Here are two very interesting games that I found recently. They drastically changed my perception of what you can do with the space on a floppy in this modern era of multi-gigabyte programs.

It started a while back when I was browsing on one of those gaming websites, and stumbled upon a game called Evochron Renegades. As I’m a big fan of space shooters and this one had nice screenshots, (not to mention I was bored with nothing else to do, ie right after a prelim) I took a closer look.

This game boasts an impressive list of features to say the least, like an entire seamless universe with no loading screens where you can literally spend days flying between star systems and hours exploring a planet’s surface after flying down into its atmosphere.

Now this is all nice and great (really great if you love space sims), but the most mind-boggling aspect of this game for me wasn’t the graphics (which aren’t next-gen, but are still very decent, especially after you read the next few lines), or the insane amounts of stuff you can do, but the physical size of the game. The download file for the entire game (not part of it, the whole deal) is only 25 mb. Compare this to the gigs and gigs that most modern games come in, this game is both puny and huge at the same time.

Now admittedly, the 25 mb is only the download file. It extracts into a much larger few hundred megabytes full sized game, but is still nowhere near the gigs needed for most modern games. But how did the creator manage to make something so compact yet so huge? Interestingly enough, he has a whole page explaining just that (you can find it here). But basically, the idea I got from reading that page was that besides from the obvious elaborate compression used for the download file and doing whatever he could to structure his code to make it compact, he also tried to avoid saving any static images and instead generates most of them in code and on the fly. This may seem like a surefire way to slow a game down horribly or to require a super gaming rig to run, but it actually ran pretty nicely on high graphics settings on my little old Sempron laptop with integrated graphics card.

The catch is this game uses about as much memory as your standard modern day game. Apparently the program draws out everything in memory first then uses them as textures and images as needed. The creator’s own words aptly shows his idea “Ironically, computers are so fast today that I can often build an image I need in code virtually as fast as it can be loaded from disk.“

This is all great and cool, but you may have noticed that so far nothing I’ve said has anything to do with the good old floppies I mention in the title of this post. The title was just made to sound interesting and doesn’t have much to do at all with anything… Just joking!

If you read the page I linked to above where the creator of Evochron explains his micro-sized programming ideas, you will have noticed how in the last two paragraphs he addresses the issues of people simply not believing that you can put lots of nice stuff in a small package. So in order to show his point (and that his 30mb limit on download file size isn’t all that extreme) he offers a link to a certain First-Person-Shooter (FPS) game that makes even Evochron’s 25mb download file seem monstrous in comparison. Here are two screenshots of this game: Kkrieger

The screenshots don’t seem half that bad. The game has detailed textures, real time shadows, advanced lighting, and shader effects. While like Evochron Renegades, it’s nowhere near next gen graphics, they still look pretty good when you take into account the fact that it was made 4 years ago in 2004, and that it runs pretty decently on my little old Sempron with integrated gpu.

Now, on the other hand, they look really very good when you take into account the fact that this game is only about 97,280 BYTES. Yes, that’s about 96 KiloBytes, which means you can fit about 14 copies of this game onto your good old floppy (hence the title), and about 500,000 copies onto a 50gb blu-ray disc.

On a more technical note, the makers of Kkrieg (.theprodukkt which is a subdivision of Farbrausch) and Evochron Renegades both used what’s called procedural texture generation (ie making things on the fly) to achieve their remarkable feats. This process moves burden from artists and physical disk space, as in the case of conventional methods, to processing power and the programmers who have to come up with algorithms that generate textures and meshes from set inputs.

And this is also finally where all this stuff ties back into our cs322. Our project 1 in which we rendered our water-rabbits, inverted hearts, and splashes could (I think) be construed as a type of procedural generation. The conventional way to draw a bunny would be to do just that, draw a bunny. But in our advanced course of 322, we use procedural generation to make our bunnies automatically. (sry bad jk)

Links:

The makers of kkrieger (.theprodukkt) have made lots of other very impressive (tiny) demos and their own applications for creating those demos. For more info, here is the link to their website: http://www.theprodukkt.com/home

In case you want to try out the two games I mentioned in this post, here are the links where you can get them for free: kkrieger and Evochron Renegades (note: Evochron is a shareware download with 90min trial, and kkrieger is a free beta so there are still many bugs in it as they state on their website)

Both games work and they do not have spyware/adware. I can attest to this because I’ve tried them both out. (kkrieger actually has quite a few weapons you can use, but I got stuck in the huge room with stairs that go nowhere)

I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area, so please forgive any over-simplifications/mistakes I may have made. This is also my first blog ever so wasn’t too sure how a blog should be like.
References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation

http://starwraith3dgames.home.att.net/dsize.htm

http://starwraith3dgames.home.att.net/evochronrenegades/index.htm

http://www.theprodukkt.com/home