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.)
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
The Hard Maths: Elevated
Posted by Jim Rossignol on April 15th, 2009 at 1:13 pm.
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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.
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?
@Scandalon
I have that exact same chipset – 1950XTX.
Elevated isnt dx10 is it?
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.
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.
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.
Pretty sure it does
edit – maybe not is on my xp hdd
edit 2 – nope works fine