In the previous part, we saw how textures are generated in H – Immersion. This time, we’ll have a look at another important tool for size coding: procedural geometry.
More specifically, since our rendering uses traditional polygons, we wrote a procedural mesh generator. We’ll see how with a few well chosen techniques, it is possible to create a variety of shapes, or make a viewer believe we did.
First, Cubes
When we started making demos, the 64kB limit felt intimidating. We didn’t know anything about procedural mesh generation, and we already had a lot to do with the rendering, the camera, the textures, the story… well, with everything. So in our first demo, B – Incubation, we took the early decision to skip 3D modeling altogether. Instead, we chose to use only cubes and designed the demo around this concept.
This is an example of how a technical constraint can become a creative challenge, and force us to look for new ideas and do something unexpected. In all of our 64kB intros, the size limitation affects the design, sometimes in small and unexpected ways: we are constantly looking for tricks, code reuse, and workarounds to evade this barrier.
After this first 64kB, it was time to introduce procedural meshes at last! For F – Felix’s Workshop, we implemented some rudimentary mesh generation. The demo received good feedback, but the code is probably simpler than what many people expect.
If you pay close attention to the image below, you might notice that there are only two kinds of shapes used by all geometry. Some elements, like the table, the shelf and the wall, are made by assembling deformed cubes. The rest have varied shapes, but are all sort of cylindrical. Indeed we built them using surfaces of revolution.
The idea is to draw simple splines, then rotate them around an axis to create 3D models. Here is the spline we used to create pawns on a chessboard.
The numbers on the left are 2D coordinates of a list of control points. We interpolate between the points using Catmull-Rom splines. Catmull-Rom is a nice algorithm first published in 1974, which Iñigo Quilez details and recommends. The shape on the right is the result (after symmetry) of applying the technique on the list of points.
Once done, we can convert the data to 3D by creating faces along the spline. With little variation we can also create other chess pieces. Here’s the final result.
How many bytes do we need for this? Not too many, especially when you reuse the technique in lots of ways throughout the demo. If we stored each number on one byte, we would need less than 40 bytes of data to represent the pawn… and this doesn’t take into account the compression step.
If you look at the source code for the chessboard, you’ll notice that we actually use a floating-point type to store these integers between 0 and 255. These 32-bit floats use 4 bytes each. Is it a waste of bytes? Not quite: as said in the previous paragraph, the program is compressed. If you check the binary representation of those floats, you’ll see they are very similar and end with a bunch of 0s. The compression tool (kkrunchy) will pack this efficiently, and it can be smaller than if we tried to be smart. Going further, delta encoding could improve compression rates, but it only becomes beneficial when there’s enough data to store. There’s more to say about floats, and we’ve touched the topic before in the article Making floating point numbers smaller.
In the scene above, notice how the drum has distinct faces. Our function lets us control the number of faces to generate, so not everything has to be perfectly circular. For example, the pencil on the desk is hexagonal.
In the background of the chess scene, even the white ornament at the top of the hearth is made with this technique: it is built as a pointy octogonal shape. Then the central part is elongated along one axis, resulting in a large shape with beveled corners. We can not only elongate the shape along an axis, but also generate it along a curve. This is how the train ramp is made, with its path described by another spline. If you watch again Felix’s Workshop, you can see how everything comes either from a revolution or from a cube. We create a wide range of objects just by combining these two primitives.
Growing Cubes
Combining and deforming simple cubes also has a lot of potential. For the vegetation in H – Immersion, we started from a cuboid, and deformed it a bit. Then we made many copies of the mesh placed vertically around an imaginary axis, with random size and orientation. This creates something that vaguely looks like a plant. We repeat, again with random parameters, to create more of them:
This looks very rough and you’re probably expecting to read what the next steps are to refine the shape. There aren’t any: this is the final mesh. We didn’t even create a custom texture for it. Instead, we just applied the ground texture on that mesh!
But during the demo, the effect works well enough thanks to the rendering, the lights and shadows, and a simple but convincing animation. The editing also helps a lot: the shapes and movements set the mood, but the viewer doesn’t have time to notice the details before the camera moves on. Sometimes evoking a shape with a proper mood is more effective than painstakingly modeling it.
At some point, we wanted to have more complex meshes. As usual, we started from our beloved cube and decided to modify it. Merely deforming a cube will still result in.. well, a cuboid. So we needed something more. Enters extrusion: we pick a face, and extrude it. This operation will create a new face, which we can pull from the object, resize, or transform in any way we like.
We iterate multiple times, to create the shape we want. Each extrusion will add more details. The result is often low poly, but we use the Catmull-Clark subdivision algorithm to smooth the result out. This approach was inspired by the Qoob modeling tool.
What we’ve described is exactly what we did to generate the small statues used as decorating props in several places during the demo:
Since it’s all procedural generation, we can pass arguments to the function. These arguments can control some angles for the legs, arms, etc. Write a loop generating lots of statues with random parameters, et voilà! You have enough variation, so that it doesn’t get visually boring.
We also created two statues with hard-coded parameters, for better results. Here is how it looks after applying textures and lighting.
In the temple, we wanted to show a colossal statue of Poseidon seating on its throne. The technique used for the small statues was too rough for a model that would have more focus. Poseidon is huge and we wanted more details. The demo has a lot of content and fitting everything was a challenge. After a lot of size optimization work, we managed to get around one spare kilobyte. We decided to use it to get a better model for Poseidon.
To do so, we used a completely different technique than what we’ve seen so far: implicit surface expressed with signed-distance fields (SDF). This is a technique very popular in 4kB intros, usually used with the ray marching algorithm to generate the result, and implemented as a screenspace shader. But since our rendering is based on meshes, we generated a polygon mesh by evaluating the SDF function with a marching cube algorithm instead of ray marching. We built the humanoid shape as a series of segments, with a little bit of tweaking to give it an organic look.
On the left, the normals deduced from the SDF reveal the underlying simple shapes. On the right, the normals estimated from the triangle mesh reveal the sampling grid, but hide the structure and give a desirable rough looking shape.
There was only so much detail we could afford, not to mention that modeling humans is difficult and people are very good at spotting issues in human-like models. We used to our advantage the low resolution of the generated mesh. It turns out that evaluating the normals on the final mesh (as opposed to deducing them from the SDF function) creates visible artifacts: the surface is full of smooth creases and edges. This very rough appearance can give sort of a sculpture look. We used lighting and cinematographic techniques on top of that to trick the viewer into filling the details. In the final shot, the statue seems more detailed than it actually is.
In creative activities, it is often crucial to iterate quickly on a design. You cannot do everything right from the first try, so you need to easily make changes, iterate, explore, see what works.
At some point, we put our mesh generator on a web server, just like we did with the textures. The webpage had a textarea where we could write C++ code. When we clicked on a button, it compiled the code on the server and returned the mesh in a JSON format. The webpage displayed the result with three.js, so that we could view and rotate the model with the mouse. Just like in Shadertoy, this allowed us to quickly try ideas, share them with the team, fork and tweak other models.
We later moved to a different solution, C++ recompilation, which we mentioned in the first part.
Conclusion
Mesh generation is arguably more difficult to design and more involved to implement than texture generation. When textures are just flat surfaces, meshes have different topologies, which adds a new layer of complexity.
But like with textures, the simplest building blocks can offer a wide range of possibilities to explore, as long as it’s possible to combine them in various ways. A few simple elements used creatively can give a wide range of shapes.
Moreover, as we’ve seen with at least two examples, the power of suggestion can play an important part and replace modeling work that would be tedious or even impossible to do with the available building blocks.
Using both of these observations can go a long way, as we hope to have demonstrated. The trick is to find the right balance between modeling work and expressiveness.
This is the poster that yogib33r and I (Zavie) made at the end of last year for the upcoming event organized by the Tokyo Demo Fest team.
Tokyo Demo Fest is a Japanese demoscene party held in Tokyo. The last edition was a success, with an all time record attendance and a notable article in IGN Japan. But since then, well, life happened. Companies were founded, weddings were celebrated, kids were born, and the core team was simply too busy to dedicate the time it takes to organize a good event. And just like that, two years have passed.
