11/5/09

FRequency To the Road of Ribbon in 1k for win32

Instead of producing my own stuff, I've spent time crunching down the original Linux 1k from Frequency. Mainly I did it to see it on my ati card (the original was messed up) but also to see if I could get a win32 version, written in C, down to 1024 bytes.

During the crunching it became obvious I'd have to make a few compromises:
  • The colour of the ribbon is the same as the walls. This is the biggest artistic compromise and definitely it can be criticised as compromising the original. To compensate I added a more dramatic camera path that gets very close to the ribbon.
  • Clock is less accurate and resets, causing a jump to a new viewpoint. This is not as good as the original.
  • View angle is smaller - caused by a new method of calculating view vectors. Not a big issue.
Thats really it. On the plus side, I've cured a bug that caused the ribbon to be reflected many times and I made the new version run a bit faster enabling a higher resolution. I've completely rewritten the code that generates the olour but I've stayed as close to the original as I could. I hope its not noticeable too much. However, mine is darker, perhaps I can cure this later.

This is a fantastic intro and not one I thought could be done in 1k in win32 in C when I started. Linux 1ks have smaller frameworks and so have more space available for the intro; and asm is of course more space efficient than C.

Here is the source code and an exe to try out. I hope you agree it has kept the essence of the original whilst being 1k in win32. I used crinkler 1.1 (even though 1.2 would produce smaller code) as 1.2 doesn't work for me. So the intro wont work under win7!!

Respect to FRequency from auld^titan.