World’s smallest shooter only needs 96 kb of disk space!
Published on July 19th, 2006 in Fun
That’s right! It’s called “.kkrieger” and was developed by German demo group “.theprodukkt”. It was created for a demo competition where only entries with 96 kb were allowed. So how did they do it? Well, needless to say, they were (probably still are) very good programmers, but the biggest reason today’s games are soooo huge, is high resolution textures. The game still uses textures of course, but they were not created in Photoshop or another software and saved as a bitmap. No, the textures are being calculated on demand, that needs a lot less space and still looks pretty good when looked at closely.
The competition has been a while ago (somewhen in 2004), but it’s still amazing, so I had to make a post about it. It’s good to see there are still programmers who care about efficiency and can deliver it, although of course, it was the main target to be met, otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to participate in that contest at all.
It’s reported to be pretty buggy, that’s why it’s still beta and I doubt there were real improvements made since .kkrieger already had won the contest. As I do not have a Windows box with pixel-shader support on hand (my Win XP sub-notebook has only got a shared memory graphics card and .kkrieger even won’t start on it), I am unable to test it out. But there should be enough folks out there who could download it and give it a quick try since you don’t even have to install it, just run the .exe file.
You can download it here (official site).
You should meet these minimum requirements to run it:
A 1.5GHz pentium 3 / athlon or faster
512MB of RAM
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
Here are a few pictures to show you what .kkrieger is all about, certainly not bad for just 96 kb (btw. the screenshots need more than that):
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