Connected through creativity
But this hiatus has come to an end when it was decided, as a way to see something happen despite the pandemic, to organize in early 2021 an online session of demoscene talks: a メガデモ勉強会 (megademo benkyōkai), literally a group study on demoscene topics.
yogib33r is a French pixel artist and animator, who was kind enough to work with me on this poster. The artwork tries to communicate the motivation behind the event. In these times when we’re all physically separated, we remain creative, and this creativity that defines our community keeps us connected.
The text at the bottom reads:「会えないときも、創造性でつながってる。」 meaning “Even when we can’t meet, we stay connected through creativity”.
Earlier this month, the large demoscene Easter meeting, Revision, took place with all its range of events and competitions, despite a new online format due to the pandemic situation. One of those competitions is the Shader Showdown: a tournament where participants are to write the best possible visual effect within a limited time. Each round opposes two of them on stage for 25 minutes while a DJ is playing and the public is cheering. At the end of the round, the public decides the winner who moves up to the next round.
After this year’s competition, Friol interviewed six contestants, including the winners of the last three editions:
ferris is a software engineer coming from the US. He’s currently working on machine learning processors for Graphcore in Norway.
fizzer comes from the UK and is currently living in Finland. He is a graphics engineer who has been working on Cinema4D before doing GPU path tracing in Notch, a tool to create visual effects for events and concerts.
Flopine is a French PhD student in digital art and a technical artist at Dontnod. She won the Revision Shader Showdown 2020.
Gargaj is a Hungarian game developer. He has worked on the indie MMO Perpetuum before moving to the AAA industry with the Project CARS racing game series.
NuSan is a French technical artist who works in the game studio Dontnod and also creates small video games with Unity and PICO-8. He is the 2019 winner of the Revision Shader Showdown.
provod is a Russian software engineer from Siberia who recently moved to California and is currently working on the game platform Roblox. He won the Revision Shader Showdown in 2018.
For reasons we will not elaborate on, the original article was eventually withdrawn. With their permission, we’re sharing here their stories and insights for everyone to read.
What is this all about?
Whether it is at home, during a stream on Twitch, or as a performance during a live event, live coding consists in writing code with immediate visual feedback. In this article, it refers more specifically to writing a shader effect on stage to entertain an audience. At Revision and several other demoparties, participants have a given time to write their effect from scratch. A DJ is accompanying them with a live mix, and their code and its result are projected on a big screen for everyone to see, in a collaborative audio-visual performance.
When asked to define live coding, ferris mentioned a “competitive aspect which makes it at least e-sports like, while still being an inherently artistic medium”. Gargaj pointed out that “the shaders themselves are rarely rewatched afterwards”, unlike “a good demo that lasts years to come”. His comments emphasized the “in-the-moment performance”, comparing it to “rap or beatbox battles”. fizzer further described the “various twists and build-ups that occur during the coding session”, comparing it to the World Cup. “The end result does of course matter, but everyone shows up to watch the game in full because that’s where the excitement is”, he added.
This early video from 2011 can be a good introduction to shader live coding. It presents some simple 2D effects that are relatively accessible for a new programmer, compared to the 3D effects and advanced tricks seen in live coding competitions:
When did you first hear of live coding in the demoscene?
Flopine: When I entered Revision’s main Hall in 2016. I didn’t know it existed at all! That people would code live in front of others…
fizzer: I think it was when I read about IQ coding shaders as a member of Beautypi, which was a group that put on a show with live music and visuals. It wasn’t competitive, but it was live and I thought back then that it must be extremely difficult. It turned out of course that many years later it would be made an official competition at Revision and I found it to be quite fun when I tried it myself!
provod: At the demoparty WeCan 2013 in Poland. I was accidentally visiting this party (was visiting friends in Germany and became aware of a demoparty nearby) and only at the party place noticed that they had a live coding competition. A few years before that I had a rather small experience of doing music performances live coding PureData patches and live soldering custom digital synthesizers on stage, so that thrill looked like a lot of fun, even though I only began exploring shaders back then. So I just applied as a contestant and got selected. I’ve heard about live coding performances before that outside demoscene, mostly in the experimental electronic music scene. I always wanted to try doing something like that also with visuals myself, so I guess it felt like a good opportunity to just try.
ferris: In the form it is now, I guess 5+ years ago. I’m not sure exactly when. But I was aware of the first competition at WeCan (I think that’s where it was?) and I helped do some mac fixes for Bonzomatic in 2015 or so (which I think were superseded by more proper work by alkama etc) and I’ve tried to participate in most of the competitions that were happening at parties that I was attending around that time, especially as Solskogen was embracing them. That said, I remember there being compos with a similar format long before this. The “drunk master coding compo” comes to mind, which I never personally saw, but heard about from the likes of kusma / excess and a few others. I believe this was a feature of Kindergarden in Norway, but I’m not sure. This was more theme-focused, i.e. make a “texture mapped tunnel” and every time you hit compile you had to take a shot. Or something. :)
NuSan: I saw some people live coding sounds at local concerts. I also saw some live coding by IQ around 2012 on his youtube channel, but it’s really Revision 2018 live stream when I saw a proper shader showdown and that blew my mind.
fizzer: Actually I had never heard of live coding before I came across it in the demoscene. I had tried a few times to code something in a limited amount of time as a challenge for myself, such as coding an effect on a laptop during a train journey home, but I hadn’t ever imagined it as a real sport. I think it’s quite futuristic.
The editors
If live coding is a sport, the editor is its field, where the champions show their skills. Two shader live coding editors popular in the demoscene are ShaderToy and Bonzomatic. ShaderToy is a creative website where a community writes and shares shaders. It is a very nice place to find shaders and analyze how they are made. Bonzomatic is a software focusing on live shader competitions. Its author Gargaj shared the story behind the creation of Bonzomatic.
Gargaj: I know live coding has been a thing outside the scene since the mid-2000s, but I never really saw an appeal because the people doing it in “algoraves” were usually using very basic graphics or sound libraries. So the actual results were never particularly pleasant, and they were always somehow laced with an influence for either databending or 8-bit or both, which got really old after a while, and I never really saw the appeal.
The demoscene insertion happened when Bonzaj and Misz came up with the idea for WeCan 2013 and they created the competition using two projectors and a custom editor integrated into with Visual Studio; D.Fox (editor’s note: D.Fox is the lead organizer of Revision) liked the idea and tried to bring it to Revision 2014, but when it was announced (about a week or two before the party). I saw the package they were trying to use, which was really janky and obviously required extra hardware. Just to prove a point I found a Github repo by a guy called Sopyer that implemented a syntax highlighting editor over OpenGL, and within about 2 hours I had the basics for a tool that was able to show a shader that was being ran and recompiled. I then merged in some of Bonzaj’s code (like the FFT and MIDI code), and posted it back on Pouet. After the party itself, I was aware of the many bugs and the overall hacky nature of the editor, so I decided to write one from the ground up with a bit more thought and cleaner basics in mind. When I was looking for a name, I obviously thought of Bonzaj again and named it after him — something which he apparently never realized until years later.
A two hour long commented live coding session from NuSan using Bonzomatic.
When asked about the editor, the participants have all sorts of suggestions as to where to take it next. At a basic level, provod regrets the lack of a vi mode causing him to “feel crippled, and sometimes do slip live” while Flopine found its automatic indentation frustrating. To “keep the concept fresh”, fizzer suggests high level features like multipass shaders which “would allow a lot of unseen effects”, and mentions how a stateful shader would make effects “from basic feedback zoomers right up to physics and particle simulations” possible. These features became available in ShaderToy in 2016, enabling such effects.
NuSan was more interested in collaborative editing. The Cookie collective experimented that idea recently with a collaborative live coding where several coders were editing a shader simultaneously. Going further, fizzer wonders “what it would be like if the two contestants had access to each other’s shader output as an input texture”.
