37 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] thread
Always impressed by projects of this kind.

One of the most impressive to me is kkrieger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger

Holy, that brought me way back; direct line of nostalgia to my veins please thank you
The tooling they wrote to make this kind of thing is absolutely insane too.
Do you have any interesting links regarding that?
werkzeug3 source code https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public/tree/master/werkkzeu...

Source release announcement can be seen on an old copy of their main page https://web.archive.org/web/20210126032752/http://farbrausch...

> Excerpt from the README:

> This is it. Pretty much a history of Farbrausch tools 2001-2011. We've been meaning to release all this for ages, in various forms, and always ended up not doing it because "we'd just have to clean it up a bit first...".

> No more. This is not cleaned up. This is the raw deal, some from old hard drives, some fresh from various SVN repositories. This is code written for a bunch of different versions of Visual Studio. Some of it is really tricky to compile, some really easy. There's some nice clean stuff there, other parts are just a complete mess.

> All of this is released either under a BSD license or put in the public domain (stated per project). Not that you're likely to want to use most of this code, but if you want to, we see no reason to keep you.

And they also point out:

> There's still some stuff missing (most prominently Werkkzeug 4) but we'll add this in the near future.

Here are some screenshots of werkzeug4 from some 2010 blogposts of theirs:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160327151958/http://farbrausch...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053110/http://www.farbra...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbra...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053104/http://www.farbra...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053100/http://www.farbra...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053058/http://www.farbra...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra...

https://web.archive.org/web/20140815053113/http://www.farbra...

You ...

It doesn't say what the environment is.

64K Commodore 64?

Windows (presumably x86)
The article yes, many people use linux,osX or BSD though so some productions using them pop up from time to time even if the majority is windows based. Some people do 64k's (or 40k's) for old Amiga computers also but those have other constraints so generated meshes aren't as popular.
In the demoscene, 4K and 64K “demos” are common conventions. They refer to programs that utilize built-in system libraries + 4 kilobytes or 64 kilobytes of custom code with no additional data.
People more often talk about "4k intros" or "64k intros" to be clear (intros being size-restriced demos), often retro-people at events also but then people talk about the "C-64" in those cases (and the technologies and capabilities used is so different that it's hard to confuse the two in practice).
It's for PC Windows (x86).

You need a somewhat recent machine to run it, but my 7 year old laptop is doing fine.

Estimated required spec for the graphics: NVidia GTX 680 (recommended: GTX 970 or equivalent) with 1GB VRAM.

Amazing.

The intro was released in 2017, so the title might need a tag. Not sure about the article, couldn't easily find a date.

Does anyone know what the assumed rendering technology is? It's a Windows executable, so I guess it can use any Windows APIs for rendering and audio? Direct3D?

> The intro was released in 2017, so the title might need a tag. Not sure about the article, couldn't easily find a date.

At the bottom of the article, it mentions that it was released a few days ago.

The intro was released in 2017. We published the first part of the making-of in 2018 (it was discussed on HackerNews here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16842576). A few days ago, I remembered I had an unpublished draft for meshes and decided to finalize it.

We use OpenGL for rendering and the code is written in C++. We published the source code of other intros of GitHub. For example, this one should give you a good idea of how we do it (although we modernized our engine since that): https://github.com/laurentlb/Ctrl-Alt-Test/tree/master/F

For the audio, we used the synth 64klang - https://github.com/hzdgopher/64klang

Great clarifications, thanks a lot!
On the topic of demo, honestly one of the communities I miss from the twitter downfall is one tweet shaders. As someone without a graphics background, almost everything on https://nitter.net/search?q=%23つぶやきGLSL is straight up pure magic.
If you are interested in learning demoscene stuff, Revision 2023 which is about to take place in roughly two weeks, features some workshops in this regard also available as online streams.
+1 to attending Revision 2023 (in Saarbrücken or online): https://2023.revision-party.net/

I'm the author of the article, and I'll be at Revision. I'll give a seminar on shader minification -- another topic not discussed in the article.

Will there be open live streams for everyone to access this year also? I watched Revision live during most of the event and it was definitely a high-point for me. I want to go in person also some time, but not this year.
Looks cool, any seminars/talks you recommend? Also, do you need a ticket to "attend remotely"? I can't find the answer on the site (it mentions a remote ticket but also that it's specifically for participating in competitions and voting).
You don't need a ticket to watch the streams. A ticket is needed if you want to take part in competitions (submit your own production) or take part in the votes.

For seminars, I'd suggest to take a look at seminars from previous years. They are on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@revisionparty/playlists) and you should be able to find something that matches your interest.

Wow, I've bookmarked the article for future reference, this is all very cool! I have been working in OpenGL recently on procedural meshes, particularly with L-Systems. My method for drawing branching structures was basically the same as the "Extruding" action the article talks about. The rotating of the splines around an axis is very clever! I am definitely going to use that.
L-Systems are indeed a very good way to get started. We didn't mention it in this article, but it could have been part of the first section. Our demo with cubes intensively used L-systems to organize and animate the cubes (it was briefly mentioned in the making-of - https://www.ctrl-alt-test.fr/2010/behind-incubation/).
I wonder how to train a large neural net in order to "diffuse" 3D mesh and animations.
If you wanted to use this for a 64k demo then your next trick would be figuring out how to cram it into less than that - you need room for all the code that actually uses the models, as well as the sound, sequencing, and whatnot.