demoscene

(note: if you’ve seen this before, you can excuse my excited rantings and play hide-and-don’t-brag-in-my-comments-thread.)
Folks at #4toontellers showed me this: http://www.theprodukkt.com/
This group, along with many other teams of programmers/designers/musicians, creates pretty freakin’ amazing displays of audio and video. I’d be pretty impressed at the designs alone that are put into this, but the programming involved is where I’m blown away:
The programs on and linked to this site are no more than 64kb each.
They explain that they use texture generators through algorithms and they simply supercompress all the models, animations, music, and more… but I just can’t believe it. It’s amazing how small you can get these things if you let your client-side computer do all the rendering and processing… I’m stunned.
And then on that site they also have a game, which totals 96kb, and is a fully-functional first-person shooter, complete with enemy AI, an arsenal of weapons, realistic physics, full maps, realistic textures on everything, and ambient music. All in 96kb. Wowowow.
Makes me wonder just what these 6 gigabytes of FFXI-related files are doing on my hard drive.