The demoscene movement has given rise to truly impressive developments. On one hand, we have enthusiasts achieving incredible things on very limited computers, and on the other, we find animations of great complexity, occupying less space than an email. Today it's the turn of «El Ciclo de la Naturaleza», created by Loonies. The demo can be downloaded without issues, but you'll need a reactor to run it properly.
The old DOS riders still remember well those battles to free five or six extra kilobytes of base memory, while keeping the mouse drivers and sound card. But the most impressive thing is that in those five or six kilobytes, the demoscene movement can store entire worlds... and it has room to spare. What we have here today takes up four kilobytes. If the data doesn't fail me, the RAM of a Sega Mega Drive could contain this project sixteen times. The Super Mario Bros. ROM is eight times larger. Want to see what it's about?
Editor's note: I recommend playing it in 1080p60 if possible.
The 4KB competition
The official name is «El Ciclo de la Naturaleza», an intro that Loonies presented for the 2017 Revision Party. The machine on which competitors had to put their creations is based on an Intel Core i7-7700K (Kaby Lake), 16 GB of DDR4 RAM at 2,400 MHz, an Asus H270M-PLUS motherboard, Nvidia Titan X (Pascal) graphics with driver 381.65, Windows 10 Creators Update x64, and the latest 'redist' of DirectX 9 from June 2010. The competition rules for 4KB intros are very strict: The system has no runtime, SDK, driver, or auxiliary codec beyond what the operating system offers, with the exception of multimedia samples (which are manually deleted). Projects made in Java are not allowed (DotNET is authorized as long as it doesn't require anything extra), and their maximum duration must not exceed eight minutes, including loading and precomputation.
The Revision Party 2017 ended yesterday, and I'm afraid I don't know how Loonies did in the competition, but the work is spectacular regardless. Most of the demos are available on YouTube for those of us who can't run them in real time... which I personally appreciate, because when I tried to open the Loonies demo, everything crashed. I guess my system isn't up to the task.
