Comment by jahnu

9 years ago

Reminds me of this classic 4k demo which blew my mind back in 1993

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=4662

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k

The demoscene is still pumping out amazing stuff. Check out this ~5 minute 64K demo (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX7ESVZ7T6Y.

That was mindblowing at the time. We thought we were being cool with our "Comanche engine using ripped Comanche terrain" on Heartquake https://youtu.be/LLsRBbFOa3k?t=1m39s but Mars was amazing.

p.s. yeah we edited the terrain to hide the signature pyramid :)

  • Yeah, the maps of Comanche were just run-length encoded and it took me an evening to reverse-engineer it. Nice to know, that I am not the only one who were able to extract them.

    But even without the pyramid it is very obvious, that these maps in your demo were from the game Comanche.

    • Hehe you're going to laugh at me - I just played the game, exited back to DOS and dumped all RAM to a file. I had already written a relatively popular tool to explore files visually (dump every N bytes to a pixel, with W pixels per line and S stride), so it was trivial to find the raw maps. :)

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  • I remember heartquake! I could probably play the credits part of the music by memory. I never realized the terrain was the actual comanche terrain.

Very cool, I remember this demo from that time! I even have a vague memory of trying to implement something similar.