Another 94Kb game.

[thenerdguy]

Another 94kb game for download.

Looks and playes real sweet on my old xp2000 geforce 4 system. :)


Link to the download page (http://www.theprodukkt.com/)


Some pics

http://www.theprodukkt.com/files/kkrieger_snapshot5.jpg

http://www.theprodukkt.com/files/kkrieger_snapshot4.jpg

http://www.theprodukkt.com/files/kkrieger_snapshot2.jpg

http://www.theprodukkt.com/files/kkrieger_snapshot1.jpg

[Edge]

Oh...my...god. That was freaking amazing. How is it they make a game that looks better than UT2004, and yet takes up less than 1 MILLIANTH the space (did I add that right?). The worst part is, it had major rendering problems on my computer (ti4200 with the 45.xx drivers, do I need to upgrade to the 50.xx drivers to get it to work right?) and it STILL looked simply amazing. How the hell do these guys get all these amazing graphics into practically no space? In Half-life and Unreal, the grunt the guy makes when he jumps takes up more space than this entire game does...

[Nephilim]

Jesus Truck-Drivin' Christ that's sweet looking......

d/ling now...

[thenerdguy]

The Readme


.kkrieger, chapter I - Beta Version
.a game in 96k
by .theprodukkt
(released at breakpoint 2004)

www.theprodukkt.com



1. about .kkrieger
------------------

The project was started two years ago and since then many, many hours of our spare time went
into developing .kkrieger. Still, in the end we didn´t have time for the most important thing:
gameplay. So expect some major improvements in our next releases.
However, we enjoyed making .kkrieger a lot and are quite satisfied with the end result and now we
are eagerly awaiting your comments :) So if you have any feedback, may it be acclaim, critique or
bug reports - please feel free to write us. Every email is highly appreciated!
(No, wait - don´t send us bugs until the final version - we know enough already ;)

We will definitely release an uncut "final" version with some more kb, enhanced content and less
bugs, soon. (The first thing we'll do after this release is relax for some time, though :).

.kkrieger is designed as a trilogy. At the moment we can not tell if and when we will find the
time to develop the next chapters, though. We will keep you informed on our homepage...


2. controls
-----------

W - forward
S - backward
A - left
D - right
[Space] - Jump
Left mouse - shoot
1-5 - switch weapon

Press M1 - M9 to respawn at the different respawn points (also helps when caught in collision ;)


3. system requirements
----------------------

.kkrieger requires a relatively high-end machine to run properly. To be
precise:

- A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
- 512MB of RAM (or more)
- 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

We've done some testing to ensure it runs on all hardware meeting those
requirements we could get, and we checked it runs on all major supported
configurations with current drivers, but with some graphics card/driver
combinations it might screw up. In case you have problems, please try
getting the most recent driver release from your vendor, and only if the
problem persists contact us (refer to the contact section).


4. detailed credits
-------------------

.theprodukkt:
- Thomas "fiver2" Mahlke: Concept, Direction, Textures, Level geometry and lighting.
- Dierk "Chaos" Ohlerich: Editor, Texture generator, Game, Physics, Collision, 'lekktor'.
- Christoph "giZMo" Muetze: Character design, Animation, Weapons, Items, Special FX.
- Fabian "ryg" Giesen: Mesh generator, Material/Lighting systems, 3d Engine, 'kkrunchy'.

freelancers:
- Sebastian "wayfinder" Grillmaier: Music, Sound design, Sound effects.
- Tammo "kb" Hinrichs: Sound synthesizer.


5. contact
----------

web site: http://www.theprodukkt.com
contact: fanmail@theprodukkt.com (fanmail, flames and cooking recipes)


6. disclaimer
-------------

.kkrieger is freeware. Permission to spread the archive in its original, unmodified
format is generally given, as long as there is no fee charged for .kkrieger itself. We
want to encourage everyone to send the file around, link to it on webpages, and we also
want to allow printed magazines to include .kkrieger on supplementary CDs and similar
media, within the conditions stated in this disclaimer. Public presentation of .kkrieger
is hereby explicitly allowed and encouraged. We require that proper credit is given to
.theprodukkt in all forms of public presentation or publication of .kkrieger.

.kkrieger comes with absolutely no warranty. It has been carefully written, but still
we can make absolutely no guarantees that .kkrieger runs properly on every configuration.
.theprodukkt can not be made liable for any kind of damage or data loss caused either
directly or indirectly by .kkrieger.


7. technical FAQ
----------------

In general, if you have any technical questions concerning .kkrieger, either refer to our
web site or contact us via email. However past experience shows that there are some rumours
and misunderstandings about our work that are very hard to correct, so we'll state the truth
here, in written form, for all the world to see :)

- We do .not. have some kind of magical data compression machine that is able to squeeze
hundreds of megabytes of mesh/texture and sound data into 96k. We merely store the
individual steps employed by the artists to produce their textures and meshes, in a very
compact way. This allows us to get .much. higher data density than is achievable with
normal data compression techniques, at some expense in artistic freedom and loading times.
- .kkrieger is not written in 100% assembler/machine language. Not even nearly. Like the
vast majority of game projects being developed today, .kkrieger was mostly written in
C++, with some tiny bits of assembler where it is actually advantageous (notably, there
are a lot of MMX optimisations in the texture generator).
- A kilobyte is, historically, defined to be 1024 (2^10) bytes, not 1000. Thus .kkrieger is
a game in 96k even though it's actually 98304 bytes.
- The concept of the texture/mesh generators was developed by fiver2. We do .not. want to
claim that the techniques we used to develop .kkrieger are new inventions. It´s rather a
selection of useful operations and their parameters to optimise the results.

