pouët.net

elevated by Rgba [web] & TBC

                         [NameOfTheIntroGoesHere]


           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]