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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