[Samoht]

Quoto direttamente dal readme.txt:

4 kb intro by TBC and rgba, and also by rgba and TBC for Breakpoint 2009

.iq.typing.

exactly one year ago i made an executable procedural graphic and video called "ixaleno", which i liked. people asked when such imagery would be realtime, and i was answering "today", as i have already seen terragen quality landscapes, completely procedural, in opengl. the point really was how good i could do _in 4 kilobytes_. i experimented and concluded i could so something similar to ixaleno without much problem, and so i stoped playing with it.

but then mentor asked me what's up and i showed him some of the images while saying it was slightly too big for a full 4k intro, and not good enough for a 64k. he replied "what about a collaboration and we make a 4k with it?".

he ported it to dx, he added his synth, he spoke to puryx and few days after we had a tune, then the code got mentorized to dead and before i could realize we were apparently making an intro! mentor did some more mentorization and added support for gnu-rocket (hey, have a look to it as it's very cool!). i reworked the rendering, then the camera system, and script, and finally for two weeks we fought against the entropy.

as for my part, i'm sure rendering could have been better, but perhaps i should instead learn for once that 4k is just 4096 bytes. dunno. but anyway i'm happy with the intro. the tune is fantastic. not to mention that working with mentor has been a superb experience.

it's little more than one day for the party now. we haven't slept much last nights and we are quite tired in fact. but we will be in time for the deadline, so we will enjoy the party!

.notes.

believe it or not, this was running at 30 fps in a gefoce 7900 at some point, but size optimizations forced us to ask you for a pretty decent graphics card, like a geforce 8800gtx or hd4850. please, make sure you have d3d9_33.dll somewhere there. also, you only need windows xp.

we are providing the following versions of the intro:

elevated_1024x768.exe (letterboxed)
elevated_1280x720.exe
elevated_1280x1024.exe (letterboxed)
elevated_1440x900.exe (letterboxed)
elevated_1920x1080.exe
elevated_1920x1080_hq.exe

the last version (hq) contains more geometry than the others. only for those who have monster machines or are living in the future.

.tech.

for those wondering, this a (too) low density flat mesh displaced with a procedural vertex shader. there arent any texturemaps for texturing, instead texturing (and shading) is defferred and computed procedurally in a full screen quad. this means there is zero overdraw for the quite expensive material at the cost of a single geometry pass. then another second full screen quad computes the motion blur. camera movements are computed by a shader too and not in the cpu, as only the gpu knows the procedural definition of the landscape.

.credits.

music puryx
visuals iq [http://www.iquilezles.org]
optimization mentor
synth mentor
gnu-rocket kusma + skrebbel [http://rocket.sourceforge.net]
crinkler mentor + blueberry [http://www.crinkler.net]