In the last few days and weeks, it was rather hard to escape one »important« news: Tomb Raider: Legend, the seventh installment of the legendary Tomb Raider computer games series, is finally there. All the news media praised the game for its great graphics, story, controls … whatever. Finally there is a worthy successor for the venerable parts 1-5, after Core Design did most of its job wrong in part 6.

I decided to give all this hype a reality check (a playable demo of the first level is available). Read more …

As promised in my post about writing 4k intros, I’m now digging a bit deeper how my 4k (actually 3.5k) intro Origami 3.5K was made. I’ll start with a »end-user« FAQ that covers some of the artistic and organizational aspects. The rest of this article will be very technical. Maybe the information isn’t directly useable in other projects, or maybe my solutions aren’t the optimal ones, but I hope that anyone who is going to do a 4k intro soon finds at least part of the information useful. YMMV.
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A few minutes ago, a friend came up with the idea of a XML-based checksumming tool. This is another great example of immense over-engineering in the XML world. I won’t go into detail about when to use XML and when not – I just want to establish some basic rules:

1. If you come up with a XML-based solution for your problem, think again.
2. If, while thinking it over thoroughly, you didn’t find a better solution, ask other people.
3. If these people also don’t find a better solution, ask people who don’t even know XML how they would solve the problem.
4. If no one came up with a satisfactory solution that didn’t involve XML, use XML.

It’s the day after Breakpoint, so it’s party report time :)
This year we had a great party again, although the weather was bad so we couldn’t do the traditional Kakiarts/Deranged barbecue. The organizers did a great job at keeping everything running without major problems. Compo delays were minimal and even though there were problems during the compos itself, these weren’t tragedies either. (A WordPad-driven PC Demo compo is actually quite a funny thing.) I didn’t notice any major issues with drunken sceners, and the toilets were acceptably clean throughout the whole party. The only thing we missed really badly was a fast competition, because we had several quite good ideas, but no use for them. Hanging around the whole time, doing nothing but waiting for the next compo to start, isn’t exactly what we wanted.
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Now I’m almost done with the functional part of my 4k intro (read: all the tricky stuff is working, and there’s still lots of space to add new stuff). I’ll use this occasion to summarize some of my findings. Maybe someone else will find it useful (but I doubt that :) – I surely do, so this is also some kind of reference for myself. So here is KeyJ’s little TinyDemoWritingGuide. It’s targeted towards experienced C programmers. Not everything here may be completely true as I’m a beginner in the 4k field for myself.
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In almost all movies that have to do with computers or only show computer screens by accident, futuristic, animated or even 3D user interfaces are shown. Now there’s finally a movie that reverses this trend: Firewall shows that a computer-related movie can also work without absurdities. Most screens shown are commodity Windows XP installations, without modifications like alternate themes. One even had a standard XP Pro background image. Internet Explorer (OK, a real security expert like the hero wouldn’t use that, but I’ll let that pass :), Outlook and lots of standard Windows dialogs – everything’s there, and just in the right place. There are also some Unixish screens, of course: In a movie called »Firewall«, an Ethereal live capture is what you’d expect. There are some shells, but the stuff typed there vanished too fast to remember. Unix shells are generally shown in X11’s standard 10pt fixed bitmap font, yet in a rather unergonomic bright-green-on-black color scheme. In one scene, I also saw a menu bar that looked quite like the one from XEmacs, but as a strict Emacs non-user, I’m not quite sure about that :)

A hardware-related MacGyverism involved combining a CCD line with a little handmade controller board to scan images using an iPod. This may sound crazy, but if the CCD line has a low enough scanning frequency, it may actually work in reality. (I actually can’t wait till seeing that at hack a day :)

Oh, and not only the technical scenes are good – there are not too much anyway – the whole movie ist just plain brilliant. There are no unrealistic or unlogic parts and every scene has a meaning. On the whole, this movie is definitely worth a look.

From the programmer’s point of view, 4k and 64k size limited demos are particularly interesting, because these types of demos rely much more on code than on data. And of course, there’s the sheer fascination of really cool graphics and excellent music in such a tiny amount of space. Programmers appreciate size limited demos the most, because they know how hard it is to get the code so small.
I’m no exception: When I first saw major 64k masterpieces like Heaven 7 or the product, my jaws dropped considerably further than those of my non-programmer friends, because I knew that 64k is really not much space.
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