Page 1 of 2
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 7:31 pm
by Axe
I just found a screenshot on my computer that reminded me of something I saw a long time ago. I thought reposting would be a good idea since a lot of people probably missed it when it was first popular. These are two demos of sound and graphics, which are pretty amazing to see. DirectX 8 is required to run these.
Now here's the fun part, these are tiny tiny little files. 64kb to be exact.
The website for this is located here:
http://theproduct.de/
These are the two files in question.
http://theproduct.de/fr08_final.zip
http://theproduct.de/fr-019-final.zip
These are .exe files, but they are not harmful in anyway. No viruses, no spyware, just the program.
The first one here was released a while ago (winter of 2000). This is certinly the better of the two. It's about 16 minutes long and is just about the most amazing thing you'll ever see. I found the soundtrack on this to be very good as well (you can download it from their site). This is a screenshot I took with my own computer a year and a half ago.

The second one, .poemtoahorse, was made around April of this year. It's shorter and not as impressive, but it mainly showcases new shapes and graphics they were able to produce.
Some fun facts: These demos use a compression rate of 30,000 to 1. Your computer is really producing 1.9GB worth of data. These are both definitly worth a look if you haven't seen them before.
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 7:41 pm
by Blimpet
Jesus fuck my eye Christ...
Still, my computer is still a shitty rust-bucket. Let's just see how much it makes my computer suffer.
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 8:26 pm
by Blimpet
Oh yeah, the soundtrack is the shiznizzle. Downloading it right now.
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 8:36 pm
by MikeJ
Yea I remember theproduct. ?If that's 1.9GB then a game like GTA3 is 1.9TB :darkstar:
They talk about how the music is something like 400MB uncrompessed or some BS, when it's obviously a midi which is like 40KB uncompressed for 5 minutes of music.
still cool stuff.
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 8:49 pm
by Angeldust
omfg~! i'm rendered mindfuct.
This is trully awesome and i cant believe theyve managed to compress it so much. my god 63.5 KB? how the fuck did they do it? awesome fucking trip. profanities can not do my reaction justice.
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 8:55 pm
by Axe
Yea I remember theproduct. ?If that's 1.9GB then a game like GTA3 is 1.9TB :darkstar:
Plz, GTA3 is not compressed like that, because it can't be compressed like that. This is non-interactive, it's just a series of 1's and 0's and your computer does all the real work (not the engine). Besides, why would they lie about the compression ratio. After seeing it, it sure doesn't seem far-fetched.
Also, the music sounds far better than any midi I've ever heard.
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 8:56 pm
by Axe
Oh yeah, the soundtrack is the shiznizzle. Downloading it right now.
You can grab the really small (37KB) converter here:
http://kebby.org/fr08zakz.exe
But I'm sure you found that already.
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 8:56 pm
by Angeldust
i doubt its a midi file. its got too many layers. too many sounds happening at the same time.
Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 10:52 pm
by MikeJ
The 1.9GB statement is misleading. It is a midi file, it says so on the site "later on, he crunched the midi file and stored it in .the product.". The most impressive technique done in the product is their texturing, which are generated on the fly in pure code, but that's only 16MB worth of textures. And obviously a 5 minutes MIDI isn't 190MB, if you covert it into a wave yea, but I can convert an AVI movie into 10MB/sec so...
My point is that it wouldn't take 1.9GB to re create this demo without any compression at all, it would take like 17MB; which is a 283:1 compression ratio if you look at it like that, which is still quite impressive. But all the textures are just patterns generated by algorithms; I doubt they could use the method to create complex textures with detailed objects and text. It?s still pretty neat. Oh and for a little comparison, the half-life engine is only 900KB, and this includes 3 rendering engines (openGL, dX, software,) physics engine, AI engine, etc..
Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2002 1:34 pm
by KBC
i thought you were gonna say you found your virginity, but then i remembered you never lost it