The Most Amazing OpenGL Tech Demo In 64kb

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Most Amazing OpenGL Tech Demo In 64kb

While we see lots of interesting OpenGL tech demos at Phoronix, a demo we saw this weekend is perhaps the most impressive yet... And the compiled size of the GL4 demo is only 64kb!..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY2ODc

[porken]

I'm currently not on windows but can someone tell me what exactly the memory usage is of this demo? I imagine it'd be higher since you'd have to decompress a lot of things in order to get textures and meshes of this quality.

[Spittie]

Demoscene on Phoronix?

I'm currently not on windows but can someone tell me what exactly the memory usage is of this demo? I imagine it'd be higher since you'd have to decompress a lot of things in order to get textures and meshes of this quality.

Yes, those things usually need lots of memory and processing power.
There is compressed stuff, but most of what you see it generally generated at runtime.

[grndzro]

Yea it sounds like 64KB of supercompressed data considering it reccomends a GTX 780 to run it.
I can't see any practical uses for it.
It is really cool though.

[ChrisXY]

The rendering is truly amazing.

But as someone who is not so much into the demoscene, does anyone know why not all their code is open source by default? Is this really the spirit that they create digital art in innovative ways, but then have their methods as their secret proprietary knowledge?

But then you can notice this in many areas. Now that quite a few games have gone cross platform like half life 2, there are still new mods being created from scratch that are for windows only and no source code is released. Or the countless windows-only demos for the oculus rift where no source code is available...

I'm not trying to troll or something, I'm genuinely curious what the big gain is in keeping the source code secret for programs that are released free of cost...

[ChrisXY]

you'd have to decompress a lot of things in order to get textures and meshes of this quality.

I'm pretty sure most of the textures etc. are created procedurally or similar in programs of this size. If you download the demo you'll notice that there is a 64 kilobyte executable and a single 916 kilobyte screenshot. There just no place to store actual assets.

[Gusar]

Reminds me of .kkrieger, which isn't just a demo but a full playable game, at a size of 96kb.

As others have already mentioned, .kkrieger and this demo aren't comprised of compressed assets, everything is generated at runtime, the executable consists of formulas to calculate together all the textures and music and such. That's why the crappy metallic music

[Luke_Wolf]

The rendering is truly amazing.

But as someone who is not so much into the demoscene, does anyone know why not all their code is open source by default? Is this really the spirit that they create digital art in innovative ways, but then have their methods as their secret proprietary knowledge?

But then you can notice this in many areas. Now that quite a few games have gone cross platform like half life 2, there are still new mods being created from scratch that are for windows only and no source code is released. Or the countless windows-only demos for the oculus rift where no source code is available...

I'm not trying to troll or something, I'm genuinely curious what the big gain is in keeping the source code secret for programs that are released free of cost...

+1 I don't understand this either, if you're going to release a full version of a program free of charge why not also give us the sourcecode and let us help you?

[Spittie]

The rendering is truly amazing.

But as someone who is not so much into the demoscene, does anyone know why not all their code is open source by default? Is this really the spirit that they create digital art in innovative ways, but then have their methods as their secret proprietary knowledge?

But then you can notice this in many areas. Now that quite a few games have gone cross platform like half life 2, there are still new mods being created from scratch that are for windows only and no source code is released. Or the countless windows-only demos for the oculus rift where no source code is available...

I'm not trying to troll or something, I'm genuinely curious what the big gain is in keeping the source code secret for programs that are released free of cost...

Probably for the "secret sauce".
Demoscene is a constant fight between various group to release the most stunning demo , and they don't want to share their algorithms with other groups.
This was even more important when the demoscene was con the C64 and similar computers, where the hardware was a constant and you couldn't just throw more power to the problem.

I'm not trying to say you're wrong, in fact I'd love to see the source code for those released. But I think this is the reason.

[entropy]

It's not an "OpenGL tech demo".
It's a demo using OpenGL.