Incredible Animation Generated By Code That Fits On A Floppy Disk

(Video Link)

As video game quality goes up so does the size of the assorted files needed to play the game, and video games have gone from a miniscule hundreds of kilobytes of data to file packages too big to fit one one Blu-ray disc. However, there is one thing working behind the scenes to help keep those file sizes manageable- the algorithm.

Revision is a programming demoparty held in Saarbrücken, Germany each year that plays host to digital artists and programmers who want to show off their skills, and the standout at this year's party is this 64k intro called The Timeless.

It was created by a demoscene group called Mercury, who used procedural generation to generate the music and graphics in real time, and despite the fact that it weighs in at less than 64 kilobytes of data The Timeless sports impressively robust sound and visuals.

-Via Gizmodo

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Okay. That explains a lot. Thanks.

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At some points in the history of the demo scene things change, depending on what is considered part of the system. With OpenGL and DirectX being standard on most machines for some time now, they no longer have to write their own rendering and rasterization code from "scratch", and support for sound has gotten easier in some ways. Although there are still demos being made for older systems doing it the old way, along with people that get cranky about calling something 64k (or 4k for the smaller demos) when it depends on many MB of external libraries.

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The whole program that creates the video and music is entirely 64k. Theres's been a demo scene and parties since the early 90's. It's amazing what can be done with less than what fits on a 3.5 " floppy disk.