Wow... just Wow, i know the game itself sucks but to fit all of that into 96k of memory.. thats crazy http://kk.kema.at/files/kkrieger-beta.zip also they did a tech demo with beter graphics in 177k http://www.theprodukkt.com/downloads/fr-041_debris.zip if only all games were coded like this, download speeds wouldn't be a problem then! NOTE: wont run on pc's with integrated graphics (intel, via, sis etc) to put this in perspective, this screen shot of the tech demo uses up more memory than the tech demo it'self!
That tech demo is utterly insane! With quality rivalling F.E.A.R. at a fraction of the size! I hope to see a LOT of this technology being used.
kkreiger has been around for years, it was when I first started hearing about that entire branch of developing images on the fly. Still awesome though...
Yeah, procedural image generation isn't new. It's just hard. Sure we could get games that fit into 10MB, but they'd take 10 years extra to develop. We have the storage space, and DVD readers and broadband internet (all of which are getting faster, bigger and cheaper all the time) so why do you care about an 8GB game? It makes them easier and cheaper to develop.
We should have something inbetween - I'm tired of having games that take up 8GB when you know that with a little effort the programmers could've given us something better. It really racks me off. Just because we're getting increasing space and speed of information transfer doesn't mean we can forget how to optimize programs. It's just lazy.
Most of the space in a game is down to assets, pre-recorded video, high resolution images, high quality sound and so-on. Remember that a DVD movie lasts for ~6hrs including extras, but fits onto a 9GB disc easily with no complaints.
well take your favorite game, open the install folder and look at the size of the exe plus the few dlls present, thats the size of the game, the rest of the space is assets. trust me you dont want a programmer doing your graphics, we are good at the "making things work" part not the "making things pretty" part. Also noticed how long the load time for the kkrieger demos is, beofre launching it has to procedurally generate all the textures, vertices, etc, store them, etc... Often cases apps like that will use more memory to run than conventional apps since assets cant be swapped/loaded from disk as need be.
Why can't it just procedurally generate the textures when we install the game? I know it wouldn't save a lot, but anything is a bonus now that digital distribution is starting to take off more and more.
the problem with that is if you look at the scene, most of the texture are repetitive and so can be procedurally generated, so for materials such as brick, stone, etc it's easy to procedurally generate textures. but what about for uniforms, faces, weapons, rocks, back drops, flags, signs, etc... you cant procedurally generate these. They have too much detail, and we as consumers want realism, not brick walls that look identical etc... If you look at the credits of a game, the programming team is like 10 guys maybe, then the artists list starts, and goes on and on and on... a game's 3d engine is pretty much just a model/texture loader and scene controller. The reasons the games look so good is not because of programmers but because of artists.
Holy. I just compiled around a 700 line 3d program and the exe takes up 9 hundred K. Obviously these guys are probably calling almost everything from in built functions. That said I just compiled the bit that inits the 3D on it's own and that takes 800K so, granted it's not the best language for memory management. (I'd code in C++ but I never learned Direct X and I'm really not all that familiar with it yet) Aren't most of these procedularly generated anyway but then saved as a file to cut loading times?
Not a chance, and I wouldn't say that to a dedicated texture artist if I were you. The only proecedural component in the creation of most textures is the use of filters or effects in a program like photoshop. Beyond that it's almost always done 'by hand' (or rather, by mouse or tablet). Sure, plenty of texture artists will 'cheat' slightly when generating bump maps/normal maps or when applying filtered grain to a grit texture or the like, but there's a good reason why a game's textures aren't produced in a single day.
I'm not saying they should cut out texture artists, quite the opposite infact! I think that the artists should create the textures as they do now, then the programmers use their skills to make the texture the artist designed be created procedurally.
you dont understand what procedural textures are, they are textures created by a function. Whether that function is a simple red for 3 blocks then white for 1 block or something more complicated like a noise function is irrelevant. The fact is that its a mathematically definably function. You cannot define a human face with a simple math function. There are no benefits to procedural textures apart from storage reduction, in a world where hard drive space and dvd media is so cheap, it makes no sense.
