.kkreiger

[siriusb]

This game is pretty old, but it's size is just around 96KBytes. Minimum Requirements for the game:

# A 1.5GHz pentium 3 / athlon or faster.
# 512MB of RAM.
# a GeForce4Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon8500 (or higher) graphics card supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
# some kind of sound hardware.
# DirectX 9.0b.

Download here: http://kk.kema.at/files/kkrieger-beta.zip

[sumitava_b]

Please tell something about the game and mention the size of the file too

[siriusb]

Dood, read my post's first line for the size of the game.
Click here for the Making-of of the game.
For those of u that had played the game, can u imagine the word 'bloatware' popping up in ur mind when u think of doom3 and other games? Sure, the above game has no optimization, voice and ai, but doom3 (or other lessser games) seem just a few tweaks away from this one, don't it?

[QwertyManiac]

Good one mate...
Will try to finish it...till satisfied...

[Nemesis]

Yep I've tried the game. It looks fabulous considering that it's under 100KB. I wonder when they'll release a final version of the game. It's been in beta for too long!

Correct me if I'm wrong but I remember reading somewhere that the game uses a highly complex compression algorithm which is why it is just 96KB. It also explains why the game needs suh a high end system to run it.

[QwertyManiac]

yes u r right nemesis...
The game runs on a hig compression algo allright,
will try it on a low end pc like ith 128 mb ram and no gphx and will edit and report...

Edit and Report :
CRASHED AT 2% Loadin with a dong sound...

[cvvikram]

Yup it's good ....

[icecoolz]

Nem...it isnt because it uses a high compression alogrithm. It's because it uses real time rendering and hence the higher system requirements. Tthey simply rely on texture generators. I've played this from an early beta stage and tho still buggy gotta admit it is frggin awesome....imagine if they can do this with 96kb...what they can do with a 2gig install !

[NikhilVerma]

Hey can any of you guys post screenshots?
I have seen a few on the site itslef.. But can you guys gimme so more??

[siriusb]

I've already posted the compression of exe and stuff here.

Here's an extract on the technology behind the game:

come on, not everything I see is in that small file, you use DirectX standard textures, right?
there's no such thing as DirectX standard textures. everything you see in .kkrieger is procedurally generated at the beginning, in the "loading" Phase. there are neither stored images nor stored geometry in the executable file, everything you see is generated procedurally (the one exception being the menu/HUD fonts, which are generated from standard Windows fonts).

You need that fast graphics cards to calculate the textures, right?
no. all the textures and models are calculated entirely doing the loading phase and by the CPU. in case you wonder why, different graphics cards render things very similar, but not quite the same. even a small level of unpredictable inaccuracy is unacceptable - some of our textures and models are made in hundreds of steps, and very small errors in each of those steps can (and will) cause an entirely different result. The reason we need fast graphics cards is because we use rather expensive (but also visually exciting) techniques like per-pixel lighting and realtime shadows in rendering.

the ".werkkzeug3", our procedural content creation and management tool, is, so to say, the magic behind .kkrieger. it was used to create all visual aspects of .kkrieger - be it textures, materials, levels, characters, or animations.

the underlying principle of the .werkkzeug3 is very simple - similar to modular synthesizers: the functionality of the texture and mesh generators is seperated into simple, indepedent parts ("operators" in our terminology) that each have their own set of parameters and can be connected to other operators, which are in turn connected to other operators. this combination of relatively simple operations is able to produce complex and detailed results. however, there is one problem: keeping track of the connections between individual operators. the "traditional" solution employed in other programs which use a similar system is to display the operators as boxes and the connections as "cables" or arrows, with the user connecting them manually. However, this is tedious and can easily lead to a chaos of overlapping arrows on the screen. So we went for a different approach: "operator stacking".

the idea is very simple: instead of explicitly listing the connections, two operators are connected by stacking one over the other. This has a number of advantages: it is a lot faster to work with, conserves screen space, and it enforces suggestive layout of individual operators (this may sound like a restriction, but is a very helpful in practice). together with "loads" and "stores" (which allow you to tag individual working steps and reuse them later in other places), this makes for a both fluid and effective workflow: nothing gets done twice. and as the complete "history" of operations leading to a given texture or mesh is retained, it's no problem if you find out you made an error right at the beginning - adjustments can be made anytime to any operator, and are automatically propagated to all its "derivative works", instantly!

which is another important aspect: everything is completely realtime - all necessary processing of textures, meshes, materials and levels happens as you edit them, and is previewed using our regular 3D engine that is also used for the game itself - so there are no individual export steps and bad surprises: what you see in the editor is exactly that way in the actual game too. and the tight integration of everything in one tool makes for features you normally just don't get, like changing a texture while simultaneously previewing it in its "final" form, mapped on a mesh.

and what does that have to do with making a 96k game? Well, instead of storing the results, we store the operators and their connections, allowing the game to produce everything itself - all it needs is the code for the operators, which is tiny in comparision to the size of most images and meshes, even in a tightly compressing format like JPEG.

Yea, this is one very old game still in beta.

[moshel]

Thats quite a game for 96 kb. even DOOM 3 works on a better FPS on my computer than that game!!!!!

[Keith Sebastian]

I was absolutely blown away when I first saw their fr-xx series demos a few years back. The original one is still available here and they've added quite a few newer ones. http://www.theprodukkt.com/demoscene.html

Keith