It doesn’t matter how small it is, but how you use it that matters - or at least that’s what most of our girlfriends would have us believe. But the truth is, that line just about perfectly defines demoscenes - content that packs quite a visual punch in ridiculously small filesizes. Made extremely popular among geeks and gamers by the 96kB FPS called .kkrieger, the demoscene, err, scene, has expanded to lots of crazy coders trying to find more ways to pull off the gaming equivalent of squeezing Kirstie Alley into Calista Flockhart’s bikini.

So who better to show off their new stuff at Breakpoint 2007 than the guys who gave us .kkrieger in the first place? Showing off the latest in the Farbrausch line - fr-041: Debris, the produkkt team showed how much DX9.0-like visual quality you can squeeze into a 177kB file. Although Debris isn’t playable, the flyby that it generates takes you on a magical carpet ride through a mindbogglingly beautiful 3D cityscape, complete with GTA IV-esque train rides and F.E.A.R.-like underground railway stations. Never mind the fact that the demo made mincemeat out of my AMD64 3000+/X800 XT PE/1GB RAM system at 1024×768/HQ/2x MSAA and how you’d probably be needing an Intel QX6700/8800GTX SLI system to get this to look it’s best, but I just can’t wait to see if some game developer will actually use this method of dynamic content generation in lieu of shipping next-generation titles on multiple DVDs. Heck, with so much processing power available on the PS3, wouldn’t it just make more sense to pepper their game design with such design methods to ensure we don’t really need that BluRay player? At least that way, I’ll be able to afford a PS3, now that I’ve sold my soul and gotten an Xbox 360?

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By N2H

• Yadu Rajiv Says:
  April 17th, 2007 at 11:55 am

  dynamic content generation has been around for a while now.. we are gonna see that in a lotta mmo’s and similar games.. sadly those small files are real system hogs.. i had to wait to get a new system to even see .kkrieger :-S and well like u said.. if they can leverage the power of those next-gen consoles effectively then it will help.. hmmm.. smthing to think abt..

• Dev Kanchen Says:
  May 1st, 2007 at 8:42 pm

  Well let me just say Necessity may or may not be the Mother of invention, but it certainly paints the prettiest of pictures! To put it in English it looks and sounds sweet, but there really is no need for it. If it were an enabler of a really simple idea it would appeal and people would lap it up. Take the compression technology and slap it onto video (I know/guess there’s more to it than that. Content generation etc. It’s a completely different playing field. In fact there is NO logical connect. In fact I might be sounding like Mr. Jack Thompson and Microsoft Counterstrike. But I’ll get to the point later.) which people download like crazy these days anyway and bingo! No confusion (unnecessary, partially intended ad-dig), you have a killer product! But the POINT (finally!) is that it’s easy and therefore cheaper to stick to something you know works and scale it to requirement than work on an entirely new technology. Unless of course that technology gives you something you didn’t even know you wanted badly!

  Getting to the point of using this technology to cut “next-gen” games down to size, it’s just so much easier to push out another DVD (how much does it cost anyway) than put in R&D to create an engine that makes anorexia and pretty go together in the virtual world!

  We have multiple cores everywhere now. Yes. But I’d much rather see those additional cores (and/or idle cycles if any) being used for better physics and animation (like what Valve’s doing) than for enabling some VERY interesting technology. And THAT’s what a developer would be thinking!

  Advances in storage technology have not hit a wall. Till such a time comes, the industry is going to keep pushing at the boundaries and come up with bigger and better storage media. It’s inevitable, a fact of nature. For a publisher (or whoever it is that needs to worry about distribution), if/when a better storage medium is required it is THERE. And till the next iteration comes along, pushing out more than one disc for a game (if required) is not such a big deal. It is definitely less than ideal, but it is also a lot cheaper and less time consuming than R&D into better compression/content-creation technologies. Like I said, the latter is not needed.

  Till such a time comes, and/or online distribution becomes it, technologies such as this one are only going to be part of the constant dialogue between highly motivated geeks and their couch-loving brethren (read, people not unlike me).

  Oh, and if there are any little girls reading this (first, get yourself checked), anorexia and pretty don’t go together in ANY world. So eat! That’s what you got a mouth for! Now why did I say that….

• Dev Kanchen Says:
  May 1st, 2007 at 8:48 pm

  Just for the sake of completeness: there was a “tall claim” “/tall claim” tag that I’d put in around the “And THAT’s what a developer would be thinking”. I’d enclosed it in the “” tags so it didn’t quite stay. Just so….:)