The heat of the competition
“I generally think that it doesn’t make sense to be alive and not constantly try to do the most complex and exhausting stuff in the dumbest way possible and with the silliest look.” — provod
The Revision 2018 final match: provod vs Flopine, with Ronny mixing.
Do you prepare for a live coding competition?
provod: Usually I do. I did not prepare for WeCan 2013 at all, however, and entered it at the party place on a whim really. It had a different format where you could continue to work on your shader in the next round, and in fact I immediately started making very specific preparations between rounds when I got the hang of it after the first round.
For subsequent compos I looked at participants list, got scared by all the big names, and decided that if I’m to at least show something comparable I should really have a few techniques memorized and should try to train myself to make a few scenes with these techniques combinations. I don’t do graphics professionally, and I’m not always involved with demoscene, so it’s not rare that there are a few consecutive months in which I don’t touch shaders (or any graphics stuff really) at all, so skills get very rusty. :D I certainly would not be able to write anything coherent if e.g. I forgot all the relevant math.
Usually a week or two before the compo I try to make a list of techniques to rehearse (e.g. raymarching basic loop, normals, basic shading) that I should be able to write with my eyes closed in a few minutes. Then I come up with a few scenes, maybe remember some ideas I had and did not have time to try previously. Then I just set up a timer and try a scene. Then I try to tweak a scene for a few hours to feel its “phase space” and get an idea what works and what doesn’t. Some of these end up being 4kB intros later :D.
NuSan: I try to train myself regularly by doing a shader coding live stream on Twitch each week so I have some pressure from an audience. Before an important showdown like the ones from Revision, I try to find an idea that could be original. A few hours before the match I mess around in Bonzomatic with that idea and try to find a nice visual target.
Flopine: I’m always prepared because I absolutely love coding shaders, thus I’m doing it all year long. And before a match or a VJ set, I usually practice and test ideas 2 hours before, until it’s my turn to go on stage! For the Revision showdown I often have 2 ideas at least, and then for the finals I’m always surprised and need to improvise more because I never think I’ll be able to pass the quarter and semi-finals!
Nusan: I don’t try to memorize each value or piece of code, it’s more about what steps I want to follow, so that once in the match I already know where to start and where to go. I don’t prepare for more than one round and usually there is at least an hour between two rounds so I can find a new idea. It’s a good process to get something cool on the screen without destroying all improvisation.
provod: I try to have at least three solid scene ideas each of which I can do within 20 minutes and tweak in the remaining minutes. There’s an interesting meta with these scenes, which scene I should play against whom and in which order. And I think I completely failed the meta for the past two Revision parties! It doesn’t mean that I have a super rigid scene idea for each round that I just type out (there were people doing this, I think, but my memory is way worse than that). Scene is mostly a vague pointer to a collection rendering techniques, geometries and maybe palette and camera movements. For some rounds I wasn’t sure what exactly I was doing before I started typing. And for some I just went and combined things from different scenes I practiced previously.
fizzer: When I know that I will be doing any kind of live coding, I brush up on basic flexible effects that I can code out quickly at the start. So during a round I will start with one of those and then just improvise on top of that. I think this is a nice compromise between going in cold and memorising an entire shader. Complete memorisation can be very risky. If it goes wrong, the time that it takes to come up with a Plan B can be significant. Likewise, if you have memorised some basic small effects that take little time to code then you have the choice of switching to another effect mid-round if it’s not going so well. You can also entertain the audience better that way, by making big changes to your shader mid-round.
What kind of shader will win over the audience?
Gargaj: That’s always a tough one, sometimes it’s just sheer visual splendor, sometimes it’s hitting the right note with the audience, sometimes it’s doing something more interesting than the other person even if it’s not as good looking. Plus there’s always audience bias as well :)
provod: Path tracing! It’s super trivial to do, and any random crap rendered with it looks good. It’s like pentatonic scale :D.
ferris: It depends on the audience of course. It’s the same with demos – people like what they like. For the demoscene, a cool 3D scene with lots of shiny things will often win. However, sometimes a very stylistic 2D shader will also win if it captures the audience (which is particularly common if it appeals to an “oldschool” palate, eg. by using a classic C64 color scheme/dithering style).
NuSan: Making some 2D neon lasers rotating in all directions always gives a good effect.
Flopine: The MirrorOctant from mercury sdf library! Such a cool way to duplicate space seamlessly. That function combined with a cool shape and maybe an angular repetition can win almost all shader showdown matches I’ve been into :) but I like to try different things because I don’t want to do stuff that are “too easy” on stage.
Flopine and Cupe look at each other’s creation after a match at Revision 2018.
Any particularly memorable live coding event?
NuSan: My first shader showdown in public (at Cookie demoparty) was very intense, my fingers were shaking but it was awesome. I had some bad live coding sessions mostly when I’m tired or if I do several sessions in a row. After a while, you can’t really think anymore and your creativity runs dry. Then it’s not fun and usually you lose ^^.
Flopine: The first time I went on stage at Revision 2018 will remain in my memory for decades I think! So exciting, so many emotions and fun… I think I want to feel that again over and over, that might be why I’m doing a lot of showdowns, but obviously (and unfortunately) the feelings are never as strong as they were the first time!
fizzer: A terrible one. It was Revision 2018. I had requested (or so I thought) to be coding in GLSL, but my computer on-stage had been set up for HLSL. This would ordinarily not be a huge problem, except that I didn’t notice this problem until some minutes into the round. I had no idea how to switch the shader language, and in my focused state of mind I had no choice but to continue, rewrite the code I had written in GLSL into HLSL and make the most of it. I still can’t believe that I was able to keep coding coherently after that!
provod: The whole Revision 2018 experience was completely surreal, I felt like such a huge impostor really. I was recovering from a severe flu (had been hospitalized just a few days before the party), so the preparation was interrupted, was sleep deprived due to long flights from Siberia, and also was desperately trying to finish a 4k and 8k before their deadlines. I did not expect to be able to write anything coherent on stage, even less so to win against all those strong sceners I still consider lightyears ahead of me.
Revision 2019 final, with NuSan and Flopine.
“Absolute panic”
On the third day of Revision 2020, a DJ set took place, together with another live coding event. Unlike the competition rounds, this session was much longer and not meant to be a competition, and more of a freestyle VJ. Accompanying Bullet during his mix, it featured not two, but three participants: Flopine, Gargaj, and IQ. IQ is widely known for having pioneered many ray marching techniques, creating the vegetation in Pixar’s film Brave, and being the coauthor of ShaderToy.
Gargaj talked about his reaction when he was asked to take part in the event.
Gargaj: Oh my first reaction was absolute panic when I found out at around 1:30AM that they want me in it too, and then just mounting anxiety. Then the whole thing kicked off and I just locked in to the keyboard and the screen. Aside from the quick HLSL-to-GLSL port, my focus narrowed in so much that I didn’t watch the stream, had no idea what the other two were doing, and completely forgot about the relaxo-beer I opened myself 10 seconds earlier. I don’t know if I’d call it “fun” to be honest, because while I was incredibly lucky that the idea I decided to go with worked out, it was really just luck and it could’ve been equally as much of a disaster with me staring at a blank screen for an hour. I really genuinely dislike things that have a time limit and try to actively avoid them. I got to participate (and let’s face it, totally undeservedly, compared to what others can do) against the two best people who do this, so it was at the very least a good entry on my demoscene CV. :) But I don’t know if I ever want to do it again.
The online event between Flopine, IQ, and Gargaj, with DJ Bullet, all streaming from different countries.
“It’s important to have fun during a match or else the pressure can be a pain.” — NuSan
Did live coding shaders get better with time, technically?
Flopine: For me I’m getting better each year, but not because I’m working on the same thing again and again. I’m learning new things every month and filling my own palette of techniques with them, which helps me build more complex/mastered images in my opinion.
In general, live coding shaders is also becoming better and better technically because intros and 4k are getting better and better! I once saw a path-traced shader typed under 25 minutes for a showdown! I think the demoscene and also papers that come out of research labs will continue to improve, thus improving what type of effect you can make in 25 minutes.
