AGrass by Rescue Rangers
AGrass by Rescue Rangers
A 4 KByte ode to a true Classic :D
(http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=11012)
Released at Function 2017
The Rescue Rangers are (in order of appearance):
Chip - Reversing, coding, minimizing, sweating over music
(including sitting down in front of a tracker
for the first time after almost 20 years) and
haggling with entropy for the last 300 bytes.
Dale - Initial music pass with many many iterations
Zipper - Secondary music pass, 4klang sample magic and size optimizations
Gadget - 4klang support and manual size optimizations
Monterey - Arpeggio fix, renoise lesson, chilling in the AC with some Wine
Hello, Reptile. ;)
A bit of background.
This is not a simple remake of an old demo.
This IS the old demo, with the obviously necessary changes in content to make
it fit into 4k. (These changes being the music and the ground texture)
This all started as a joke. Watching TheFu with a friend I jokingly said "hey,
maybe THIS should be done in 4k". Then came the obligatory "holy fuck let's
do this" style looking-together moment.
The demo was first fully reverse engineered over the span of about a week,
the code cleaned up, and the visuals crunched down to about 2.8k in the next
month. Work on the music started after a plausible size has been reached, and
the very first iteration resulted in an executable about 4.8k large, and it
didn't even sound close to what we deemed acceptable. A crinkler update helped
with the size, then some 4klang gurus came and helped out with making the music
sound better (and get larger). 4klang was manually tweaked to get some extra
bytes, while the visuals were shrunk even more. After about 3 months of work
completely, we arrived at the version that you can see here. Bit of an overkill
for a 10 second joke aimed at a single person, but hey, it was fun and
interesting.
The differences between the original demo and the 4k are as follows
- the music is obviously not the original trance classic
- the ground texture has been replaced
- the pink particle texture is only a close approximation of the original
- the sync is a lot tighter as a necessity to make things fit into 4k
- the 4k version doesn't have a lot of the never used setup stuff
- the 4k version doesn't dump the current timestamp into a file when you press
space
- the starting white flash has been removed both from the music and the visuals
and most importantly:
- the 4k version hides the mouse cursor
As for the rest, even the randseed of the randomly positioned flashing effects
in the breakdown part, the fact that the lack of vsync will make the grass
blades animate instantly and the resolution are the same with pretty much the
same, albeit heavily size optimized code.
This was fun.[ back to the prod ]