FD should totally hire these dudes ...

anikaiful

anikaiful
CMDR Zarniwoob said:
That is amazing... but you know what is even more amazing? FD puts 400 billion star systems (with landable, non atmospheric planets), 30 ship models, physics, stations, etc... in 11.5GB!
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Without any sort of compression or algorithm 400 billion system names alone would take half of a Terabyte drive alone, without game content. Or a whole lot more than that if the names were longer than 1 character.
 
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Parmo

Parmo
anikaiful said:
Try Star Citizen for a measure... you pay a few hundred bucks to gaze at someone's pixels - and then it crashes.

But in all seriousness, if FD hired people who can do *this*... we, players, would be in for a treat beyond our dreams.
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:rolleyes:
Before you all get carried away with your hopes and dreams read this book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dreaming-Co...d=1459630183&sr=1-1&keywords=dreaming+in+code
and this one too
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Patterns-So...of+software+tales+from+the+software+community
They've been on my bookshelf for years keeping good company with all the others of note like the Mythical Man-month etc.
 

anikaiful

anikaiful

huehnerfaust

huehnerfaust
if you are interested in high fidelity realtime graphics, you should pay www.shadertoy.com a visit. For example this shader:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XsyGWV

realtime planet surface, just like in horizons! Only produced by a clever fragment shader. Plus you can see the code that produced it on the right side of the page. You can even edit it in realtime and fiddle around for yourself.

There are alot of greate shaders, which some can learn alot from!
 

Jack Schitt

Jack Schitt
Wow. That was beautiful.

I used to be a huge fan of the Amiga demoscene back in its heyday, when in general the hardware was consistent and the only "extra" required for some demos was the 0.5Mb RAM expansion. But then various custom hardware and GFX boards started to appear, followed by the A1200 and the AGA chipset, and we started to see demos that required a 68030 or 68040, or a Picasso graphics board with a certain amount of dedicated RAM, or a maths coprocessor, or 20MB of hard disk space...

Many of these demos were still works of art, but for me they'd lost the purity of the early days when a demo on a couple of 880KB floppy discs could be sent anywhere from Portugal to Poland and be guaranteed to run on anyone's machine. So I fell out of love with the Amiga demoscene, and never really embraced the PC scene because it had all of the problems the Amiga scene had but in spades. So many hardware variations, no sense of pushing the limits of a specific configuration.

For me, the only two categories of PC demo that managed to retain that technical purity were the ANSI/DOS demos, and those that artificially restricted the size of the executable. It's been a few years since I've looked at any of those either, so thanks to the OP for linking to this one. It truly is a work of art, and was well worth the time to watch it running natively even if it sent my security programs up the wall. ;)
 

Zplintz

Zplintz
anikaiful said:
Without any sort of compression or algorithm 400 billion system names alone would take half of a Terabyte drive alone, without game content. Or a whole lot more than that if the names were longer than 1 character.
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......372.5gb for 1 byte names and that is only the systems and doesn't even take into account naming all the celestial bodies within those systems *oooh I think I just broke my brain...... . . . . . . . . . . .
 

Ekar

Ekar
Love the gas giant stuff at 3:43. Still disappointed at the gas giants in ED, you don't get that sense of gases mixing and folding, probably because they don't seem to be using a realtime fluids approach, unlike in the video.
 

Iskariot

Iskariot
Siobhan said:
Well the original Elite fitted into a LOT less than 64K, so sure... bring them aboard and remind DBOBE what he used to be able to do.
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I have no doubt DBOBE, or at least FD, still is able to do it, but we would not at all be satisfied we such a limited product these days.
 

lysan

lysan
anikaiful said:
These people do absolutely amazing things within the super-strict exe size limits. I saw the first vid... was like "real neat", then noted the size of code what produced the whole thing... and that quite literally blew mind to 64K pieces.

These dudes can work magic within 64K, what could be they able to do with free reign? Cram the whole ED into 1MB package? Probably.

People think procedural generation comes up with dull results, but ... how wrong those people are in thinking so.
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Been my mantra for years, PG are if done right a wonderful tool. However what we have seen during many years of game development was that PG was A. limited due to computer processing power and B. game developers didn't know how to use it correctly.

There are so many examples today describing how to get amazing results from PG.
 

znôrt

znôrt
Henri said:
these demos are written in machine language just imagine the computational power wasted by ED.
64k ...a gfx engine, sound engine, models and the animation, the music. 64k is microscopic compared
to 3 GIGABYTES. Just imagine what could still be done with the unused power.
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guys, chill, these are "demos" (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demo_(computer_programming)), not games. a venerable tradition, there's an incredible amount of passion, work and cunningness invested just for a minutelong 'show'. it's as nerdy (and narcissistic) as it gets, and it requires a rare combination of highly specialzed programming skills and artistic talent. but that's it, there is no way you could make (and maintain) a working game that way. simply not comparable. forget it.

that doesn't deny the fact that software in general is on an exponential curve of bulkiness and waste of resources, but that's just ... the effect of capitalism at its best.
 

Jools

Jools
Liqua said:
Only problem is if you're going to write code in assembly it takes eons to get anything done - I used to help write games in Z80 (showing my age :D) and know first hand the pain of doing so.

C++ / C# [I only dabbled in C] is just as good given the amount of computing power of today.

*Edit:
Also, credit where it's due, ED runs on a potato which is down to the efficiency and talent of the Devs.
Click to expand...


I know a nice space sim serires and a rollercoaster park sim written in assembly
 
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DocPossible

DocPossible
anikaiful said:
It's pretty much like this: the more there's at disposal, the lazier approaches are taken - bloatware is born. When people start headbanging the hardware with strict limits is when magic starts to happen. There's always ways to make thing smaller, faster, smoother, while not removing important content. And that's what DBODE did with original Elite - squeezed the system to the last bit and made something amazing. Imagine what he could've done if the hardware back then had been able to produce today's video quality?

If the devs of today took the road of the demo scene coders, we'd likely see much longer production times but with simply mind blowing results.
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It's not laziness, it's efficiency. The stuff I can code these days would have taken a team of 10 twenty years ago. Using 3rd party code libraries means someone else has already done 95% of the work. The downside is the bloat, but that's the difference between hand crafting something and mass production. It would take a lonnnnng time to produce ED using the same techniques as the original ED.

<edit> btw ace post :) I love that stuff </edit>
 
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