As promised before I am obliged very happy to present you the 2nd part in our decennal review of 4k intros.
(Wow, it seemed more the statement of some retirement club...)

This time I won't reveal you how many 4ks could fit your 1.44Mb disk, but, to make you understand 4ks, I would just use an easy concept: as someone said, "4k intros are like 4096 1-byte intros glued together".

Anyway. I have mixed thoughts about this second span of 4k history. I'm quite confident we exited from the "wobbly raymarched thingie" or "infinite fractal" trend we've seen starting around 2010, but the general feeling is that the way to find a new direction is still long and painful, and that new ideas are just starting to emerge.

Also, looking over this new decade, some black spots, or "black years" like 2014 come up, years that seem to show a general emptiness in terms of ideas and new releases. In general, we also saw a massive increment of 4ks that use the same synth (4klang), unfortunately often with the same presets, flattening the soundscape variety.
But, regardless of that, and confident that the scene is NOT dead, let's dive in.

2008 - Texas by keyboarders

The best 4k of 2008 couldn't be anything different from 'the best 4k intro so far', by definition.
I've seen people on Youtube asking if this intro really plays that music.
Yes, it does. On Windows Vista, at least. Understanding how (even if everybody in the scene knows that) is left as an exercise to the reader in the long, winter days.


By the way, I personally like the visuals more than the music in this one.

2009 - Elevated by Rgba

And, by definition, the best 4k intro of 2009 couldn't be different from Elevated.


2010 - Cdak by Quite & Orange

The music and the atmosphere in this one is spacey.
If you read the comments on Pouet, people even like this 4k's music more than the one in "Texas".


Historically, this intro places itself at the dawn of the "infinite fractal" trend that plagued pervaded the demoscene in the early 2010s. But come on, this is *the* infinite fractal demo.

2011 - D-Four by Ctrl-Alt-Test

The best 4k of 2011, according to pouet's "top of the trumpets" is "Code is my pron", but I consider that one, as the title says, just coder's porn. Even if I'm I've been a coder too.


Instead, Ctrl-Alt-Test manages to create something really unique/rare in the scene with this one: an intro based on a flow of words, with a solid and catchy tune. By the way, it's funny reading the source code and the names of the background colours in French (Fondu noir de début, Nuit, Jour, etc.).

2012 - Reionization by mfx

The best 4k from 2012 is this one. Not this one. Not even this one.
Why? Because it's from mfx, because muzik rules and because Youtube can't compress it and you have to run it on real hardware.
(Youtube screenshot follows)


2013 - HBC-00013: Highway 4k by HBC and Tekotuotanto

The clear winner for 2013 is "Highway".


I bet anyone likes camera-distorted tron-esque motorbikes with pumping music in the background.
Interestingly enough, this 4k is written in javascript and then compressed. It's one of the few 4ks using this approach (maybe the only one? there are 55 according to pouet.net, there was even a dedicated party, called DemoJS, seems everybody forgot about this).

2014 - Dismantlement by BluFlame

As said, 2014 was a pretty poor year.
BluFlame, experts in 4k, come to us and save the princess with their "dental mirrors".


In general, the techniques used in this intro are not so new, but the "torus factory" scene is enjoyable, at least.
Nobody knows, still, why some toruses are missing.

2015 - hydrokinetics by Prismbeings

Prismbeings debut at an already very high level with their first 4k.


Some nice touches make this intro stand from the other "normal" raymarched productions: the moody music, that has nice and trippy echoes, the camera distorsions, the dust effect, the *hexagonal* *lens* *flares*.
Wait a sec, they don't have hexagonal lens flares...

2016 - 2nd stage boss by 0x4015 and YET11

What Gargaj said. Really.
If you sum up a size limited intro, a story, spaceships, lasers and explosions, you won't find a demoscener unpleased by this.
Since Lithium by Vista.


2017 - Unprogress by Fairlight

And we end this walkthrough with one of my favourite (to say the less) groups, that seem to have passed through all the ages of demoscene and still being able to be great, even if now they have probably 389 years each one.


This 4k could easily be mismatched for a movie trailer. And it's the first 4k with "statues", I think, or the first 4k with scene titles. But I may be wrong. Disprove me in the comments.

