting. Hax.
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psyk: farbrausch are great, they’re the authors of kkrieger, doom 3 style game in 96 kilobytes. Now we fit profile of this blog I think :)
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Wow, stunning. I’d probably shake creators’ hands so much, they’d fall off.
I don’t follow demo scene, but I do love to watch a few demos once-twice a year. Always love it when I find myself on a chair with a stupid face gasping for air.
These guys are all so talented! Amazing!
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kkrieger is sweet top notch lighting.
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For those getting misty eyed about the Amiga demo scene may I recommend this. (Spaceballs’ 9 Fingers was the first time I ever saw a computer playing back recognisable video, and now we can embed it in a webpage and/or watch it on a cellphone)
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You can make full 3d games in 64k or less with the Free Opensource Z Game Editor! [ zgameeditor DOT org ] I have been using it for around a year now, and have released many demos and games,. check it out if procedural content generation and non-bloated file size interested you! or you just want a powerfull free 3d game engine (openGL w/shaders!) to mess around with,. . peace
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Tei: No, modern games are huge because they use high-rez pre-made graphic data, not because of code to support rare hardware.
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@People who’s antivirs are complaining:
The reason for that is because demoscene exes are packed and heavily compressed in manners that are also popularly used in viruses. Nothing to worry about.
Anyways, great demo (seen it already myself, but that’s cause I’m a major demoscene follower), and while I do appreciate when the demoscene occasionally get’s mainstream recognition, I also kind of hate the side-effects.
For instance, you have a bunch of uninformed people who don’t understand anything about these sorts of apps, who see a demo like this and start dreaming and posting about “imagine this amazing technology being used in Future-game-X!” or “wow, why isn’t this technology being used in all games!” or “man, the programmers of fallout 3 obviously must be idiots since their game is so big and this is only 4k!” and whatnot.
Sort of obnoxious. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but people often get confused…
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False positive :p
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“Any suggestions for good demos to check out?”
“(seen it already myself, but that’s cause I’m a major demoscene follower)”
so nothing new to recommend?
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A few suggestions, psyk:
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52931 – brand new, very cool and stylish (check out more ASD-stuff at Pouet, just click their name, they’ve got tons of good demos)
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=31571 – another great ASD-demo
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=51438 – good old Andromeda, great demo. also have a look at noumenon (again, click their name in pouet to get their releases)
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52940 – 4k demo released at the same party as elevated. classic demo stuff, very impressive that it’s only 4k.
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nice one thanks, watched the lifeforce one earlier is rly nice. Looking like an afternoon is going to be put aside going down the list at pouet.
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Kind of annoyed that there’s no 1680×1050 version, but apart from that it’s pretty impressive.
Talking of cool demos – I quite liked Into the Pink, even if it slowed to a crawl in places.
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Just want to point out to the people saying this should be used in games- this is a different sort of “procedural” than you’re used to. The mountains in that video are to a vertice all explicitly laid out- it’s not randomly generated. It’s however not stored as a 3d model or level- the geometry, textures, sound, and effects are all generated on the fly by the extremely well made, very heavily compressed code based on internal specifications. It’s not the sort of “procedural generation” that for example makes a Spelunky map or Dwarf Fortress overworld. If this tech were to be implimented in games the effect you’d see personally is that they’d take up far less space, run far slower, and take significantly longer to load since every art asset in the game has to be dynamically uncompressed, generated, and stored when you launch it. Good for Australian gamers of the future, maybe. Not so much us right now.
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MMmm Dwarf Fortress. Even then Dwarf Fortress uses a seed so it isn’t REALLY random at all.
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My computer found a virus in every file and wouldn’t run it… D:
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@Inanimotion: Your computer as a poor antivirus that thinks a packer for a exe == virus, and that is not true, and more important, a very lame asumption.
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Makes me think of Infinity… That won’t be a 4k demo though.
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It ran more like a slide show for me, even on the lowest resolution. Sad days.
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I ran it at 1440×900 and was quite impressed.
While not really game-related, I’m glad RPS covers the odd demo.
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Didn’t work for me at all, does its calculations, music starts then I just get small blue and white squares (kind of like voxels) everywhere, and then nothing else much happens.
Not frozen, just… nada.
