Procedural Synthesis

Procedural Synthesis: try saying that three times in a row before your morning pint (of coffee).

Wandring_Soul spotted this amazing little insert (about 2/3rds of the way down) about the Xbox 360's "procedural synthesis" capabilities. I'll paste it because it's difficult to spot:

Procedural synthesis is has a great deal of potential to affect the Xbox 360's filesizes. In short, procedural synthesis is a way of producing graphics that Microsoft has pushed heavily with the introduction of the Xbox 360, including specific hardware functions designed to do handle procedural synthesis. It uses algorithms to produce high quality graphics out of extremely small files. For the best example of what procedural synthesis can do, check out .kkrieger, which means Warrior in German. This first person shooter is built almost entirely from procedural graphics, and as a consequence occupies about 96 Kilobytes of space.
Yes, the game responsible for this screenshot here, here, and here could fit almost 14 copies on an old-fashioned 1.4 megabyte floppy disk.

96K for the whole game?? My jaw is ON THE FLOOR.

(Thanks W_S!)

Comments

[Pixel Kill]

It's a very cool feature of the 360, though more for developers than us gamers.

I do love how it's just another case of the demo scene pioneering something that's now being used in games. Bump mapping also comes to mind, now we're getting procedural textures (and more) on the 360 and in Spore, something the demo scene has used for years. The original Unreal also used an old demo trick to make its gorgeous fire and water effects (care of demo coder Erik DeNeve).

.kkrieger is extremely good though I highly recommend checking out some other top graphical demos over at scene.org . Zoom 3 (http://scene.org/file.php?file=/parties/2003/assembly03/in64/zoom3_v1_02_final.zip&fileinfo) is another astonishing use of 64k to fit music, speech, animation... bloody amazing.

Might have to put together a blog post sometime with a few more demo highlights. I love the demo scene, truly an amazingly talented bunch of tight coders.

[Darren]

Been available to download on the pc for a while now;

http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger.html

[mike]

I downloaded kkriger a little while ago, but couldn't get it to run even on my gaming machine (not great, but 2ghz, 1gb RAM, GeforceFX5200). What you get in small file size you have to make up for in pure CPU output, as the game basically creates its own graphics as well as rendering them.

Now, probably won't be a problem in a year or two when dual cores are the standard (on both CPUs and graphics cards), but for now there's not much to play with besides a tech demo.

[Tont]

.kkreiger is fantastic. Farbrausch, the group who did it, have a long history of procedural content generation.

ANYHOW, there's a seminar from Assembly 04 (the biggest annual event in the Demoscene calendar)where a couple of the guys talk about how they did it. It's fairly dry, but interesting in the most part and the technology is amazingly good. (apologies for massive url):

http://www.scene.org/file.php?file=%2Fparties%2F2004%2Fassembly04%2Fassemblytv%2Fseminars%2Fkkrieger-content_creation_in_96kb.avi&fileinfo

[phi]

Well, it's not a feature of the XBox 360 but Chaos' skill (Farbrausch) ...