P.S.: by definition, this list should include "the best intro ever" by Razor 1911, but it doesn't. Sorry about that.

posted by friol at 9/07/2018 10:29:00 PM - under: 4k, flares, hexagonal, history, lens - comments? here (0)

Watching 4k intros at Revision 2017 made most people say that 4k is the new 64k.
Well, that's hard to prove, but at least we've seen one revision 8k that was a nearly 1:1 remake of an old 64k ("rise" by mindforce and park).

So maybe 4k is half the new 64k.

Jokes apart, let's see how modern 4ks and 64ks compare.

4ks and 64ks share some limitations. Both have to use generated music, both rarely use stored textures. They are both not using precalculated video, even if some groups, starting from Complex, did this in the past.
64ks can use some stored samples, but just one or two may fit the 65536 bytes limit - so using them doesn't give a clear advantage to 64ks anyway.
Finally, the use of shaders everywhere made 64ks and 4ks even more similar than before.


Still, 64ks have elements that are not present in 4ks (for now).
For example, Conspiracy's intro from Revision 2016 had some evocative black silhouettes recalling human figures. "Gubernyia" from Macau Exports had some of these too, far in the background. 64ks can have a longer and better "story" inside. Just think of "eidolon" by Poo-brain or of (the unfortunately a bit cheesy) "h-immersion" by Ctrl-Alt-Test. Some 64ks can use gm.dls with a bit of trickery. In general, 64ks can have some additional content inside that makes them more complex and various.

But despite of this, having 60 additional whopping kilobytes often acts like a psychologically inverse mechanism that makes coders waste them.
Take "Off" by Mercury. No matter if they say "we have this new shining engine", "we have the bestest synth in the world", "we have a lot of dust on the camera" ("and hexagonal lens flares too") - their 64k seems a lot more like a 4k (at the point that somebody called it "a screensaver"). The same, unfortunately, goes for the latest intro from Conspiracy.

So, does a modern 4k intro look like an older 64k one?

Let me examine some very good candidates.
For example, "absolute territory" by prismbeings reminded me a lot of old intros like "Fresnel 2" by Kolor or "Transgression 3" by mfx. But if you watch them carefully, you see that "absolute territory" looks more like *one* single scene of Fresnel 2, leaving apart the visual quality of the two productions.


Let's take the one I consider the "state of the art" 4k in 2017, "horizon machine" by Eos and Alcatraz, and compare it to the winner 64k of Revision 2012, "gaia machina". Even if you can visually see the gap in those 5 years (the first "machine" is way better for rendering quality), content-wise, or looking at the camera paths and cuts, or even for the quality of the content and objects in the latter one, "gaia machina" still stands higher than the 2017 4k.
The same thing happens if you compare it to more recent winners of Revision: there is almost no competition there.

It seems clear that a middle placed 64k intro like "Off" or "Vessel" can be compared (and maybe lose) to a top-notch 4k like "horizon machine" or "Joia" by Collapse. But 64k clearly win if we take a better designed, packed and polished intro like "eidolon" or "guberniya".


Now we can ask the final questions.

Has the gap between 4k and 64k reduced?
Maybe. Maybe now 64ks and 4ks have the same shaders, the same synths, the same effects, and they are so close that you can't distinguish a mediocre 64k from a brilliant 4k (but still you can distinguish "Chaos Theory 4k" from "Chaos Theory", I suppose).

Is 4k the new 64k?
Not really. Maybe modern 4ks surpassed the average 64k, but still 4ks are runner-ups compared to a jaw-dropping 64k of 2017 or previous years. And probably they will always be.

P.S.: oh well, I didn't notice but 10 years have passed from this post here.
Seems like I "already" have the task to write the second chapter of 4k history (2007-2017).
Stay tuned for more.

posted by friol at 4/21/2017 01:03:00 AM - under: 4k, 64k, comparison - comments? here (2)

"This post is bigger than 4Kbyte".

4k, in the qabbalah of demoscene, means a program with size smaller or equal to 4096 bytes.