Gargaj: I don’t know, I don’t remember the first ones; if they’ve gotten better, I think it’s because people learned to scope the 25 minutes in better and started to explore more ideas.
NuSan: I think that live coding did get better, as new techniques are found regularly. Also there is a lot of knowledge sharing between demosceners so we can all improve, for example with shadertoy and live coding streams. Then some tricks might sometimes get lost, and also we are maybe too focused on technical skills and impressive shaders. We could spend more time on simpler but more improvised shaders that would be more personal and maybe fit the music better.
ferris: I think they’ve peaked a bit actually, and I think it has to do with a certain overlap of 1. what people can conceive of in their heads with such a limited format and 2. the round time limit. Admittedly I think it’s usually a bit stale, though we are seeing better and more impressive space folding/lighting stuff as GPUs get faster in particular. In fact I think GPU technology advancements are what drive live coding advancements more than coder skill, but it’s certainly not the only factor.
fizzer: I think they did. When the event was first introduced at Revision it was totally new. The idea of having the volume of the cheering from the audience dictate the winner in a very subjective manner was even more radical. It was quite hard to guess how it would work, and what the best strategy would be, how much stress it would be to code on stage in front of everyone. I think now it’s quite well established what makes a good live coding round and what to expect from it. It’s getting more intense every year, and some participants are effectively training all year round by doing time-limited live coding streams on Twitch in their own time, for example. I’ve been out of the game for a while, but I may yet return. We’ll see.
provod: Absolutely! My impression is that previously people generally were just improvising on the spot. But for the past year or two I see people both make special preparations for live coding compos (you can see that from the way people write complex scenes with great confidence) and keep themselves in good shape and are constantly refining their skills by doing shaders regularly. Like NuSan, evvvvil and Flopine streaming on Twitch (i’m sure there are other sceners who also stream shaders but I can’t remember them all). Unfortunately, I don’t have a time budget to keep a similar routine.
provod vs Ferris at Revision 2018.
Does live coding require distinct skills from coding?
Flopine: The demoscene is full of super great coders that don’t livecode! Live coding is stressful not only because you have to type and think fast, but also because you have to be present, to be on stage in front of hundreds of people that will judge both your production AND the code of it. I think a super talented coder needs to be sure every line is in its right place, that he does not implement something in a dull way or whatever… but in a live coding environment you don’t have time to think about all those!
ferris: Frankly I think the best coders are the ones that take their time and do something more comprehensive. live coding to me isn’t better/worse, it’s a very different thing, and it’s an odd skillset that to me doesn’t really overlap much with what I’ve typically thought of as “best” coding skills, though I have a lot of respect for it certainly!
NuSan: Live coding is a very special thing, focused around short and intense sessions. Also you have to sacrifice some elegance in coding style to get faster. Some coders prefer having time and peace of mind while creating and it doesn’t make them less impressive. Right now, I like live coding because it lets me create fast and I don’t have the patience to take my time.
provod: Yes. You have to be able to do a lot of stuff consistently in a very limited time and under quite a bit of pressure. Not everyone will find this fun. It is also laser focused on short-term results sacrificing everything else, so it’s kind of orthogonal or even outright adversarial to other code writing dimensions like code quality, performance, cleanliness etc, which are very important in real life, and lack of which would cause physical pain to many great coders I know.
provod vs NuSan at Revision 2019.
Who is the livecoder in the demoscene you appreciate the most?
fizzer: I would have to say Flopine, she has a real sense of showmanship and personality resulting in a real cool performance when she is live coding, and the shaders she produces are likewise always charming and funny. In the demoscene it was a bit like she came out of nowhere and suddenly started making these awesome live coding performances. She has also produced demos besides that too, and is very active online sharing her code and livestreaming on Twitch and such.
Gargaj: That’s a tough one; the NuSan / Evvvvil battle this friday was probably the most insane thing I’ve ever seen, and yet when you ask the question, I find myself thinking about people like Ferris and Cupe and Visy who usually do something completely lateral and non-3D, because I think that’s not only harder to pull off, but also shows guts. On a higher level though, what NuSan, Flopine, Evvvvil, yx, and the likes are doing with their weekly streams is fantastic and helps a great deal with community building and knowledge-sharing.
During the Revision 2020 quarterfinals, NuSan vs Evvvvil has been a memorable match.
provod: It feels weird to pick just one person — I envy all of them and would love to grow and be like them some day. Evvvvil is doing some crazy space warping stuff that I can’t wrap my head around. LJ is an absolute god of making complex (and realistic!) geometry. Nusan’s stuff is very beautiful and clean. And of course Flopine always comes up with some unconventional approach and kicks all of us default abstract raymarchers :D.
But if I absolutely had to pick one scener, it’d be Ferris. I love the diversity of the stuff he’s doing and the polish of it. And I absolutely hate the fact that he’s always ahead of me in whatever and is also doing it way better than I could ever event attempt (I wanted to do FPGAs, he’s already streaming it; I wanted to do some DJing, and he immediately streams a DJ set breakdown he did weeks earlier; etc. He’s also the person who showed me shaders in 2009 when I didn’t even know what those were.
Flopine: Tough question… I think I’ll always admire LJ, both for what he did in previous showdown tournaments and for the quality of his 4k. He gave me the initial spark not only because what he did was amazing but also because it “hit the spot” artistically, at least for me. The first time I saw him on stage I saw an artist, being in such control with his medium that he was capable of improvising a masterpiece on short notice. And then with his 4k I think he is also able to express a mood, a feeling and to share it with us. I’m very receptive to that and I’m glad to see more and more entries being sensible, like some from Primsbeing for example.
ferris: Admittedly, while I’ve tried to be somewhat involved in the live coding scene, as it’s become larger/more competitive, my interest has waned a bit. I’ve been in the scene for a long time and I appreciate the typical compo entries more, especially larger ones like 64k and full sized demos (even though I focused specifically on 4k’s in my late teens). When live coding happened, the fresh part for me was the spontaneity of it, that you could just bang out something and it would be cool. As people started memorizing more and more it was less interesting to watch, even though I know that’s not an easy feat and it’s impressive, it just doesn’t capture me personally as much. That said, blueberry is always my favorite person to watch because he comes up with crazy colors and usually fresh ideas, and I think he has a similarly not-so-competitive attitude as me. So, he’s both my favorite contestant and my favorite opponent :)
NuSan: Flopine often manages to surprise me with a new effect or style so watching her is a lot of fun. I also like coders who make impressive 2D effects, like Cupe or Ferris, it always feels magical to me.
After the big endeavour that H – Immersion was, we needed a little break and do something less ambitious. Have more fun with less work. See if we would be able to make something decent within a just a handful of weekends.
Moreover, we were curious to see what we could do now with that shiny new engine. A significant part of it was developed while working on the intro, so we still needed to try to use it and use it only. Focusing on content without without adding features sounded like a good test to spot parts of the engine that maybe were problematic.
By the way, we already had a couple of new features that we hadn’t tested in a production yet. We wanted to make sure that they would work in a real production and not just on a prototype test scene.
Finally, our musician also wanted to experiment outside of the constraints of a 64kB. As we mentioned before, extreme size intros make content creation harder, because you cannot use your usual toolchain and workflow. For example, as a musician, you cannot use your sound samples.
So those were our constraints this time: a demo with no size limitation, just two or three weekends of work, try to spot problems in the engine (and fix them), but no new features.
After five or six weekends (spread over nine months), we released I – Probe in early November, at Alchimie. The title refers to the main feature showcased in the demo: the use of light probe for illumination. We consider the objectives fulfilled.
We are proud to announce that we will be at the computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 this December, where we will present the techniques used to create our 64K intro, H – Immersion.
At the conference, the “Computer Animation Festival” celebrates storytelling and animation in general, and showcases some of the best works of the year. We are honoured to have been selected among the talks there, and still in disbelief to be sitting next to talks about Pixar’s Incredibles 2 or Solo: A Star Wars Story.
If you are attending SIGGRAPH Asia this December in Tokyo, come to our session on Thursday 6th of December, from 16:15 to 18:00, in room G502 (glass building, fifth floor). All the details are available on the SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 session description. There is an iCalendar file as well.
