Isometric RPG dungeon image created with Stable Diffusion.
Yesterday, one of my top students visited my virtual office hours on Zoom to talk about their research paper. During our conversation, he made impassioned arguments that I add chapters on Video Games and Table Top Gaming to Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT), the OER textbook that I published earlier this year and am teaching with for the first time this semester. He’s right–it does need coverage of those topics not just for completeness but also because it’s how many students make a deeper connection to the genre (with television and film often being an introduction). It’s something that I plan to work on when I get a chance.
This blue sculpture looks like a blue polygonal figure that has stepped out of a mid-1990s Playstation game. The sculpture is called “Jean-Marc” and was made by Xavier Veilhan. It’s located in Manhattan near MOMA.
In 2004, .theprodukkt, a project aiming to use “generative computer graphics” and “procedural content creation,” developed a demoscene-inspired first person shooter (FPS) called .kkrieger that features a complex 3D environment with lighting and shadow effects, a variety of enemies, a selection of weapons, an atmospheric soundtrack, and engaging sound effects. Incredibly, .kkrieger is an astonishingly small 96K! The game uses a clever procedural approach to recreate its main elements at runtime instead of storing those assets in an appropriate file format that would balloon the game’s installation.
To put .kkrieger’s tiny file size in perspective, consider that Wolfenstein 3D (1992) is 1.3MB installed, Doom (1993) is 4.6MB, Quake (1996) is about 700MB (including its audio CD soundtrack), Unreal Tournament (1999) is about 780MB, Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) is about 700MB, and Half-Life 2 (2004) is about 6GB. Put another way, many of the in-game screenshots that I made and attached to this post in JPEG format are about the same size or larger than the entire kkrieger game!
To accomplish this feat, .theprodukkt designed the game to run on high-end PC hardware of that era on Microsoft Windows with DirectX 9.0b:
.kkrieger requires a relatively high-end machine to run properly. To be
precise:
- A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
- 512MB of RAM (or more)
- A Geforce4Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon8500 (or higher) graphics card
supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
- Some kind of sound hardware
- DirectX 9.0b
In the readme.txt included with the game’s executable, .theprodukkt explains the technical details for .kkrieger:
In general, if you have any technical questions concerning .kkrieger, either refer to our web site or contact us via email. However past experience shows that there are some rumours and misunderstandings about our work that are very hard to correct, so we'll state the truth here, in written form, for all the world to see :)
- We do .not. have some kind of magical data compression machine that is able to squeeze hundreds of megabytes of mesh/texture and sound data into 96k. We merely store the individual steps employed by the artists to produce their textures and meshes, in a very compact way. This allows us to get .much. higher data density than is achievable with normal data compression techniques, at some expense in artistic freedom and loading times.
- .kkrieger is not written in 100% assembler/machine language. Not even nearly. Like the vast majority of game projects being developed today, .kkrieger was mostly written in C++, with some tiny bits of assembler where it is actually advantageous (notably, there are a lot of MMX optimisations in the texture generator).
- A kilobyte is, historically, defined to be 1024 (2^10) bytes, not 1000. Thus .kkrieger is a game in 96k even though it's actually 98304 bytes.
- The concept of the texture/mesh generators was developed by fiver2. We do .not. want to claim that the techniques we used to develop .kkrieger are new inventions. It´s rather a selection of useful operations and their parameters to optimise the results.
For this post, I ran .kkrieger on my Ryzen 7 5800X system (NVIDIA RTX 3090 Founder’s Edition, 128GB DDR4 RAM) with 32-bit Wine 8.0-repack-4 for Debian with it set to run in an emulated 1024×768 desktop (to avoid it resetting my display settings and make it easier to capture game play using OBS Studio. It ran smoothly without any glitches. However, it did freeze once during a sequence of running it multiple times. After closing Wine, it successfully ran on the next try. You can download a copy from the link in the first paragraph that leads to a cached copy of the official website in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
I made this image of an anthropomorphic cat hacker with Stable Diffusion while thinking about the illicit computer hardware in Vernor Vinge’s “True Names” (1981) and award-winning .kkrieger first person shooter that occupies only 96K disk space and procedurally creates its textures, music, and sound effects at runtime–simply put a phenomenal bit of programming. I got wine setup to run .kkrieger on my computer, so I’m thinking a post about it is in the works.
My current access to Azeroth is kind of convoluted. It’s a little bit like an incantation or prayer that my Undead priest Mordvar might have to speak in order to heal a comrade or hurt a foe.
I’m running World of Warcraft 1.12 via Wine in the foreground window where you see Mordvar flying a Tawny Wind Rider on a flight path. In the background on the right, I have Windows 7 Professional 32-bit (a copy that I received for free from a Microsoft event in Ohio some years back) running in Oracle VirtualBox. And in Windows 7, I have an old copy of SingleCore Vanilla, a WoW server emulator that I connect to on my local machine.
This weird assemblage allows me to explore Azeroth for research using admin tools that are otherwise unavailable to normal WoW players.
