Ice & Fire

My “first 4k”/ 4 Kbytes intro / 4096 bytes

Released at revision 2017, ranking #7 – Hard competition this year ;-p

“One hundred hours” to optimize shader code & music size…

Because of the strict size limits, intros show off the programmer’s ability to squeeze much into little space, often by generating graphic and sound data rather than just reading it from a datafile. Because of the extremely low size limit, 4K intros used to lack sound, or had extremely low quality music. As technology progresses, however, 4K sound synthesis has become a new frontier in the demoscene. 4K still isn’t the lowest border for demosceners: some demoparties organize 1K, 256 byte, 64 byte or even 32 byte intro competitions.

Coding a 4k intro is a matter of discipline and code magic. You have to be very good friends with the development environment you are working with and know it’s inner details.

My work flow for coding a 4kb intro start from scratch using some of the ready made frameworks available on the net.

The best framework I’ve come across is the one made by Inigo Quilez aka iq of rgba. He has published frameworks for starting 4k and 1k coding in c/c++ using software rendering, opengl with/without shader and d3d9. You can safely download one of his framework and use as foundation without loosing any credits in among the tough guys in the scene. This will setup visual output and allow for easy coding of visuals.

An previous version before the competition…

You can download this at pouet.net :

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69710

More free stuff @ https://unix61.bandcamp.com/