Tomasz Bednarsz has been trying to increase the presence of demoscene at the major graphics community conference, SIGGRAPH, for a few years now, through so called “Birds of a Feather” sessions. This year I had the unexpected opportunity to attend SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, and I was invited to participate to the session along with a few other sceners. The details are available on the description that Tomasz posted.
There, I presented some aspects of 64k creation, that Laurent and I have been discussing here in the recent articles. The slides are available here:
A recording of the entire session is available. It includes the introduction by Tomasz, a presentation of a technique to render clouds in real time by Matt Swoboda (Smash, of Fairlight), our part, another take on 64k creation by Yohann Korndörfer (cupe of Mercury), and a presentation of Tokyo Demo Fest by Kentaro Oku (Kioku, of SystemK).
The event was way more successful than any of us expected, and we were all gladly surprised to see so much interest from the graphics community. A lot more people showed up than the room could accommodate, meaning that unfortunately most of them had to walk away.
The waiting line for the Birds of a Feather session on demoscene, at SIGGRAPH 2018.
Hopefully this increased interest means we can expect more events like this to happen at SIGGRAPH in the future years. We are already planning to do another demoscene session at SIGGRAPH Asia 2018, which will take place in Tokyo on December 4th to 7th.
When making an animation within only 64kB, using images is tricky. We can’t store them in a traditional way, because it is not efficient enough, even with a compression like JPEG. An alternative solution is procedural generation. It consists in using code to describe how to create the images at runtime. Our implementation of such a solution is the texture generator, a core part of our toolchain. In this post we will present how we designed it and how we used it in H – Immersion.
The spotlights of a submersible reveal details of the seafloor.
Early version
Texture generation has been one of the earliest elements of our code base: our first intro, B – Incubation, already had procedural textures. The code consisted in a set of functions to fill, filter, transform and combine textures, and one big loop to go over all the textures. Those functions were written in plain C++, but were later exposed with a C API so they could be evaluated by a C interpreter, PicoC. At the time, we were using PicoC in an effort to reduce iteration time: in this case it allowed to modify and reload the textures at runtime. Limiting ourselves to the C subset was a small price to pay for the ability to change code and see the result without having to quit, compile and reload the entire demo again.
With a simple pattern, some noise and some deformation, we can obtain a stylized wood texture.
Various wood textures are used in this scene from F – Felix’s workshop.
We explored for a while what we could do with that generator, and ended up putting it on a web server with a small PHP script behind a simple web interface. We would write texture code in a text field, the script would feed it to the generator, which would then dump the result as a PNG file for the page to display. Soon enough, we found ourselves doodling from the office during lunch breaks and sharing our little creations among group members. This interaction was very motivating for creativity.
Our old texture generator web gallery. All the textures were editable in the browser.
A complete redesign
For a long time the texture generator almost didn’t change; we thought it was fine and our efficiency plateaued. Then we woke up one day, and discovered that Internet forums were suddenly full of artists showing off their 100% procedurally generated textures and challenging each other with themes. Procedural content used to be a demoscene thing, but Allegorithmic, ShaderToy and the likes had now made it accessible to the crowd while we had not been paying attention, and they were beating us hard. Unacceptable!
Fabric Couch
Forest Floor
It was long due time to reevaluate our tools. Fortunately working with the same texture generator for several years had given us time to understand its flaws. Our nascent mesh generator was also giving us some additional perspective on what we wanted a procedural content pipeline to look like.
The most important architecture mistake was the implementation of generation as a set of operations on textures objects. From a high level perspective, it may be a correct way of viewing it, but at the implementation level, having functions like texture.DoSomething() or Combine(textureA, textureB) has severe drawbacks.
First, the OOP style requires to declare those functions as part of the API, no matter how simple they are. This is a major problem because it doesn’t scale well and more importantly, it creates friction in the creation process. We don’t want to change the API every time we try something new. It makes experimentation more difficult, and ultimately limits artistic creativity.
Second, in terms of performance, it forces to loop over texture data as many times as there are operations. It wouldn’t matter too much if those operations were expensive relative to the cost of accessing large chunks of memory, however that’s usually not the case. Except for a few operations like generating a Perlin noise or doing a flood fill, most are in fact very simple and require few instructions per texture point. This means we keep traversing texture data to do trivial operations, which is ridiculously cache inefficient.
The new design addresses those issues with a simple reorganization of the logic. In practice, the majority of the functions just do the same operation for each element of the texture, independently. So instead of writing a function texture.DoSomething() which goes through all the elements, we can write texture.ApplyFunction(f) where f(element) only works on a single texture element. f(element) can then be written ad hoc for a specific texture.
This seems to be a minor modification. Yet doing so simplifies the API, makes the generation code more flexible and more expressive, is more cache friendly and trivially parallelizable. Many of you readers will probably recognize this as being essentially… a shader. Although the implementation is still, in fact, C++ code running on the CPU. We also keep the ability to do operations outside of the loop like before, but we only use that option when it is relevant, for example when doing a convolution.
Before:
// Logic is at the texture level.
// The API is bloated.
// The API is all there is.
// Generation of a texture has many passes.
class ProceduralTexture {
void DoSomething(parameters) {
for (int i = 0; i < size; ++i) {
// Implementation details here.
(*this)[i] = …
}
}
void PerlinNoise(parameters) { … }
void Voronoi(parameters) { … }
void Filter(parameters) { … }
void GenerateNormalMap() { … }
};
void GenerateSomeTexture(texture t) {
t.PerlinNoise(someParameter);
t.Filter(someOtherParameter);
… // etc.
t.GenerateNormalMap();
}
After:
// Logic is usually at the texture element level.
// The API is minimal.
// Operations are written as needed.
// Generation of a texture has a reduced number of passes.
class ProceduralTexture {
void ApplyFunction(functionPointer f) {
for (int i = 0; i < size; ++i) {
// Implementation passed as a parameter.
(*this)[i] = f((*this)[i]);
}
}
};
void GenerateNormalMap(ProceduralTexture t) { … }
void SomeTextureGenerationPass(void* out, PixelInfo in) {
result = PerlinNoise(in);
result = Filter(result);
… // etc.
*out = result;
}
void GenerateSomeTexture(texture t) {
t.ApplyFunction(SomeTextureGenerationPass);
GenerateNormalMap(t);
}
Parallelization
Generating textures takes time, and an obvious candidate for reducing that time is to have parallel code execution. At the very least, it is possible to generate several textures concurrently. This is what we did up to F – Felix’s workshop and it greatly reduced loading time.
However, doing so doesn’t shorten generation time where we most want it. Generating a single texture still takes as much time. That affects editing, when we keep reloading the same texture again and again between each modification. It is preferable to parallelize the inner texture generation code instead. Since the code now essentially consists in just one big function applied in a loop to each texel, parallelization becomes very simple and efficient. The cost of experimenting, tweaking and doodling is reduced, and that directly impacts creativity.
A damaged mosaic texture for H – Immersion
A mosaic texture for H – Immersion
This illustration is an idea that we explored and abandoned for H – Immersion: a mosaic decoration with orichalcum lining. It is shown here in our live editing tool.
GPU side generation
In case it isn’t completely clear in the paragraphs above, texture generation is done entirely on the CPU. At this point some of you might be staring at these lines with incredulity and thinking: “But, why?!”. Generating textures on the GPU would seem like the obvious thing to do. For starters it would likely speed up generation by an order of magnitude. So, why?
The main reason is that it was a smaller step of redesign to stay on CPU. Moving to GPU would have been more work. It would have required to solve additional problems, new problems we don’t have enough experience with yet. On CPU we had a good understanding of what we wanted and how to fix some of the earlier mistakes.
The good news however, is that with the new design it now seems fairly trivial to experiment with GPU side generation as well. In the future, testing combinations of both could be an interesting path to explore.
Texture generation and physically based shading
Another limitation of the old design was that a texture was considered to be just an RGB image. If we wanted to generate more information, say, a diffuse texture and a normal texture for a same surface, nothing was preventing us from doing that, but the API wasn’t actively helping either. This takes special importance in the context of Physically Based Shading (PBR).