Classic figures you get to explain how tight 4k is are, for example, comparisons with other programs (Microsoft Word spans several megabytes) or with the size of a movie (a 3 minute .avi can weight even 15 megabytes).
But those delights in 4096 bytes are more than that. You should imagine 4ks as the haiku of informatics; like an ecosystem in a matchbox; like a ship in a bottle. Like bonsai.

If this article was made of code, we would have already used 25% of the available 4096 bytes.

This is a trip through what the demoscene managed to put in 4 kilobyte intros across the last 10 years.

Ready?

1997 - Omniscent - (download link - watch with Dosbox)

To understand the beauty of "Omniscent" you don't have necessarily to know Descent, as you should have not necessarily seen Microsoft Word to understand how small 4096 bytes are.

"Omniscent" was a step towards the future. "Omniscent" brings an entire level of the game "Descent" in 4Kbytes, and, as a bonus, if you rise your speakers' volume, you'll hear the metallic chords of a videogame-music.

Sure, the technology is ten years old, but in those 4 kilobytes you'll find everything: earth, lava, warning signs, neons and even alien-painted walls. We see everything in first person, floating lightly as a spaceship pushed by anti-gravitational rockets.

And while we exit from the tunnel, maybe we can hear behind of us the sound of the exploding corridors.

1998 - Mesha - (download link - watch with Dosbox)

After "Omniscent", democoders wanted to demonstrate that more and more things could fit into 4k; they wanted to push the limit some polygons further.

So the intro's info-file tells us that those 4096 bytes of code processed 13.000 vertexes, 17.000 faces, 8 different textures; many 3d solids were created by "revolutionary" generative algorithms.

If there is an astonishing aspect of 4k intros, this is the size of each routine, like the size of a leaf or a root in a bonsai tree.
So "Mesha" contains a code depacker in only 95 bytes. Every texture is generated by an algorithm of a few bytes. Other 4ks have musical players in 100, 110 bytes or musical scores in a bunch of bits.

Now you could ask yourself: would nowadays' software span entire DVDs if it was made as 4k are?

1999 - Void3 - (download link - watch with Dosbox or see the video)

The echo of a metallic sound in the distance, a pink fog that clears in front of our eyes, and then, coup de coeur : speech synthesis in 4k.
The future is now.

Ok, even Commodore 64 could do speech synthesis, you may argue, decades before, but here is the difference: this is 4k. C64 had ten times that memory space, and, do you remember?, when that "destroy him, my robots" quote got out of the speakers, everything just freezed.

Here we have realtime 3d graphics, synth quality music, 16 millions of colors and high resolution video all running together with speech synthesis. That's just the difference.

2000 - Stoerfall ost - (download link - watch the video)

Who programmed a factory with orange automatic robotic arms and put it to sleep in just one sector of our hard drive?

4k intros are no more than a magic lamp: you just have to rub them to realize your dreams.

If we run "Stoerfall ost", we suddenly see two couples of orange robots hanging up some blue panels in an assembly line. Then the camera zooms out and we understand they are just weaving Penelope's shroud. They are condemned by the coder to repeat the same moves ad infinitum.


Perpetual motion in only 4096 bytes. Now, GOTO 10.

2001 - Juggler 2001 - (download link - watch with Dosbox)

A reference to the koine of computer-graphics, again.

This time, we should go back to November of 1986 to catch it, year when in an Amiga program the animation of a stylized humanoid made three reflecting balls spinning inside a surreal landscape. At that time, this made people scream for a miracle, and relegated green phosphors monitors of IBM PCs in a dusty corner, in favour of a machine that was light years ahead in technology.
The programmer himself described in detail the somersaults needed to inflate that animation in an Amiga diskette.

An Amiga disk is 880Kb big.

In 2001, the juggler comes back to life; this time the camera is not static, but moves through the scene; the spheres are not just three anymore, but become many; music is not even that metallic "bip" again, but is made of real armonic chords.

Pressing "escape", the Pandora's box closes inside itself its 4096 bytes.

2002 - Industrial light and magic - (download link - works in xp and vista)

Industrial light and magic is obviously the company that creates the most astounding special fx in the world, but here its name is borrowed by the two democoders of this intro to play on words with the "light" of the technique used to realize the graphics (raytracing) and the "magic" of enclosing everything in 4 kilobytes.

