Panic Room

panic room

by fairlight

pc 64k intro at assembly 2008.

featuring:

code and visuals by smash (smaash@yahoo.com).

music by reed.

big thanks to ryg for kkrunchy, which made this possible.

requires:

a fast highend ps3.0/vs3.0-enabled card - ati 2600 or geforce 8600 or better recommended. a fast card is definately

needed for the higher resolutions - don't expect to run it at a decent speed on a 6600gt at 720p.

1gb of ram or better.

a decent (dual core recommended) cpu.

dx9.0c and d3dx9_31.dll installed.

windows xp.

if you run it on vista, you might not get the rap in the music. thats because the codec used isnt installed in all

vista configs for some reason. if we had realised earlier we would have used another one. oh well.

the precalc is epic, but actually more than 60% of it goes into compiling around 400 shaders.

never say never again.

the full story about how and why we came back and did this might be in a scene magaZINE near you soon.

suffice to say:

in the two years since we and others quit making 64ks, 64k died. we didn't like that. so many times ive heard

"4k is the new 64k", and that current 4ks are now matching 64ks. that's a bit sad, dont you think? we felt that

it was time to come back once again and show the world what could be done.

and this is the result, after months of hard work in complete secrecy and after missing the original deadline

(of breakpoint 2008) by a long way.

this represents a different direction and a new technical approach to the previous 64ks. primitives, basic synths

and layers of simple generated textures are now dead. in their place is highly compressed polygon meshes,

textures using a new hybrid of generation and texture synthesis with real images, lots

and lots of shaders, too many kilobytes of samples, and even some "actual effects".

our aim was not to just make a nice texture generator, mesh generator or particle engine. the aim was

to make something that in every way could compete with a good modern demo, share the same comfortable

production methods as we use on our demos, having access to the same quality and quantity of effects and shaders

as in a demo, and having a soundtrack that could be in a demo. we wanted everything, and everything had

to be top of the line in every respect.

it was clear from the start that we should make full use of modern graphics hardware and not bake any of the

lighting (and certainly not fake it into textures). so you have such realtime rendering features as screen space

ambient occlusion, soft shadows from multiple lights, parallax mapping, depth of field, refracting water, a

model of light scattering and absorbtion for underwater rendering, caustics, raymarched godrays with

intersections, and so on.

it is relatively easy to have demo-esque textures, or demo-esque meshes, or demo-esque shaders, or a couple of

demo-esque effects, or demo-esque music, in a 64k - as we have done ourselves before. you can say "this is where

i will spend my bytes". but when you want everything all together it becomes a whole new challenge, one that we

had never managed to succeed in before.

this right here is the line being drawn.

the easy ride is over.

admit it. you've missed us.

greets go to all the false idols, including:

cncd,orange,tbl,andromeda,asd,conspiracy,mfx,farbrausch,loonies,plastic,orb,nooon,

cocoon,dcs,triad,excess,portalprocess,equinox,brainstorm.

do not worship false idols.

Ted.