A Jaw-Dropping Demo In Only 256 Bytes:
"Revision" is probably the Olympics of the demoscene. The world's best tiny graphics coders assemble, show off their works, and learn new tricks to pack as much awesome into as few bytes as possible or make unheard-of effects on limited hardware. And of course, there's a competition. Winning this year's 256-byte (byte!) competition, and then taking the overall crowd favorite award, was [HellMood]'s Memories.
If you watch it in the live-stream from Revision, you'll hear the crowd going (virtually) wild, and the announcer losing his grip and gasping for words. It's that amazing. Not only are more effects put into 28 bytes than we thought possible, but there's a full generative MIDI score to go with it. What?!?
But almost as amazing is [HellMood]'s generous writeup of how he pulled it off. If you're at all interested in demos, minimal graphics effects, or just plain old sweet hacks, you have your weekend's reading laid out for you. [HellMood] has all of his references and influences linked in as well. You're about to go down a very deep rabbit hole.
Video (2m).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by YeaWhatevs on Friday April 24 2020, @01:39AM (2 children)
No friggin way
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @02:25AM
Or in the words (repeated about 70 times) of the announcer in the livestream, “WHAT THE HELL??!!”
That is perhaps the most amazing virtuosic thing I’ve seen on the internet in the past year. Holy shit. And it just keeps going...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 24 2020, @03:25AM
256 is 16x16, these demos have been developed over 30+ years and a lot of them have been optimized down below 32 bytes each, some below 16, and when you combine them there are additional memory savings.
Impressive as hell? Yes. But, this is hand coded assembly, refined for 30 years with no other purpose than to do the most impressive stuff you can with the fewest bytes of code possible.
"in the day" moire patterns were a favorite trick to make a simple for loop fill a screen with interesting patterns. These demos use similar pattern replication to make a few instructions appear to do a lot.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:45AM (3 children)
This reminds of the one-line BASIC code contest.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:13AM (2 children)
Reminded me of the immortal MIT AI Lab HAKMEM memorandum.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 26 2020, @12:39AM (1 child)
For reference, HAKMEM [pppl.gov] is now online.
(Score: 2) by corey on Sunday April 26 2020, @11:09AM
Took a look - could barely understand any of it!
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @02:03AM (1 child)
A Mind Is Born (256 bytes) [youtube.com]
Puls - Rrrola | 256b [youtube.com]
H - Immersion - Ctrl-Alt-Test | Revision 2017 | 64k [youtube.com]
Future Crew - Second Reality (1993) [60fps] [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Saturday April 25 2020, @01:58PM
Well there went an hour and a half of my Saturday night.
I saw the Rrrola one earlier - good one that.
Back in 98 or so I first saw Martian by Euthanasia, catchy music, cute story (rather than rotating patterns and meaningless stuff:
Euthanasia - Martian (1997) [60fps] [youtube.com]
Another Euthanasia follow-up, cool music too:
Euthanasia - Space (1997) [60fps] [youtube.com]
Liked the music in this one.
ino by Quite | 64k [youtube.com]
Couple of nice RAZOR 1911 prods:
RAZOR 1911 - We Have Accidently Borrowed Your Votedisk | 64k 2011 [youtube.com]
The Scene Is Dead - Razor1911 | 64k Revision 2012 [youtube.com]
I just came upon this one - wow it's absorbing and intense! From 2010, what quality. Music and the colour/lighting is wicked.
cdak by Quite & orange (Final version) | 4k intro 64k [youtube.com]
I do find it hard to like a lot of the new 3D demos more than the old pre-2000 ones, where they had to raster/sprite everything. No fancy AA/filtering/spectral effects/3D/shadowing/etc back then. But some of the new ones are insanely good, and still 64k (or 256byte!)
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday April 24 2020, @02:58AM
Really impressive. His wiki writeup is a very good read too if your into this kind of thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:02AM (1 child)
This looks like the kind of thing an AI could do. Let it loose and try to figure out WTF it's done later. See this [damninteresting.com] to have your mind blown.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @03:18AM
It shows how you can get complex and interesting outcomes from very simple rules. And by putting some math and intention behind it, you make the outcome worthwhile:
http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/File:Intoanew.gif [sizecoding.org]
2^512 = 1.34 * 10^154
But yes, AI + procedural generation will create some amazing stuff.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 24 2020, @08:49AM (3 children)
Welcome to code golf. I've dabbled in it. I implemented the classic arcade game Pong in 62 bytes of code (x86), and didn't win the contest. The winner did it in 50 bytes.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @01:02PM (2 children)
Aww, I made the world's smallest violin for you (62 mm).
(Score: 4, Informative) by istartedi on Friday April 24 2020, @04:16PM (1 child)
These guys [cornell.edu] could make one way smaller if they wanted to.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 25 2020, @01:03PM
But would it be practical to play?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @03:10PM (1 child)
I tried it on Windows 10. It locked up with a buffer overflow, my dog died, my cat is walking on the ceiling, and my wife looks like she needs an exorcist.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @04:29PM
Besides the OS issues, how was the demo?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @08:40PM (1 child)
Who many bytes of JS would that require to duplicate?
(Score: 3, Funny) by bart9h on Friday April 24 2020, @10:07PM
Most of them.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday April 24 2020, @09:06PM (5 children)
That '8' should be a superscript.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 24 2020, @10:42PM (4 children)
fixed
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 26 2020, @12:43AM (3 children)
How do you get nested subscripts on soylent news?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 26 2020, @12:47AM (2 children)
222
2<sub>2<sub>2</sub></sub>
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 26 2020, @11:36AM
Thanks.
That's something I should have known ... It's HTML after all, but I didn't. Now I can rewrite my John Baez started counting story to use ordinary HTML instead of Mathjax. I'll go script-free on that.
pdf version on http://topoi.pooq.com/hendrik/ord.pdf [pooq.com]
But html would be better.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 26 2020, @08:45PM
GGGrrreeeaaattt TTThhhiiinnnkkkiiinnnggg, PPPaaalll!!!
Thank you for the idea! In the interest of the advancement of Computer Science, here's the source code.
#!/bin/bash
while true
do read -s -n1
echo -n "$REPLY$REPLY$REPLY"
done
All in less then 256 bytes of perfectly indented and, let's say, self-evident code.
You may want to adjust some lameness filters next :P
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