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Comment by jakejake | Hacker News Reader

These demos always amaze me. Can somebody enlighten me as far as the way the size is measured - does it typically include all of the assets such as music and textures? I was watching a few of the demos and it blows my mind that the audio would even fit in that amount of space, let alone the visuals.

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To my understanding - yes, all "assets" are typically included. In most of the cases though, all assets (textures, geometry, sounds, camera paths) are generated during runtime. More information can be found, for example here: http://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm

> Can somebody enlighten me as far as the way the size is measured - does it typically include all of the assets such as music and textures?

In size limited categories like 4k and 64k intros as well as "challenges" like this, the size is the final size of the executable. The productions are typically delivered as a single executable with no other files, so everything is bundled into the executable. In 4k and 64k there is usually some kind of compression algorithm used to compress everything that's possible, including the actual executable code.

The "assets" are procedurally generated as much as possible. A hand-written software synthesizer and the control data ("sheet music") can fit in to less than one kilobyte, which is a lot less than producing a few minutes worth of music otherwise. Same goes for the textures, 3d models, etc.

All assets are bundled into the executable and the measured size is the size of that executable.

If you download the 14k .zip file available on that web page, inside you will find a 128 byte .com file. In this case, there is no sound and the textures are generated procedurally.

Size includes everything. Usually the textures are procedural, but can be seeded so they're the same every time. Music is usually pretty easy to encode if it's a chiptune, loads of redundant data.

bemmu

Hopefully you see this, unfortunately your comment is dead.

Because I think your comment has value I will quote it here, please let me know if you'd like it removed.

"You can also have procedural music.

Viznut (a legendary Finnish democoder) did some experiments to see how short you could code something that still sounds at least interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtQdIYUtAHg

I also wrote piece of JavaScript that can play these programs in case you want to try create your own: http://www.bemmu.com/music/index.html "

Thank you all, malnourish, bemmu and viznut -- now I understand how the 8bit synth works in Caustic on my Android tablet. Furthermore, I want to make my own music software on my Raspberry Pi and Adapteva Parallellas and this is the first real step on the path to that.

Make sure to watch some of the later videos too as viznut added some visualizations as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCRPUv8V22o

Thanks for the link, very cool.

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