7 HN users recommended this demo7 months2009–2025score 7.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN repeatedly holds it up as the benchmark for what procedural generation and size-coding can achieve in 4K.
Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.
“you'll have a hard time believing it if you haven't seen it yet” (HN, 2014)
Check out 'Elevated' - winner of the 4k PC demo category at Breakpoint 2009. It's a fly-through of a realistic looking procedurally generated terrain model with music and some fancy post processing effects all squeezed into a <4096 bytes executable. Even my moderately high-end PC can't run it (I suspect because it shoves an overwhelmingly huge triangle mesh at the GPU) but there's a video here: [this video]
Fly-through of procedural terrain with music in a 4KB executable
Two more by Farbrausch the.popular.demo [link] and Candytron (64K) [link] For some newer releases blunderbuss by Fairlight [link] is very different is style but still very cool and two post about the particle system behind the demo [link] [link] Elevated by Rgba & TBC [this video] is a great example of what people can do in 4K, and they even have a presentation about the technical details [link] and State of the Art by Spaceballs [link] is a highpoint of the amiga scene (edited to add, which I should have clicked on the link to see it had already been embedded)
Indeed, keep going, and you may reach this level of awesome: [this video] (Quite realistic terrain generated by a 4 kilobyte binary, along with music . Source code and its discussion here: [link] )
I know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like "elevated" from 2009 [1]. I've heard Iñigo Quílez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene). 1= [this video]
Amazing 2009 demo results; commenter wishes for in-depth teardowns
It's 12 years old now, but I am still extremely impressed by this 64k intro [link] and also by this 4k intro [this video] :) And overall this website is extremely interesting with tutorials and code and great explanations [link]
For the impatient or people without sufficient hardware, a YouTube recording is here: [this video] One of the guys who created this little gem gave a presentation about the technology behind it; slides are here: [link]
Video recording of the 4K demo for those without hardware
> For doing data compression has anyone ever heard about using these techniques to generate other things besides 3D game levels? These techniques are routinely used in the demoscene for making 4Kb/64Kb intros. In this kind of intros almost everything is generated procedurally, not only meshes, but also textures and sound. If you are interested you can watch one of these examples: - Elevated (4K intro) Binary: [link] Youtube video: [this video] - .kkrieger (96K game) Binary: [link] Gameplay video: [link]
Example of a 4K intro generating meshes, textures and sound procedurally
> The article's tone implies that these were the 'good old days' when compilers were small and fast. That's reading a lot into two short paragraphs. Tone doesn't come across well in text, and the shorter the text is, the harder it is to figure out tone. I don't hear nostalgia for the 'good old days' in the article, what I hear is, "Wow! What a feat of engineering to fit an IDE and compiler into 40k!" We get the same kick out of watching demo competitions. Have you seen the "Elevated" demo? Including the music, sound effects, textures, everything, it's only 4k... [this video]
Shows a whole demo with music and textures in only 4k
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