[LiquidX]

The game took longer to load that it it did to download. Awesome for what its worth. These guys will make it big if they can make more games like this, 56k gamers will love them. :)

[sytaylor]

Yeah saw this earlier, these are the same guys who did the excellent 64k demo FR-08 etc, I think they use standard libs or something to brilliant effect. An entire game is 96kb is a bit ott, however it would be worth developers considering compression every now and then considering the size of some footprints latley. I know microsoft preach that hard drive space is cheap but that doesn't make it true, i'm burning ~6 DVD'rs a month just to not buy another hard drive

[stncttr908]

How is this even possible? I'm so confused.

[eL_PuSHeR]

I also have a GeForce4 Ti4200 and latest detonators (forceware 56.72) and it runs and shows like crap. :ORDER:

[Mullins1060]

doesnt run very well here either

[jbirney]

How is this even possible? I'm so confused.

Instead of using static textues (ie textures your read from a file) they create their own on the fly. This allows them to avoid using real textures that are usally HUGE.


Its kind of like Midi music. Here you have complete "song" that are only a few k vrs a MB size wav. Midi's store the notes of the music and recreate it on play back. Of course a midi will never sound as good as a wav, just as this method they use does have some restrictions. So its "kind" of the same thing.

Really cool what they can do with this stuff.

[Edge]

Yeah, they have a pretty amazing way of conserving space. Even back when they released The Product demo (was that FR08?), I was amazed at the way the textures were actually compiled when you loaded the demo rather than having 50 megs of pre-rendered textures that you had to download. I think they said that if everything was pre-compiled in a raw, uncompressed form, there would've been over a gig of total files, and they got it into 64k :eek:

But still...it's just boggles my mind how they were able to make this game. I've seen HTML code larger than that game, not to mention an animation file for Half-life is like 50k, and this game has SEVERAL enemies and animations. Come to think of it...a level like that should be at LEAST a meg just for the geometry...

These guys will make it big if they can make more games like this, 56k gamers will love them. :)

Yup, I loved the way that even on my 56k, it took less time to download than it did to load the game :D

[sytaylor]

it took longer to UNZIP than it did to download!!!

[eL_PuSHeR]

Could display issues be related to having just 64MB of VRAM memory? It seems it requires a graphic card with 128MB.

[einstein_314]

This is amazing. I never expected the graphics to be like that (despite the screenshots at the beginning of this tread). WOW. Plays kinda choppy. And would look better on a Geforce FX (or a 6800 ultra!! :) ) Cool.

[Mullins1060]

Could display issues be related to having just 64MB of VRAM memory? It seems it requires a graphic card with 128MB.

doubt its that, i have 128mb vram and it feels choppy, could be my main ram bottlenecking though.

[stncttr908]

Instead of using static textues (ie textures your read from a file) they create their own on the fly. This allows them to avoid using real textures that are usally HUGE.


Its kind of like Midi music. Here you have complete "song" that are only a few k vrs a MB size wav. Midi's store the notes of the music and recreate it on play back. Of course a midi will never sound as good as a wav, just as this method they use does have some restrictions. So its "kind" of the same thing.

Really cool what they can do with this stuff.Ah, thank you.

[Vash]

I think that's the coolest thing that I've seen all week. Packing all that graphical goodness into 96kb has got to be hard.

[theultimo]

the zip file compressed it to 96520 bytes, from 97280 so naa :)

[fx5600ultra]

Some other older 64kb demos
http://www.theproduct.de/

fr-08: .the .product
released 29-dec-2000
http://www.theproduct.de/fr08.jpg
fr08_final.zip (http://www.theproduct.de/fr08_final.zip) (63.5kb)

fr-019: poemtoahorse
released 30-apr-2002
http://www.theproduct.de/fr019.jpg
fr-019-final.zip (http://www.theproduct.de/fr-019-final.zip) (64.0kb)

fr-030: candytron
released 20-apr-2003
http://www.theproduct.de/fr030.jpg
fr-030_candytron_final.zip (http://www.theproduct.de/fr-030_candytron_final.zip) (64.0kb)

[sytaylor]

their newer stuff all seems to be lights and translucent/transperency, 08 is far and away my favourite, although 13 is cooooool!

[Rampant CL]

How is this even possible? I'm so confused.


As well as textures being handled in that method, the entire level is all vector coded - which results in the levels being a tiny filesize - as well as some leet shared code.

[saturnotaku]

These games are incredibly cool. Even if they were full-size, they would still be awesome. All they need is to give the user an option to tweak controls and mouse settings and they'd be all set to market these bad boys. Very impressive. :)

[Zeta]

nub question: What is "M1 - M9"? I keep getting stuck at the same spot and I cant figure out how to spawn somewhere else. I guess I dont know what M1 is.

[eL_PuSHeR]

Could display issues be related to having just 64MB of VRAM memory? It seems it requires a graphic card with 128MB.

I quote myself. Tried it on a friend's laptop (P4 centrino - GeForce FX5xxx 64MB) and it displayed properly. So it doesn't need 128MB of video ram. Don't know why it's displaying bad on my GeForce4 Ti4200. I have latest forceware drivers installed (56.72)

[lunatix]

nub question: What is "M1 - M9"? I keep getting stuck at the same spot and I cant figure out how to spawn somewhere else. I guess I dont know what M1 is.

i dunno either, and my vid is messed up too, so i doubt it'd make a difference if i knew