[HN Gopher] How we made an animated movie in 8kB
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How we made an animated movie in 8kB
Author : laurentlb
Score : 166 points
Date : 2024-01-24 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ctrl-alt-test.fr)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ctrl-alt-test.fr)
| MrLeap wrote:
| I didn't care for the ending. He was just a hungry dude.
| froddd wrote:
| Ruined the whole tech achievement for me. Great technical
| approach, rather slim on the creativity. Shame.
| djmips wrote:
| It's a very lazy ending. Very derivative of early shock
| animations like Bambi meets Godzilla but with less class.
| Joeboy wrote:
| It's a bit more than 8kB, but if you like unexpectedly dark
| animated movies about sheep I recommend the Blender Foundation's
| open movie Cosmos Laundromat[0]. Their movies always seem to be
| weirdly dark for tech demos for some reason. I thought this one
| in particular came out really well.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-rmzh0PI3c
| vanderZwan wrote:
| "Weirdly dark" is a pretty apt description of the Dutch sense
| of humor, I suspect it's mainly because of that.
| maxglute wrote:
| Demoscene videos are pretty fun and criminally under viewed.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRQwR4-_0PR9HBI_GZs1n...
|
| I wish there was a channel like retro game mechanics that break
| them down with good visuals.
| echelon wrote:
| When we solve AGI, I'd love to see demoscene for intelligence.
| How much could you compress it?
|
| From there, how small can you make a world of mutually
| intelligent agents?
|
| Edit: all these downvoters - don't you dream? There are so many
| crazy and fantastical things that await.
| maxglute wrote:
| I can't wait to eave drop on my smart fridge making small
| talk with my smart toaster in the morning. Only slightly
| joking.
| hinkley wrote:
| Can I just ask one question?
|
| Would anyone like any toast?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhnN4eUiei4
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I was going to post my 8kb favourite but then discovered it was
| 64kb. Been a while.
|
| Anyway :https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1dcrV_7JpXQ
| laurentlb wrote:
| A classic!
|
| You may be interested in discovering some more recent 64kB
| intros: https://64k-scene.github.io
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I kind of like these things, but (unless I missed it!) they don't
| seem to specify their constraints. So clearly the graphics
| wouldn't fit in 8kB, so what does that mean?
|
| It could be a cool SDL competition where you allow a version and
| a set of assets and then let slip the dogs of war.
| kristianp wrote:
| If you look in the download link they give [1], the zip file
| contains multiple different 8kB exe files, for different
| resolutions. So it seems the target is executable size.
|
| [1] http://aduprat.com/pub/The_Sheep_and_the_Flower.zip
| jsheard wrote:
| For PC intros the rules are generally that your 8kB (or
| whatever size) executable has to run alone, with no other
| files, on a bone stock install of Windows with no internet
| access. That means that yes, the graphics and sound are all
| generated on the fly by the 8kB exe.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| But stock version of Windows has a ton of stuff you can use.
| All sorts of graphics and audio files. And that again depends
| on which version you're basing it on.
|
| I think it would be cool to run a competition with more
| specific (and platform independent) set of constraints. I
| guess I should spend more time thinking about how to organise
| it myself than complaining that no-one else has!
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| It's usually forbidden to rely on those files as they can
| disappear with updates of windows. The best example I can
| think of is General MIDI. The files were avaialble with XP
| and below, and is now often explicitly forbidden because
| it's not available anymore or not in the same form making
| demos incompatible.
|
| It's also often forbidden to use the filename to store
| data. There was that case of the 256B demo that relied on a
| deep hierarchy of directories to work :)
| jsheard wrote:
| Indeed, the rules for the Revision party where this was
| released require the intro to run on Windows 10 (so
| implicitly no MIDI) and specify that the sample music
| that comes with Windows will be deleted.
|
| https://2023.revision-party.net/competitions/pc/
| jsheard wrote:
| There are competitions for all sorts of retro computer and
| game console platforms which are "purer" in the sense that
| there's little to no operating system at all, so the demo
| has to be programmed against the bare metal. That's not
| feasible for modern PCs though, you _need_ the OS
| infrastructure and drivers to abstract over the variety of
| hardware.
|
| Or if you're web-inclined you could use the browser as your
| OS:
|
| https://0b5vr.com/domain/domain.html /
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2COWeeEqTs
|
| https://fms-cat.github.io/condition/pages /
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co42e8ErbaY
| laurentlb wrote:
| The result is an 8kB Windows executable file. It is self-
| contained: there's only one .exe file, that generates
| everything (without resource files). You can download it and
| execute it (it requires a relatively recent GPU).
