this is not vb but still amazing

[JungleMan]

http://home.online.no/~jlaroenn/Heaven/heaven.exe

Look how small that file is, and look how much video it has in it. That is some incredible compression. How was it done? was it repeating patterns? but even then, that can only be done to a point.

[Sastraxi]

It looked like it was 3D to me, especially in the part after the "Heaven Seven" logo appeared, where it showed the earth or a similar planet.

[JungleMan]

Originally posted by Sastraxi
It looked like it was 3D to me, especially in the part after the "Heaven Seven" logo appeared, where it showed the earth or a similar planet.

That's not my point. How did they fit such a 3-D presentation into such a small file??

[Zaei]

If that is the heaven 7 demo, it is a realtime raytracer, written in assembly. Probably 90% of the geometry is procedural (generated using mathematical formuli), and the rest (sound, any non prcedural geometry, etc) is compressed, perhaps with wavelet compression. Although, in comparison, The Product takes the cake on compression. That demo generates/stores ~1.9 gigabytes (yes, gigabytes) of data, into 64K. Anyway, yes, it's amazing, but certainly possible =).

Z.

[JungleMan]

Originally posted by Zaei
If that is the heaven 7 demo, it is a realtime raytracer, written in assembly. Probably 90% of the geometry is procedural (generated using mathematical formuli), and the rest (sound, any non prcedural geometry, etc) is compressed, perhaps with wavelet compression. Although, in comparison, The Product takes the cake on compression. That demo generates/stores ~1.9 gigabytes (yes, gigabytes) of data, into 64K. Anyway, yes, it's amazing, but certainly possible =).

Z.

i saw that one too let me find the link..

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

It uses DirectDraw for the '3d' and DirectSound for the sound.

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

Also... it uses the UPX exe packer.

http://upx.sf.net/

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

I compressed Photoshp.exe to 4.22 MB with it from 13.1, it's a very good program.

[Zaei]

Trust me, it's 3D, done in software (realtime raytracer). I can imagine using DDraw for that, for the speed of setting individual pixels.

Z.

[Fox]

You surely meant this one..

[bradley252]

how ever they did it it looks mighty fine!! wht is the dff betweenupx packer and the one that comes with vb?? better??

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

UPX compresses a single exe, or other type of executable file(com being one example).

[Mad Compie]

Nicely done indeed.
I also noticed, like DigitalError, that it was done using DirectDraw and DirectSound.
I never heard of UPX. Yet I did a download of it and now I'm testing it out.

[bradley252]

where can i get upx from??

[plenderj]

That 3d demo that fox posted is pretty beautiful itself... just a pity my video card renders things incorrectly from time to time

[Mad Compie]

Here you can download the free UPX program:

http://upx.sf.net/

I tested it on a VB6 GUI, which uses a large amount of embedded graphics. UPX compressed this executable to 1/5 of the total file size. And when I ran the compressed exe I did not see any difference in speed !!!

Nice app, UPX. It also supports many OS and it is free for use!!!

[agent]

i looked at it. very nice.

it seems to use DirectSound for output because I loaded two instance of it and it was able to mix the sound instead of cause the second one to error.

The audio may be based on midi with an internal wave table for the instruments. I think there is a section of DirectX that also handles this.

I'm pretty sure that the shapes were defined from an internal scripts (much like povray) but the backend that renders it is based on Direct3d. It seems that they hardcoded Direct3d to use the software driver instead of a hardware one so that it would be guaranteed to look the same on all systems.

On the other hand, it they wrote the raytracer from scratch, they could use DirectDraw (i would think) to draw the output on the screen.

The textures used are most likely procedural maps.

Here's how I figured out the graphics portion: my system has an ATI Rage Fury card. This card is capable of 60fps at 1024x768x32bit. When I use software rendering, my system is barely able to do 15 fps at 800x600x32bit. The demo would not exceed 15fps (estimated) when run at 800x600x32bit

[dafhi]

I wonder if The Product's description of its compression performance is misleading. For example, if I write a soft synth / sequencer that plays 10 minutes worth of music, I could say that I compress 10 minutes worth of cd audio into 'a filesize this small'.

[duc]

i dont care what the heck they used that was pretty cool :-0)

[dafhi]

yes. 'demos' are pretty cool. demos are the 'source' of my inspiration to become a 'demo-writer'

[Hu Flung Dung]

Anyone remember those old Amiga 1200 demo's? They were (and in some cases, still are) awesome!

[dafhi]

yup

[Pirate]

can that be done by 3D max ?well that't really great work

[CornedBee]

It's definitly DirectDraw and DirectSound, I used the Depency viewer to check.

The uncompressed size of this exe is ~150k.

The sound is surely some internal sequencer, you can't have sound of this length in 150k in two qualities. Well, maybe MP3, but by the sound of the music I'd say it's a sequenzer.