GridStream Productions

Ever thought that modern games are bloated, uses a lot of space on your system. Are slow or bloated?

Check this demo out, it is LESS than 64KB in size (no kidding).
Created by a bunch of "scene" guys back in 2000,
and not surprisingly won the first place at The Party 2000.

The demo is attached, also attached is the tool to extract the music if you like it

(warning, when the music is extracted and generated it becomes a wooping 100+MB wav file, you have been warned)

Now download the attached demo, and the music extraction tool.
Play the demo. (it lasts around 16minutes or so then end/quit)
Extract the music, listen to it while you read how they did it.
at: http://www.theproduct.de/idea.html (to go between pages click in the topright menu)

Then come back here and post:

W O W !!!

Which is all I can say for the lack of another word.
(Brilliant is a given so I wont say that

Also check out http://www.theproduct.de/index.html
esp, note the news post on the 96KB 3d game

It was funny, I saw this a few years ago, and they explained their compression process in the fact that even though it was soo small, the compression was being done instantaniously because it is just lines of code that is generating the graphical interferface... or something along that nature.

Still... KICK ASS STUFF.

So why aren't gaming companies following this path? What's holding them back from downsizing the games drastically.. Shit... 1.9gb to 64kb.. that's !#%!#% up.

Well, that was an experiment to show what you can do. For the most part, it isn't really needed.

Most programmers are restricted based on the environment they need to work in. When you think about it with a PC, do you really need your game compressed down like that?

Yeah? saves a shit load of cd's packaged with each game? Unless I'm misunderstanding the concept here, why would you want 3-5 cd's when they could toss everything on to a floppy or somethin lol

Zephem wrote:When you think about it with a PC, do you really need your game compressed down like that?

no, of course not. i enjoy upgrading my hard drive so i can add more 1GB+ games when they come out... seriously though, no, it's not needed but it'd be pretty damn cool to pull away from the "you must upgrade" to play new games. sure if i didn't have so much music on my drive i could fit more programs, but that's another story. i saw the product a couple years ago and it is just cool.

Okay, I think what Switchfront is saying is more along these lines. Althought you can do what you can with the compressed graphics, there's only but soo much that you can do with it based on the complexity of the current engines. Actually, all of the current games do use compression methods for displaying graphics and such, but what happens (particularly with the Quake 2 Engine or the Half-Life Engine, I THINK, DO NOT QUOTE ME) is that you have a ton of other added variables that you need to take into consideration like hit detection, gravity and physics egine results, so on and so forth.

WHAT you don't see in the demo is how things respond to each other when it is not timed in a certain sequence, for instance if I fire a rocket at an object, but miss, or if I step on something but not in a certain timed sequence. Everything in their demos are pre-programed (ALTHOUGH you could set it up in the sense that an action does not activate until it is set off by a trigger, so for instance they have a demo where a nail hits a head and it reacts in a certain way, YOU COULD set it up in the way that unless the nail it hit do not react).

ALSO, remember, those graphics and demos were pre-designed, and pre-made, they were not built from the ground up like most engines are, and are not entirely tested in real models when someone does something that isn't properly set with the programming.

The real question you should be asking is this... why haven't games adopted the DVD model of placing games?

There's quite a few of these small demos out there. My personal favorite is Heaven Seven, a 64k raytracing demo. No polygons, only raytracing, which is pretty cpu intensive. Search for it and check it out.

They're moving to DVDs now for storage media, so that 3-5 CDs is now 1 DVD

Well, I don't know about you, but I've kept the same hard drive for about 6 years now. It's a 20gb Maxtor, and all I put on it is games. OS gets it's own drive to install stuff on, and then I have my file server. On my gaming machine it's only 30gb total

When I am done playing something, I have this nasty habit of uninstalling it. I know, it's horrible.

That was a cool demo Etaks.

Nex, right on the money. There has to be texture compression, but it's based on your settings. I can play HL2 and Doom3 with minimal texture compression. Things start looking photorealistic

you need to take into consideration like hit detection, gravity and physics egine results, so on and so forth.

http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger.html#dload

Same scene guys. using the same "tech", only this time for a game!
Check out the screenies, then download and play the handfull of levels.

TOTAL size of the entire 3D First person shooter? 96KB
(no that was not a typo, 96KB in size)

I didn't point out kkrieger earlier because I assumed people would explore what these guys had made, guess not, even tough I did mentione a 96KB game earlier too

I assumed they made one, but still stand by my point though although it looks good (I can't run it worth crap to actually test it out ya know)... still kinda stand by my points as much griddy this looks like the next step foreward.