In a traditional non-PBR pipeline, surfaces typically use color textures in which a lot of information is baked. Those textures often represent the final appearance of the surface: they already have some volume, the crevices are darkened, and they may even have some reflection highlights. If more than one texture is used at a time, it’s usually to combine details of large and small scale, to add normal mapping, or to represent how reflective the surface is.
In a PBR pipeline on the contrary, surfaces tend to use sets of different textures that represent physical values rather than a desired artistic result. The diffuse color texture, which is the closest to what we commonly describe as “the color” of a surface, typically looks flat and uninteresting. The specular color is dictated by the surface index of refraction. Most of the detail and variety come from the normal and the roughness textures (which you could argue represent the same thing, but at two different scales). How reflective the surface feels just becomes a consequence of the roughness. At this point, it makes sense not to think in terms of textures anymore, but in terms of materials.
Greetings marble floor texture breakoff
Cobbles textures breakoff
Fountain scene in H – Immersion
Seafloor textures breakoff
Seafloor scene in H – Immersion
Old stone textures breakoff
Arch scene in H – Immersion
Submersible body texture breakoff
Launch scene in H – Immersion
The current design allows to declare arbitrary pixel formats for textures. By making it part of the API, we can have all the boilerplate taken care of. Once the pixel format is declared, we can focus on writing the creative code, without spending additional effort on processing that data. Upon execution, it will generate several textures and upload them to the GPU, transparently.
Some PBR workflows don’t directly expose diffuse and specular colors, but instead a “base color” and a “metalness” parameter, which have some advantages and some disadvantages. In H – Immersion we use a diffuse+specular model, and a material usually consists of 5 layers:
Relief elevation (A; used for parallax occlusion mapping).
When it was used, emissive detail was added directly in the shader. It didn’t seem necessary to have ambient occlusion either since most scenes didn’t have ambient light at all. It wouldn’t be surprising to have such additional layers though, or other kind of information like anisotropy or opacity for example.
Wall texture without ambient occlusion
Wall texture with ambient occlusion
Pictured here is a recent experiment at generating local ambient occlusion based on the height. For each direction, march a given distance and keep the biggest tangent (height difference divided by distance). Finally, compute occlusion from the average tangent.
Limitations and future work
As you can see, the current design is a strong improvement over the previous one, and it provides creative expressivity. However, it still has limitations that we would like to address in the future.
For example, although it wasn’t a problem for this intro, we noticed that memory allocation could be an obstacle. The generation of a texture uses a single array of floats. For large textures with many layers, this can quickly hit the point where allocation fails. There are various ways to address this, but they all come with drawbacks. For example we could generate the textures tile by tile, which would scale better, but some operations like convolution would become less straightforward to implement.
Finally in this article despite using the word “material”, we have only talked about textures and never about shaders. Yet a material should arguably encompass the shading part as well. This contradiction reflects the limitation of our current design: texture generation and shading are two distinct parts, separated by a bridge. We have tried to make that bridge as simple to cross as possible, but what we really want is to treat the two as a whole. For example, if a material has static features as well as dynamic ones, we want to describe them in a same place. This is a difficult topic and we don’t know yet what could be a good solution but, let’s go one step at a time.
An experiment in trying to create a fabric texture similar to the earlier texture by Imadol Delgado.
Next up: meshes
Now that we’ve talked about textures, we invite you to keep reading to learn about mesh generation.
At last. Last December, we finally finished it. This video here is our last production, a 4 minute animation called “Immersion”. To be more precise, it’s a capture of what is usually referred to as a 64k intro. But more on that later.
Making it took the better part of two years’ free time. It all started during Revision 2015, a large event that takes place every year in Germany, during the Easter weekend. The both of us were chatting on our few kilometers long walk from the hotel to the party place, our faces battling the brisk morning air and the sleep deprivation. The previous night, the level of the 64kB competition had been high. Really high. The long established Hungarian group Conspiracy was finally back with a serious bombastic entry. Our best enemy Approximate was perfectly on time for its three years release cycle and showing a great deal of improvement in storytelling. The prolific Mercury now had a mature design style, with a foreshadowing intro title that left no doubt on the showdown.
That year, coming empty handed, we were not part of the competition, but we sure wanted to get back as soon as possible. Yet, after such a show we were wondering: slick look, great storytelling, great design… how could we get to that level? I couldn’t see what concept that, even perfectly executed, would have been a clear winner over any of those three. Not to mention that our tech was below any of them. And so there we were, throwing ideas on Hohenzollernstraße, when finally one of them stuck. A city rising out of the sea. That was a concept that, well executed, could maybe stand a chance at competing at the level this subset of that subculture had become. Revision 2016, get ready, here we come!
Revision 2016 zoomed past us with a whooshing sound… Revision 2017 it would be then. Alas, we barely made it to this new deadline either. At the party when people asked how it was going, the answer was a witty “It took us a year to make the first half, I’m confident we can make the second half in 24 hours”. We couldn’t. We did release though, but that second half was rushed, and it showed. So much so that we didn’t get even close to the podium. But we worked on it, gave it the love we thought it needed, and at last released the final version shown above.
What’s a 64k intro?
Demos are digital art creations at the crossroad of short films, music videos and video games. Although they present a non interactive experience, often music driven, like a music video does, they are rendered in real-time like video games are.
64kB intros, 64k for short, are like demos but with an added arbitrary limitation on the size: they must fit entirely within a single binary file of no more than 65536 bytes. No extra assets, no network, no extra libraries: the usual rule is that it should run on a freshly installed Windows PC with up to date drivers.
But how big is that exactly? Here are some comparison points.
In a 64kB file, you could store either:
400ms of wave sound with CD quality, or
3s of mp3 at 192kbps, or
A 200×100 RGB .bmp image, or
A JPEG picture of medium size, medium quality, like this 800×450 screenshot from the intro:
A 65595 bytes JPEG image, 59 bytes over the 64kB limit. :)
Yes, you’ve read that right: that video embedded at the beginning of this post, fits entirely within a single file that takes no more space than a just a screenshot from the video itself.
When you see these numbers, it seems complicated to fit in the binary all the images and sounds that surely must be necessary. We talked previously about some of the compromises we make and some of the tricks we use in order to make everything fit within such a small size. But that is not enough.
In fact, because of these extreme constraints, usual techniques and tools cannot be used. We wrote our own toolchain instead, a task that is an interesting challenge in itself: we create textures, 3D models, animations, camera paths, music, etc. thanks to algorithms, procedural generation and compression. We’ll talk about those very soon.
Some numbers
Here is an overview of how those 64kB are spent:
Music: 12.4kB
Meshes: 12.5kB
Textures: 4.8kB
Camera data: 1.3kB
Shaders: 6.2kB, from 5k lines of code
Engine: 12.9kB, from 20k lines of code
Intro itself: 12k lines of code
Time spent: hours, maybe over a thousand of them
This chart shows how the 64kB are used by the different type of content, after compression.
This chart shows how the binary size (excluding ~2kB of depacker) evolved until the final release.
Design & Inspiration
Having agreed that the central theme was a submerged city, one of the early questions was: how was this city going to look? Where was it located, why was it submerged, what was its architecture? One simple answer addressed all these points: it could be the legendary lost city of Atlantis itself. This would also explain and justify the emergence: by its divine nature (a literal deus ex machina). And thus it was so decided.
An early concept art for the emerged city. The artworks shown in this article were created by Benoît Molenda.
Two books guided our design decisions: Timaeus and Critias, in which Plato describes Atlantis and its fate. In Critias in particular, he details the structure of the city, its colors, its abundance of the precious orichalcum (which became an essential element in the temple scene), its circular shape, and the main temple dedicated to Poseidon and Cleito. Since Plato apparently based his description on countries he knew, a mix of Greek, Egyptian and Babylonian styles, we decided to stick with these.
Without proper knowledge of the topic though, creating convincing antique architecture seemed challenging. Instead, we decided to reproduce existing buildings:
The temple is essentially the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the antique world.