|
| I'll see how I can edit the text to make this more obvious.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I understand that. I guess I'm complaining that I need to
| download several GBs of Windows that I don't use in order to
| run this 8kB file...
| mrb wrote:
| " _clearly the graphics wouldn 't fit in 8kB_" is a nice
| compliment for the authors - because yes they did fit
| everything in 8kB :)
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Has anyone been able to download it?
|
| The download keeps failing, and the file is already 165kb
| (zipped) partially downloaded.
|
| So is this truly 8kb?
| mrb wrote:
| Yes I downloaded the ZIP, here I put it on my website:
| https://www.zorinaq.com/pub/The_Sheep_and_the_Flower.zip
| (SHA256: 91327f463ff5edaae89e1e6fd386f313c33d1f171c84f9e843e263
| af3d034321) After extracting it contains these files (the zip
| archive is large because it contains a ~200 kB JPEG
| screenshot): 8159 bytes:
| The_sheep_and_the_flower-1280x720.exe 8143 bytes:
| The_sheep_and_the_flower-1920x1080.exe 8159 bytes:
| The_sheep_and_the_flower-3840x2160.exe 8157 bytes:
| The_sheep_and_the_flower-640x360.exe 206507 bytes:
| The_sheep_and_the_flower.jpg 1014 bytes:
| The_sheep_and_the_flower.nfo
| skrebbel wrote:
| Yes. The zip is bigger than 8kb because it includes a
| screenshot and builds for various screen resolutions.
|
| Try the scene.org download link here
| https://demozoo.org/productions/322612/
| laurentlb wrote:
| On Chrome, the download works better when I right-click and
| select "Save link as". Chrome mentions that it's not secure
| because it's http. I've just uploaded the file here, maybe it
| will work better: https://ctrl-alt-
| test.fr/dl/The_Sheep_and_the_Flower.zip
|
| If you open the zip file, you'll see multiple files. The
| biggest (200kB) is a screenshot for reference. It's not used,
| you can delete it. We didn't include a resolution selector in
| the executable file; instead we provided one binary for each
| resolution (e.g. The_sheep_and_the_flower-1920x1080.exe).
| neckro23 wrote:
| The link is simply malformed a bit (http instead of https),
| it's available (from the original site) here:
| https://aduprat.com/pub/The_Sheep_and_the_Flower.zip
|
| It's truly 8kb, the zip contains several versions for different
| resolutions and a relatively large screenshot.
| Lumocra wrote:
| This is amazing, love how funny and creative the story is given
| the constraints! Truly impressive.
|
| Would love to hear more technical details on how corners have
| been cut to shave off some bytes.
| laurentlb wrote:
| To see micro-optimizations and how we iterated, you may look at
| the history of the repository: https://github.com/ctrl-alt-
| test/mouton/commits/main/
|
| There's a commit (https://github.com/ctrl-alt-
| test/mouton/commit/79d2d1eab7a22...) where we save many bytes
| by removing a performance optimization. We originally wanted to
| keep it, but we realized we were short on bytes and that
| optimization was not required on recent-ish GPUs.
| Fredkin wrote:
| When connecting to this site I get SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG.
| Also malwarebytes blocks it. Odd because it seems to be clean
| here
|
| https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/5dc759a5c5f69aec6c7ba1959...
| walth wrote:
| Sloot lives!!!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
| latexr wrote:
| > In 1999, just days before the conclusion of a contract to
| sell his invention, Sloot died suddenly of a heart attack. The
| source code was never recovered, and the technique and claim
| have never been reproduced or verified.
|
| What rotten luck, for everyone.
| fareesh wrote:
| Killed by a time traveller. That technology led to an
| apocalyptic period
| jancsika wrote:
| My quick and dirty interpretation after skimming that article:
| he misrepresented a hashing algo to non-technical people who
| didn't understand that a) it's a one-way function and b) even
| if it weren't, multiple inputs can still map to the same hash.
| Nition wrote:
| There's some more info/speculation on it here:
| https://www.spronck.net/sloot.html
| tombert wrote:
| I know the tech behind it is pretty different, but this reminds
| me of .kkrieger from back in the day. An entire 3d FPS,
| compressed down to 96k. It was pretty neat.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
| speps wrote:
| The backstory written by one of the authors is worth a read:
| https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
| nickstinemates wrote:
| Razor 1911. Pure nostalgia.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Surprisingly fun, particularly with the care in the little
| details, for 8kb. Well done!
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(page generated 2024-01-24 23:00 UTC)