4kb rendered real-time graphics scene - Incredible!

[Ryan Callan]

Incredible stuff - http://videosift.com/video/Elevated-PC-4kb-intro-winner-at-Breakpoint-2009-RGBA-TBC

From the readme:

exactly one year ago i made an executable procedural graphic and video
called ixaleno, which i liked. people asked when such imagery would be
realtime, and i was answering "today", as i have already seen terragen
quality landscapes, completely procedural, in opengl. the point really
was how good i could do _in 4 kilobytes_. i experimented and concluded
i could so something similar to ixaleno without much problem, and so i
stoped playing with it.

but then mentor asked me what's up and i showed him some of the images
while saying it was slightly too big for a full 4k intro, and not good
enough for a 64k. he replied "what about a collaboration and we make a
4k with it?".

he ported it to dx, he added his synth, he spoke to puryx and few days
after we had a tune, then the code got mentorized to dead and before i
could realize we were apparently making an intro! mentor did some more
mentorization and added support for gnu-rocket (hey, have a look to it
as it's very cool!). i reworked the rendering, then the camera system,
and script, and finally for two weeks we fought against the entropy.

as for my part, i'm sure rendering could have been better, but perhaps
i should instead learn for once that 4k is just 4096 bytes. dunno. but
anyway i'm happy with the intro. the tune is fantastic. not to mention
that working with mentor has been a superb experience.

it's little more than one day for the party now. we haven't slept much
last nights and we are quite tired in fact. but we will be in time for
the deadline, so we will enjoy the party!

.notes.

believe it or not, this was running at 30 fps in a gefoce 7900 at some
point, but size optimizations forced us to ask you for a pretty decent
graphics card, like a geforce 8800gtx or hd4850. please, make sure you
have d3d9_33.dll somewhere there. also, you only need windows xp.

we are providing the following versions of the intro:

elevated_1024x768.exe (letterboxed)
elevated_1280x720.exe
elevated_1280x1024.exe (letterboxed)
elevated_1440x900.exe (letterboxed)
elevated_1920x1080.exe
elevated_1920x1080_hq.exe

the last version (hq) contains more geometry than the others. only for
those who have monster machines or are living in the future.

.tech.

for those wondering, this a (too) low density flat mesh displaced with
a procedural vertex shader. there arent any texturemaps for texturing,
instead texturing (and shading) is defferred and computed procedurally
in a full screen quad. this means there is zero overdraw for the quite
expensive material at the cost of a single geometry pass. then another
second full screen quad computes the motion blur. camera movements are
computed by a shader too and not in the cpu, as only the gpu knows the
procedural definition of the landscape.


.credits.

music puryx
visuals iq [http://www.iquilezles.org]
optimization mentor
synth mentor
gnu-rocket kusma + skrebbel [http://rocket.sourceforge.net]
crinkler mentor + blueberry [http://www.crinkler.net]