Searching reference material for the Artemision turned out to be an unexpected, enriching experience. Originally, we were only looking for photographs, schemes or maps for reference. But when we learned about the name “John Turtle Wood”, things took a greater depth. Wood was the very person in charge of the searches and ultimate discovery of the temple location. Hoping that his name would yield better results than merely “Artemision”, we followed up, and we immediately found the book he wrote in 1877, in which he reports not only descriptions and drawings of the temple, but also his eleven years journey to find the lost site, his negotiations with the British Museum to stay funded, his relations with the local workers and the diplomacy involved before randomly digging holes.
Those books were essential to the design decision but above all, reading them brought us, as individuals, so much value from making this project.
And by the way, how is the roof supposed to look like? Some representations, including Wood’s, have a hole in it and some do not; there is apparently some controversy. We decided to go with an open roof model, allowing us to reveal the interior of the temple with a beam of light. The illustrations above show the floor plan and the cross sections, from the book Discoveries at Ephesus, compared to our work in progress model of the temple.
Achieving the desired look
We knew from the beginning that the appearance of water would be crucial to this intro. So we spent a lot of time on it, starting with watching reference material to understand the essential elements of underwater look. You might have guessed inspiration from James Cameron’s The Abyss and Titanic, 3DMark 11, or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner for lighting.
Getting the right look wasn’t about implementing and turning on some epic MakeBeautifulWater() function. Instead, it was the combination of a series of effects that, when refined, would eventually trick us, the viewer, into accepting the illusion and feeling “This is it, we’re underwater!”. But one mistake, and the deception would collapse; a lesson we learned too late, when comments after the initial release pointed out where the illusion disappeared.
As illustrated above we also explored different non-realistic and sometimes extreme palettes, but we didn’t know how to achieve that look so we kept a classic color scheme in the end.
The water surface
The rendering of the water surface assumes a flat plane reflection. Reflection and refraction are first rendered to separate textures, using cameras on one side and the other of the water plane. In the main pass, the water surface is rendered as a mesh with a material that combines reflection and refraction based on the normal and the view vector. The trick is to offset the texture coordinates based on the water surface normal in screen space. This technique is classic and well documented.
It works well at a medium scale like during the boat scene, but at a larger scale like in the final emergence scene, the result looks artificial. To make it believable, an artistic trick we used was to apply a Gaussian blur to the intermediate textures. Blurring the refraction texture gives a murky look to the water, and a greater sense of depth. Blurring the reflection texture helps make the sea look more choppy. Moreover, applying more blur in the vertical direction imitates the vertical trails expected from a water surface.
A blurred image of the temple is reflected on the water surface.
The animation is done using simple Gerstner waves in the vertex shader, adding 8 of them with random directions and amplitude (within a given range). Smaller scale details are done in the fragment shader, including 16 more wave functions. A fake back-scattering effect based on normal and height brightens the tip of the waves, visible in the image above as small turquoise patches. During the launch scene, a few additional effects are added, like this rain drop shader.
Volumetric lighting
“How to make shafts of light for the submersible?” was one of the early technical questions. Maybe a translucent billboard with a beautiful shader could work? One day, we started experimenting with naive ray marching through a medium. We observed with delight that even in an early crude rendering test, and despite coder colors and the lack of a decent phase function, the volumetric lighting was immediately convincing. At that point, that initial billboard idea disappeared, never to be heard of ever again.
With this simple technique, effects we didn’t even dare think of where already baked in. As we added the phase function and played with it, it started to feel like the real deal. This opened a lot of possibilities from a cinematography point of view. But then there was performance.
Light shafts give this scene a look inspired by the film Blade Runner.
On each pixel, a ray is cast, and its intersections with each light cone are solved analytically.
The math is described here (now guess on what occasion the article was written in the first place ;-) ). In terms of performance, it would probably be more efficient to use a light volume bounding mesh, but for a 64k it sounded simpler to use an analytic approach. Obviously, rays only go as far as the depth in the depth buffer.
In case the ray intersects, the volume inside the cone is then ray marched.
The number of steps is limited for performance reason, and they are randomly offset to remove banding. This is a typical case of trading banding for noise, visually less questionable.
At each step, the shadow map corresponding to the light is fetched, and light contribution is accumulated according to a simple Henyey – Greenstein phase function.
Unlike epipolar coordinates based approaches, using this technique it is possible to have heterogeneous medium density, which adds more variety, but we didn’t implement such an effect.
The resulting image is upsampled using a two passes bilateral Gaussian filter and added on top of the main render buffer. Unlike Sébastien’s tutorial, we don’t use temporal reprojection; we just use a high enough number of steps to reduce visible artifacts (8 steps in low quality settings, 32 steps in high quality settings).
Volumetric lighting makes it possible to give a mood and a distinctive cinematic look that would be difficult otherwise.
Light absorption
An immediately recognizable aspect of an underwater image is absorption. As objects get distant, they become less and less visible, their colors fading into the background, until they disappear completely. Similarly, the volume affected by light sources is reduced as light is quickly absorbed by the water medium.
This effect has great potential for cinematography, and modelling it is simple. It is done with two steps in the shader. A first step applies a simple absorption function to the light intensity when accumulating the lights affecting an object, therefore modifying the light color and intensity when it reaches surfaces. A second step applies the same absorption function to the final color of the object itself, thus modifying the perceived color depending on the distance from the camera.
Test of light absorption in the water medium. Notice how color is affected by the distance from the camera and the distance from the light sources.
Adding vegetation
Seaweeds were an element we weren’t certain we could use. When reviewing the typical features of an underwater scenery, they were sitting among the top elements in the wish list, but their implementation seemed risky. Organic elements like that can be difficult to get right, and getting them wrong could break immersion. They would need to have a believable shape, be well integrated in their environment, and they might even require some subsurface scattering shading model.
One day though, we felt inspired to experiment. Starting from a cube, scaling it, and putting a random number of them on a spiral around an imaginary trunk: from far enough it could pass as a long plant with many small branches. After adding a lot of noise to deform the model it was already starting to look half decent.
A test shot with a few sparse plants.
However as we tried adding those plants to a scene, we realized the performance tanked rapidly with the number of objects. This limited way too much the number of them we could put for the image to look convincing. It turns out our new unoptimized engine was already hitting a first bottleneck. So we implemented a crude ad hoc frustum culling at the last minute (in the final version a proper culling is used :) ), allowing the dense bushes visible in the demo.
With appropriate density and sizes (patches with normal distribution), and the details taken care of by the dim lighting, it was starting to look interesting. Experimenting more, we tried to animate them: a noise function to modulate the intensity of an imaginary underwater stream, an inverse exponential function to make the plants bend, and a sinus so their tip would swirl in the stream. Doodling some more, we stumbled upon the money shot: the submersible casting a light through the bushes, drawing shadow patterns on the seafloor as it passed off camera.
The vegetation casting shadow patterns on the seafloor.
Giving volume with particles
Particles are the final subtle touch. Pay close attention to any real underwater footage and you will notice all sorts of suspended matter. Stop paying attention and it disappears. We tuned particles to be barely noticeable, preventing them from getting in the way. Yet they give a sense of volume filled with a tangible medium, and help sell the look.
The technical side is fairly straightforward: in Immersion, particles are just instanced quads with a translucent material. The rendering order problem due to translucency was simply avoided by setting the position along one axis according to the instance id. By doing so, they are always drawn in the correct order along that axis. The particles volume then just has to be oriented properly for each shot. In fact, in many shots this is not even done at all, since the size of the particles and the darkness of the scene made noticeable artifacts rare enough.
In this shot, particles provide depth cues and a sense of density as the submersible descends.
Music
How to fit a high-quality music in around 16kB? This problem is not new, and most 64kB intros written after .the .product in 2000 use the same concepts. The original series of articles is old, but still relevant: The Workings of FR-08’s Sound System.
