.kkrieger – An FPS game from 2004 in 96kb

65 points by saganus 11 months ago | 10 comments
  • jsheard 11 months ago
    This is a bit light on detail so here's the story of how they managed to get it under the 96k target at the absolute last minute before the competition deadline.

    https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...

    It shouldn't surprise anyone that the author now works on compression middleware for a living.

    • redleader55 11 months ago
      A few years before this game, they launched .fr-08 [1] which was a 64k demo which lasts 11:01 minutes and renders full 3d scenes, with music, animations, models, text, etc. It ranked 1st at the 2000 Assembly (The Party).

      As far as I know, they used the technology from .fr-08 for .kkrieger.

      [1] - Pouet link: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1221

      • ranza 11 months ago
        They did :) A lot of their tools can be found on their github profile. Its insane to think this was 24 years ago. I still remember seeing fr-08 at had my mind blown. Seeing the credits across the screen after 5 minutes saying "oh hey we still have 7 kb left so heres a bunch of text" :D And that text went on for another 5 minutes until it finally looped.

        https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public

    • sitkack 11 months ago
      Single best post on the LoE that the programmers went through to fit it into 96kb https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...

      previous discussions https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

      All the wonderful posts for that blog https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fgiesen.wordpress.com

      • leshokunin 11 months ago
        If you haven't had the chance, watch this keynote by Farbrausch (creators of kkrieger). It goes in detail about how the enginer, textures, and animations were made.

        The use of inverse kinematics to force animations is so brilliant.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUfV41HE_Dg&list=PLHnFVcTJWn...

        • Dwedit 11 months ago
          In addition to the procedural generation of all the data, removing all the code paths that led to error handling was another thing that brought down the size of the game.
          • dvt 11 months ago
            I remember playing this in ~2005 and how mind-blowing it was. Shaders were comparable to Doom 3 which was absolutely insane for the time.
            • 11 months ago
              • ycuser2 11 months ago
                What does the 96kb contain? The whole game with assets or only the pure game logic?
                • jsheard 11 months ago
                  It's the whole game with assets.
                  • ycuser2 10 months ago
                    Wow truly amazing
                • 11 months ago
                  • 11 months ago