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Not surprised, but it doesn’t display properly on a Radeon X1950. :( – (Same symptoms as MeestaNob)
Cedge/Jetsetlemming: (IANAGraphicsProgrammer, but I have a basic/vague comprehension of what was listed in the readme)
I understand the need to temper the “OMG, this is teh WIN!1! – Fallout 4 will b 4w3s0m3!” reaction, I think you’re shortselling the potential and muddying the waters a bit, esp. as it seems “procedurally generated” is kind of a fuzzy term to begin with. Procedural Content is not the be-all, end-all magic silver bullet, but one more, new(ish) tool.
“Procedurally generated” doesn’t have to mean “random”, but it can – perhaps “procedurally created” would be more precise for that definition. Some games you wouldn’t want any random world geometry, others, you’d want all random, and most “open world” type games you’d want a mix. (See the developer diaries for Subversion)
This demo shows very well some of the possibilities of doing much/most of the geometry work on the videocard, which often goes hand-in-hand (erroneously) with what people mean when they start talking about “Procedural Content” – but using the card is one method of doing PCG, not the method itself. (The light-rays in tune to the music was nifty – sure you could do that with most traditional engines, but I have a feeling this implementation was…more elegant.)
As for the “small but slow” argument – everything’s a tradeoff, but in this case, if I understand the readme, the rules for coloring a pixel are running directly against the mesh, they’re not even generating a texturemap, per se, procedurally. If I’m wrong about that, or for others that *do* first create a standard texturemap…why is that bad? If you can shave a few gigs off my steam download (or whatever) and then generate a texture cache on first launch of the starting area(s), and then generate the textures in the background, do it! (Preferably give me a “small, medium, large” disk space usage option.) Also, don’t forget moore’s law has a way of making previously unthinkably slow things possible.
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Hi there, I’m iq, one of the two coders of Elevated, the one who made the visuals actually.
It’s not that impressive when you realise how little is done by the app and how much is done by the directX libraries.
In fact, nothing is done by the dx libraries, other than the compilation of the shader. The rest is don all in-demo. Of course basics things like handling the keyboard, writing to video memory, initializing the sound device and so on are done will win32 api calls, we made a 4k demo, not a 4k operative system and gpu driver.
Also the music and light show suggests they are from Northern Europe. No-on else could be so straight-facedly cheesy, surely?
Actually I’m spanish, altough the musician and the other coder are danish. I created all the images just by visually remembering the spanish mountains, which are right now full of snow and I miss a lot.
Antivir finds a virus in every exe.
Don’t worry, no viruses, I promise. It’s just that the compression technique we used (Crinkler) is confusing the antiviruses.
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Hi iq, thanks for stopping by! Any chance you can respond my post directly above yours and tell me what I have right and what parts I’m full of carp about?
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@Scandalon
I have that exact same chipset – 1950XTX.
Elevated isnt dx10 is it?
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For those with problems to run the demo: it requires DX9 only, BUT still a powerful card.If you have an geforece 7900 it will “run”, although slowly. I didn’t try it in radeon x1000 family cards, I would not be surprised if I used an incompatible render target format or something. I know it works in higher radeon cards…
Scandalon, you are basically right in all your statements. Proceduralism is not any holly grail, it’s not a magic technology and it’s also in no way tight to the gpu (most visual effects see in movies are procedural shaders!). However as you point out, as gpus grow so fast in computing power while their memory keeps evolving very very slowly i capacity and speed, replacing texturemaps with computations makes more and more sense. Sure one cannot always “compute” the desired texture (or yes??), but there a few which are easily computable (like terrain textures, clouds, grass, etc), so it makes sense to start replacing those textures which were traditionally texturemaps with procedural textures. So yes, I agree with everything you say.
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Know what this reminds me of? Infinity, the space exploration/kickassery game with the procedurally generated universe. One of the planetary entry/exit videos is very similar but lacking in the procedurally generated disco music and cheesy skylighting.
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Hi it looks amazing. I just would like to know if there’s a way to run it in Vista x64. It just gives the program stopped working error.
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Pretty sure it does
edit – maybe not is on my xp hdd
edit 2 – nope works fine
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here you can find some nice 32k games and 1k intros too
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http://www.secretly.de – a demoscene group
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if you have no time to learning,buy thesis, it will help you in learning and save your time
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