In short, the idea is that we need the music sheet and a list of instruments. Each instrument is a function generating a sound procedurally (see for example Subtractive synthesis and Physical modelling synthesis). The music sheet represents the list of notes and effects to apply. It is stored in a format similar to midi, with some changes to reduce the size. During the execution of the program, the music is generated.
The synth has also a plugin version (VSTi) that the musician can use from his favorite tool. Once the music is composed, the musician clicks on a button, which will export all the data to a file. We embed the data in the demo.
When the demo is run, it starts a thread to generates the music in a giant buffer. The synth is CPU intensive and is not guaranteed to be real-time. This is why we start the thread before the beginning of the demo, while the textures and other data are generated.
Daniel Lindholm composed the music, using the synth 64klang created by Dominik Ries.
Workflow
Iteration time is one of the most critical aspects of the workflow when making a demo. In fact, this is true of many creative processes. Iteration time is king. The faster you can iterate, the more you can experiment, the more variations you can explore, the more you can refine your vision and increase the overall quality. So we want to eliminate as much as possible all the obstacles, all the pauses, all the little frictions in the creation process. Ideally, we want to be able to change anything, any time, and see the result immediately, as a continuous feedback while we are still making the change.
A possible solution, used by many demo groups, is to build an editor and create all the content inside the editor. We didn’t. Our initial approach was to write C++ code and do everything inside Visual C++. Over time, we developed a number of techniques to improve the workflow and reduce iteration time.
Hot reload all the data
If there was only one single advice to take away from this article, it would be this: make all your data hot reloadable. All of it. Make it so you can detect when the data is changed, load the new data when that happen, and update the state of your program accordingly.
One by one, we have made all our data hot loadable. The shaders, the camera, the editing, all the curves that depend on time, etc. In practice, we generally have an editor and the demo running on the side. Whenever we modify a file, the changes are immediately visible in the demo.
In a project as small as a demo this is fairly simple to implement. Our engine keeps track of where the data comes from, and a small function checks regularly if the timestamps of the corresponding files have changed. If they do, it triggers a reload of the corresponding data.
It might be significantly more involved in a bigger project where such changes are made difficult by complex dependencies and legacy design. But the impact it has on production cannot be overstated, so it is well worth the effort.
Tweakable values
Reloading data is all well and good, but what about the code itself? This is more complicated and we have approached this problem step by step.
The first step was a clever trick that allows to change the constant literals. Joel Davis described it in a post: a short macro that turns a constant into a variable with a piece of code that detects when the source file is modified, and updates the variable accordingly. Obviously in the final binary, this additional code is absent and only the constant is left. The compiler is therefore able to do all optimizations (for example when the constant is set to 0).
This trick is limited but it is really simple and can be integrated in the code in a matter of minutes. Moreover, although it is only meant to tweak constants, it can still be used for debugging purposes to modify a code path or toggle features with conditions like if(_TV(1)).
C++ recompilation
Finally our most recent update in our quest to make the code more malleable has been the inclusion of the tool Runtime Compiled C++ in our codebase. By compiling the code as a dynamic library and loading it, as well as doing a bit of serialization juggling, it allows to make changes to that code and see the result at runtime, without restarting the program or, in this case, the demo.
This is not perfect yet: the API is intrusive and constrains the design (classes have to derive from an interface), and compiling and reloading the code still take a few seconds. Yet the ability to make changes to the code logic inside the demo and see the result in situation enables a great deal of creativity. At the moment only our texture and mesh generators benefit from it, but in the future we want to extend it to the entirety of the “content” code.
To be continued
Here ends the first part of what will be a series of articles on the techniques used in H – Immersion. We’d like to thank Alan Wolfe for proof reading; you can check his many technical articles on his blog. In the next parts we will present in more details how the textures and the meshes are created.
Until then, feel free to ask any question or share your own experience.
When making a demo in 64kB (or less!), many unexpected issues arise. One issue is that floating point numbers can take quite a lot of space. Floats are found everywhere: position of objects in the world, position of the camera, constants for the effects, colors in the texture generator, etc. In practice, we often don’t need as much precision as offered by floats. Can we take advantage of that to pack more data in a smaller space?
In many cases, it’s not important if an object is 2.2 or 2.21 meters high. Our goal is to reduce the amount of space used by those numbers. A float takes 4 bytes (8 bytes for a double). This can be reduced a bit with compression, but when there are thousands of them, it’s still quite big. We can do better.
A naïve solution
Suppose we have some numbers between 0 and 1000, and we need a precision of 0.1. We could store those numbers as integers between 0 and 10000 and then divide by 10. Whether we use 32 bit or 16 bit integers in the code doesn’t make a difference: since we don’t use their full range of values, all these integers start with leading 0s. The compression code will detect such repetitive 0s and use around 13 bits per number in both cases.
The problem with this solution is that we need some processing in the runtime code. Each time we use a number, we have to convert it to a float and divide it by 10. If all our data is in a same place, we can loop over it. But if we have numbers all over our code base, we’ll also need processing code in all those places. This simple operation can be cumbersome and expensive in terms of space.
It turns out we can get rid of the processing, and use directly floating point numbers.
A note on IEEE floats
Floats are stored using the IEEE 754 standard. Some of them have a binary representation that contains lots of 0 and compress better than others.
Let’s look at two examples using a binary representation. The IEEE representation is not exactly the same as in the example below (it has to store the exponent), but almost.
6.25 -> 110.01
6.3 -> 110.010011…
In fact, 6.3 has no exact representation in base 2: the number stored is an approximation, and it would require an infinite number of digits to represent 6.3. On the other hand, the binary representation for 6.25 is compact and exact.
If we’re optimizing for size, we should prefer numbers like 6.25, that have a compact binary representation. For example, 0.125, 0.5, 0.75, 0.875 have at most 3 digits in binary after the decimal mark. The binary representation will have a lot of 0s at the end of the number, which will compress really well. The great thing is that we don’t need processing code anymore because we’re still using standard floats.
To better understand IEEE representation, try some tools to visualize the floats. You’ll see how removing the last 1s will reduce the precision.
How much precision do we need?
Floats are much more precise for values around 0. As our numbers get bigger, we’ll have less and less precision (or we’ll need more bits).
The table below is useful to check how much precision is needed. It tells you the worst error to expect based on the number of bits, and the scale of the input numbers. For example, if the input numbers are around 100 and we use 16 bits per float, the error will be at most 0.25. If we want the error to be less than 0.01, we need 21 bits per float.
Of course, each time you add a bit, you divide by two the expected error.
How to automate it?
An ad hoc solution is to remember this list of numbers and use them in the code when possible: 0.125, 0.25, 0.375, 0.5, 0.625, 0.75, 0.875. An alternative is to use a list of macros from Iñigo Quilez. As Iñigo points out, this is not very elegant. Fortunately, this is hardly a problem because chances are this is not where most of your data lies.
64kB can actually contain a lot of data. Developers often rely on tools and custom editors to quickly modify and iterate on the data. In that case, we can easily use code to truncate the floating point numbers as part of the process.
Here is the function we use to round the binary representation of the floats:
// roundb(f, 15) => keep 15 bits in the float, set the other bits to zero
float roundb(float f, int bits) {
union { int i; float f; } num;
bits = 32 - bits; // assuming sizeof(int) == sizeof(float) == 4
num.f = f;
num.i = num.i + (1 << (bits - 1)); // round instead of truncate
num.i = num.i & (-1 << bits);
return num.f;
}
Just pass the float, choose how many bits you want to keep, and you’ll get a new float that will compress much better. If you generate C++ code with that number, be careful when printing it (make sure you print it with enough decimals):
printf("%.10ff\n", roundb(myinput, 12));
The great thing about this function is that we decide exactly how much precision we want to keep. If we desperately need space at some point, we can try to reduce that number and see what happens.
By applying this technique, we’ve managed to save several kilobytes on our 64kB executable.
Hopefully you will, too.
After months of polishing, we’ve finally released the final version of our latest 64kB intro: H – Immersion. You can read the details, download the binary or just watch the captured video from the production page.
We’re also currently doing a write up to show some of the techniques involved in this intro, which we’re hoping to publish here soon.