This time, all the cliches of raytracing (here, scene's peculiarity, in realtime) are respected: the reflecting checkerboard that mirrors the spheres made of different materials, the columns with the central light source, the tunnel with shadows. Everything is perfect, even the realtime generated soundtrack.

Raytracing is a computational technique that normally uses machine-hours to create just a simple image, but this time, with this masterpiece, space and even time limits are broken.

2003 - Mojo dreams - (download link - works in windows xp)

The tentative to recreate a landscape (maybe a martian one) in few bytes is common in the demoscene, with more or less good results.

Indeed, here we witness a leap forward: normally we would find mojo dream's graphics in several megabytes weighted ATI or Nvidia's tech demos. Instead, for the nth miracle of demoscene, here everything is concentrated in 4k.

But how is this step made, compared to "Mars"? With algorithms, first of all: the terrain is not generated with a "simple" perlin noise, anymore, but owes its natural look to "Doc Mojo"'s (from here the title) Musgrave researchs. Light is bend by the light scattering routines. The rest are demoscenical tricks, but looking at the mojo dream's mountains is like looking at the Matrix behind an operator's monitor: at the end, they're made of scrolling green characters.

2004 - Micropolis - (download link - works in windows xp)

If "Stoerfall ost" recreated an entire factory in 4k, Micropolis creates a whole futuristic city.

There are bridges, buildings, trains, and the sky is obfuscated by thousands of small stylized flying cars.
Music is obviously synthetic and sequenced. Frequencies are cut progressively by resonant filters, the ones you normally find in 10 thousand dollars recording studios' synths.

Suddenly, going backwards, the camera uncovers a mech's foot. It's the topic moment. Suspension of disbelief falls down, because in a fraction of second the mech starts to march and goes with its footsteps towards the heart of the 4 kilobytes city.

But if you thought that we reached the limit (what can you fit in 4k bigger than a city?), read ahead.

2005 - Parsec - (download link - watch the video)

Bigger than a city.
It's simple: a planet.
More planets.
A galaxy.

This is "Parsec": an entire galaxy in 4k.

We get an initial image of the whole galaxy, but then we see that it's composed of smaller planets. Probably some planets are populated. We get worlds with asteroid rings, we get nebulas, we get stars and space debris. Quality is not far from cinematographic effects.

The 4k intros with "natural" scenarios close a circle: men always knew that behind every natural shape there is mathematics; now mathematical algorithms are used to recreate natural worlds.

2006 - Polarfield - (download link - works in windows xp)

The reaction to "Parsec"'s delusion of grandeur could not be different from minimalism.

At the beginning of "Polarfield", the screen gets filled of garbage; a "loading" sign is in the lower right corner (actually the "garbage" is not really garbage, but a side effect of precalculus). In the background, a synthetic music repeats the same six notes, in a loop. We may think that something's really broken in the program, but at this point, the intro starts.

Polarfield uses only two colors, black and white, and the intermediate shades of gray, but turns that into unequaled elegance.

The abstract shapes (from white cubes, to romboids with black spikes, similar to the beak of a robotic parrot) are rendered with an algorithm called ambient occlusion (we find something really similar in 3d graphics professional programs, like 3dStudio or Maya). At the end, the music fades away while the 3d solids continue to dance in a milky background, and the electronic carrillon closes and stops moving.

2007 - Stiletto - (download link - watch the video)

What's left after robots, planets, Descent-levels and landscapes in a 4k intro? Well, just an human. A woman, or, to be exact, half a woman.

When the intro starts, we hear just footsteps; then the silhouette of two legs, unequivocally feminine, comes onto the screen, wearing a pair of red stilettos that, we are informed, cost only 99 dollars. The intro then gets a bit repetitive; the lower part of the body is taken by many different angles.

But what gives the wow-factor is the flexuous movement, the natural colour of the skin, that makes us believe the rest of the body is not less angelical. Indeed, knowing the space-hungry scene democoders, the upper polygons of the body are surely just cut in an abrupt section.

Digital walls within 4k worlds probably are just the wings of a theatre.

posted by friol at 8/22/2007 06:51:00 PM - under: 10 years, 4k, intro - comments? here (1)

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