Elevation (in Off-topic)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWMGuh15nE&feature=player_embedded

Wow. 4kb, and procedurally generated. Very cool stuff. :)

whats so special about it?

That is impressive.

It's all made with math! And, it's 4kb big.

Yeah, I'm impressed.

I don't get it. It's a boring video and a bad techno song?

Yes, all compressed to 4kb.

I'm still not entirely sure why that's impressive. Honestly.

I know videos are generally larger file sizes than that, but... well, what does it mean?

Very impressive demo.

4KB is a ridiculously small filesize. If you encoded that to a video, it'd probably run around 4 orders of magnitude higher. Even rendering it from textures and a mesh would require significantly larger amounts of storage, not to mention a 3MB+, compressed audio track.

So how did they do it?

Procedural generation.

That's insane.

so what the guys are attempting with this is to make all rendered items smaller?
that would be very awesome in say WoW-esque game..
make the download from 4 gigs to like 2 megabytes would be insane

It doesn't have very many practical purposes. Firstly, procedural generation is ridiculously hard to fine-tune. Secondly, it requires extensive computation to generate them on the fly, so often what is done is a precomputing stage where all objects in the scene are precomputed, then stored into memory. I'd personally prefer a onetime download to 5 minute load times.

So is the video itself the 4kb file, or is the program that generated the video 4kb?

The former would be completely absurd; the latter seems much more possible.

@ Goodfish,

The idea here is that all the imagery you are seeing is generated by a code base and data file totaling 4k.

If the video file was 4K you wouldn't even have a single frame a today's compression rates. As it is, the fact that one can get such detailed imagery out of a 4k data/instruction set is quite impressive.

Okay, that makes more sense to me. :) Thank you for clarifying!