I have been watching demos for like 25 years, since I got my good old Amiga 500. To all demomakers reading this: you guys can be proud of yourselves and dont even by shy about it. Yes, you are artistic and technological geniuses! We love you guys :)
+1 to this comment.... been watching demo scene since I was a teen in the dialup BBS days... used to run up phone bills calling long distance boards just to DL newest demos
holy fuck, this is where the thin line between a programmer and an artist fades. A man who got to understand the universe has put all his feelings and knowledge into 64KB. He created a universe on a floppy disk. Meaning that the image you see and the sound you hear and the feelings behind that, are all generated by a mathematical function. Awesomness...
+frodbolf Thats because Hackers, Coders are the real humans today. Observe the others on the street. The stupidness overflows the whole system in which we are counted Bit for Bit! The Hacker a person which can decide 0 or 1, because he knows the equatation of the cycles!
Well, yeah, but that's not saying much. A SNES game with ~20-30 hours of play time also takes up less space than your average instagram picture. XD (not dissing this demo by the way. Just pointing out how bloated some stuff actually is.)
Well, in fact, almost nothing is stored. Music (see 4klang), graphics and images are procedurally generated. The code and the text are then compressed (the code is created to be as small as possible after the compilation, and after that, the generated byte code is compressed. --it can be again by procedural generation or by some deflating algo--) And there's a lot of demo
still needed to watch all these years later. it was a very impressive animation for the time. love your work dude! i hope you check your youtube comments!
The number of bytes to code this is about the same that store your f***ing address book on your Samsung S II !! That's what's amazing. I got a few things done in my oldschool assembly parties back in the 80's, coding for the Z80/8085 and device driving under DOS, where every byte counted. It rocked in those days
That was the greatest 4 minutes of my life! It helped that I played it on my awesome speakers, but the music took full advantage of it. Not to mention not only was the graphic design amazing, but it was coordinated so well with the music to create an absolutely ecstatic experience. Thanks so much for posting (and making it)!
Was watching this on my PSP the other day in a metro . Kid next to me said "when does the game start?" ... I dint say much but I did started wondering how he would imagine the game to be like... I mean, a kid of about 7 who watched this and thought this to be a intro to a game. would be awesome to play :D
Very nice! I have loved demos ever since I was introduced to it on the Amiga500 which resulted in me and two friends making some of our own on that wonderful machine :)
I did the math on this one. This entire demo (music, art, and code) fits into 64 kilobytes. A still image (uncompressed, 24-bit color) from the resulting 720p video needs 43.2 times that. The video is 4 minutes, 13 seconds long at 30 frames per second, which comes out to 7,590 frames. If each of those frames was saved as an uncompressed keyframe (sort of like if you had an uncompressed still image of every frame in the video) then the resulting video would need 327,888 times as much space as the program itself. And you still wouldn't have the audio.
This is fantastic. The quality, the size, the music. Talk about bending the rules to create awesomeness. I was about to do some coding tonight, but not anymore. I'll just sit and sob in the corner for a while instead.
You and me both. I used to do 256b and 4k back in the DOS days, and while it was a lot of tweaking and finding ways to shave off a few bytes, what the kids are doing today with 3D and real-time music just blows my mind. Even with my programming experience, I can't even begin to understand how it all comes together. I have a hard enough time writing a single damn web page under 64k! ;)
I remember the LAN I went to around this time, I got into the scene on my own and decided to do showings once a year. It ended up being bigger than the LAN and got a lot of people into the scene in my little podunk town.
Even understanding what goes into these demos from a technical standpoint I'm still blown away by the effects created here. I can only imagine the kind of effort that went into compressing this to 64k.
I scrolled and scrolled, hoping I would find this video after searching "chaos theory" Thank god this is still on RU-vid. Before I started discovering music on my own way back then, I saved cool videos like this for my playlist
Gerardo Orozco I could've posted the first place and that's what people usually do, posting the winner. But this one (second place) just appealed much more to me. Not that the first place is bad or anything, it's just as incredible, just different. Here's the first place from the Combined 64k category at the Assembly 2006 event: Dead Ringer by Fairlight | ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Mc_TR4mcJKE.html
***** Thanks for the link! I agree with you totally, although first place is indeed quite impressive, the "organic" feel of second place is more appealing.
There's more to the story - during the initial showing, the sound system broke while our entry was playing! Whether that affected votes, it's hard to tell, but it happened.
one the best demo's ever - it's very fast and actionbased, not a slow demo as so many make. the music is really cool and very high HQ samples/instruments. unbelievable small in 64k.!!!
a world not of my making, yet a world of my design, so strange and so familiar... but no matter how distant in time or space, one constant remains - chaos.
True! And thats why I would love to see a making of !!! I'm searching for it, but didn't find anything yet. Would really be nice to see an interview with somebody explaining the process of producing such a 64k demo! It totally blows my mind, what they are able to do with 64k !!
THATS a good explanation .. that means its damn hard not to mix music and stuff like this but to programm it ...just with words and numbers .. damn ! :D respect :) would be cool if games could be programed like this :P ..
@Mephi1995 It has been mentioned above: Procedural generated graphics are basically mathematically algorithms creating the visuals. The music can be done much the same way... instead of using samples that take up a lot of space you can use sound generators
The people designed this are all masters in their category : Design, coding, graphics, music. The beauty of the machine is reflecting by the masterpiece of bits. It is the new Art, the Art of the centuries to go...
there was a little 2 or 3 level game back in the late 90s/early 2000s that used this kind of code engine. It was referred to as the 64k first person shooter (basically used folding code to reuse as textures, etc.) pretty cool stuff. check it out, it's probably still available.
They put a 4 minutes "movie" and tons of a special effects with music to a 64K intro while nowadays a simply picture taken by a smartphone, can easily reach 1 - 100 Mbyte. Still can't believe what the programmers did with code optimizing tricks on the old computers.
@SirKemodero Yep, most likely a module format, not an MP3, etc. They can be incredibly small but can sound so good, and are made in programs called trackers
Incredible how this video reminds me of quasars, black holes, supernovas and quantum physics, wondering how relative this math is to comic physics and on what magnification
![Chaos Theory - Awesome 64k Intro! [720p HD]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
