OMG only 64K

[DeadTeddy]

go here: http://and.intercon.ru and download both zoom3 and squish64, then come back and explain to me why the hell do I need 3 gigs for planetside.

each one is 64K in size and I've timed zoom 3, it's 7:35, it's got music all the way to the end, and it's rendered on the spot, it's not a video, it's 3D animation.

you need shaders in your GFX card. that means MX cards won't run it. a radeon 9600 not pro runs it at 20 FPS at 640x480 res....

[Squick]

I love those demos... I can't wait to see them.

But the reason it is only 64k is all the models and textures are DirectX standard, so they are being pulled from the DirectX library, which if you have downloaded DirectX, you know is several hundred megs compressed :)

They are still absolutely amazing programming feats. Did you know how those demos got started? Hackers would leave a little ASCI graphic on BBSes when they got hacked, so of course the major requirement was that they be very small and fast to upload. So this was just the continuation of that.

Oh, and you touched on one of the other major reasons it is so small... It is totally rendered on the fly, not a video... So instead of having a picture of a cube, which could be 1280x1024x32 (or up to 41 megs uncompressed for a still shot) you might have something as simple as four vertex coordinates and a texture ID, totalling maybe 200 bytes at most.

Squick

[DeadTeddy]

the end has some explaining and it says 7 megs of sound compressed to 5K and all the textures compressed to 10K. so I don't think they come with DX.

[Rayder]

Well, since I couldn't play it, I have no clue wtf your talking about. You want PS to be 64k? An MMO? A good one at that? Something that you can *play*?

[DeadTeddy]

no, but if you can render 7:36 of 3D animation and have a soundtrack for it all in 64K then why the hell can't they pack PS into like 200 megs at the very most?

[Squick]

I just followed the links from your site, and as I suspected, it is not some super duper compression they are using. They are only saving the metadata or parity, and references. Instead of having a wav or MP3 of a note, they are calling on the midi table in your soundcard or DirectX. Instead of having a bmp or tga for a texture they are either calling on the DirectX library or they are using an algorithm to create the texture on the fly using fractals or something of the sort.

Squick

[Rayder]

Because PS contains shitloads of more stuff than that? Plus, you get patches, which give you more stuff, which increases it's size.

[Searo]

It's not like hard drives break the bank. My 80 gig HD was 100 bucks maybe?

[FlakMan]

I've had my 80 gig for a few months. Does this mean I should start backing up all the porn?

[Fragmatic]

These things are great :)

[Happy lil Elf]

no, but if you can render 7:36 of 3D animation and have a soundtrack for it all in 64K then why the hell can't they pack PS into like 200 megs at the very most?
Please tell me your not dumb enough to actually be seriously asking this question and that it was somehow meant to be a rehtorical question. Please tell me you're not actually trying to ask why a MMOFPS isn't tiny in size because you found a video that's impressively small only because it does not actually contain within itself all the information needed to be able to play. Because if you honestly can't see that the two things you're trying to compare have nothing to with with each other at all I think you may have found a new level of idiocy.

Does that satisfactorily answer your question?

[FlakMan]

Planetside is big and that's the way it is, whining won't help

[Indecisive]

HFS! Someone is gonna be making some money off this thing.

[Squick]

Not likely Gohan, those are not the best I have seen, and these have been around for many many years :)

[Indecisive]

Hell, then I should.

[Squeeky]

Fucking MX Chipset. I'm about to rip mine out and stomp on the POS.

[Squick]

Here is my favorite:

http://www.scene.org/file.php?file=/demos/groups/farb-rausch/fr08_final.zip&fileinfo

That is the one that got me into the demo scene... And while watching, remember that the demo there is FOUR years old! Game graphics were not even this good four years ago.

[Ait'al]

You can alwayscut down the size of programs! Until everysingle bitmap etc is specified by something as simple as a number. They were going to start making programs like we have now back in 95 and use major compression programs and ways to cut the programing down to almost nothing so you could run big 3d stuff on old 64mb systems, but something happened and companies started getting greedy and slowing down teh progression of software so they could fight over little unimportant upgrades and boost all there profits! 8\ Like ive said many many times before, We were waiting for "planetside" to exist back when we were still waiting for aliens vs predators! Though me and i think most people were expecting something more advanced, creative, and usable than the simple render programs we have today! this was back the day when we had just stop using compressed movie clips and started using full versions of them in games and everyone was up for doing it for hte most part with whatever could be created to make 3d/VR stuff usable. The lv of complexity for expected upcoming games and OSes was already 5-10 years what it is now for todays standards, and oddly what i was expecting to come out 7 years ago is slowly developing today 8) finnaly! But of course companies had to be cheap and couldnt push the hardware so that software could continure to flurish! 8\ I hate them all