Comment by msephton

1 year ago

How about 39kB for a video game with physics, dynamic graphics, two music tracks, sound effects, online high scores, and built-in instructions? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936

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msephton

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GuB-42  1 year ago

Sizecoding is a thing. .kkrieger is a rather famous 96kB FPS game. There is even an entire demoparty called Lovebyte that is dedicated to it, the biggest category is 1k, but all demoscene events I can think of have a sizecoding competition of some kind.

And it is a completely different thing. In general, it is more about procedural generation and tricks then good packing. Runtime packers are used, like crinkler and kkrunchy, but actually they use a lot of RAM, like hundreds of MB, which is a bit surprising considering that the decompressed executable is in the tens of kB. But that's because they use very powerful but slow compression algorithms.

Sizecoding usually doesn't care about RAM, unless the platform requires it, the only think that matters is the size of the executable file and its data. For that 39kB Playdate game, I guess that's the same idea. The Playdate has 16MB of RAM, I bet the game took full advantage of it.