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"How the hell.."

http://www.theproduct.de/fr08_final.zip

Download it. dont worry about file size, it only 64kb.

I want to know, how?

Thats 15 mins (IIRC) of full 3D animation, music, thousands of colours, in 64kb? wow..

Only thing is, you need at least 50mb of RAM

They wern't midi sounds, my card can't make them, but I could hear the music, so it was definatly audio, didn't sound like low quality MP3, nothing below 90k or it would have sound like it was coming through a wall.

Fogmaster wrote:
> what about the music then? it wasn't Midi

The music is very simplistic, probably not using sound samples for the instruments, all the instruments appear to be simple sounds that its very easy to program the soundcard to make.

-G

what about the music then? it wasn't Midi

Yes luke, and if you did it from /dev/zero you'd have a file that any decent compression algorithm could push into a couple of kb :)

Fogmaster wrote:
> 1.9Gb into 64Kb??? looks damn good, I don't see how that works, dirty Germans
> making clever things.

Used to be quite interested in stuff like this, messed a bit with programming demos like these.
Well, more like a half truth there I guess. I doubt there was ever 1.9GB of data and they compressed it into 64Kb. :)
Theres lots of little tricks you can use. Like if you've got a 8k texture, you can get your program to apply various algorithms/formulas to make it look different, change the colours, smooth, diffuse it, the list is endless. So you end up with 10 versions of this texture in memory and you say oh I've got 80k of textures. :) If you watch the demo, there aren't many textures anyway, but you can see the same texture which has had transformations done to it.
Another point is that when you know the data you're compressing you can get much better compression on it than eg winzip gets which probably uses generic algorithms to work on all kinds of data.

Something else thats quite easy to lose sight of with games that come with 1 or more CDs these days is that in reality if theres 650meg on the CD, if 5% of that is the actual game code then its a pretty huge game. Most of the space is taken up with graphics, sound and game data, not the actual game code that runs things.

-G

Hm, alright then, winzip. know what i meant.

> Winamp opens the zip file. The rest is an exe.

Uh, winamp..? Heh.

A clever little script to present an near-infinite compression algorithm, for anyone who'll get the joke..

#!/bin/bash
cat /dev/urandom > /tmp/foo

Voila. Infinite data out of a 36 byte executable :)

1.9Gb into 64Kb??? looks damn good, I don't see how that works, dirty Germans making clever things.

Winamp opens the zip file. The rest is an exe.