.kkrieger – An FPS game from 2004 in 96kb | Hacker News Reader

.kkrieger – An FPS game from 2004 in 96kb

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65 pointssaganus10 comments

This is a bit light on detail so here's the story of how they managed to get it under the 96k target at the absolute last minute before the competition deadline.

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the author now works on compression middleware for a living.

A few years before this game, they launched .fr-08 [1] which was a 64k demo which lasts 11:01 minutes and renders full 3d scenes, with music, animations, models, text, etc. It ranked 1st at the 2000 Assembly (The Party).

As far as I know, they used the technology from .fr-08 for .kkrieger.

[1] - Pouet link: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221

They did :) A lot of their tools can be found on their github profile. Its insane to think this was 24 years ago. I still remember seeing fr-08 at had my mind blown. Seeing the credits across the screen after 5 minutes saying "oh hey we still have 7 kb left so heres a bunch of text" :D And that text went on for another 5 minutes until it finally looped.

https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public

Single best post on the LoE that the programmers went through to fit it into 96kb https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...

previous discussions https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

All the wonderful posts for that blog https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fgiesen.wordpress.com

If you haven't had the chance, watch this keynote by Farbrausch (creators of kkrieger). It goes in detail about how the enginer, textures, and animations were made.

The use of inverse kinematics to force animations is so brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUfV41HE_Dg&list=PLHnFVcTJWn...

In addition to the procedural generation of all the data, removing all the code paths that led to error handling was another thing that brought down the size of the game.

I remember playing this in ~2005 and how mind-blowing it was. Shaders were comparable to Doom 3 which was absolutely insane for the time.

What does the 96kb contain? The whole game with assets or only the pure game logic?

It's the whole game with assets.

Wow truly amazing

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