pouët.net

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Really happy with what pestis and I managed to create in just a few days. To me, it's a lovely bundle of 1024 bytes of pixels, audio and controlled glitches.

Hope this resonates with you!

It got a bit easier when browsers started to accept Brotli compressed html page as it is. So, there's no need anymore for abusing polyglot PNGs to get DEFLATE compressed javascript code. This saves maybe 160 bytes stub and Brotli is slightly better algorithm than DEFLATE.

That said, 1ks still require different approaches than 4ks. For example, 4ks can fit midi note data for the entire song, composed using a VST host. But for 1ks, even with free compression, that is too much. The whole song needs to be composed more like bytebeat, trying to find code that produces passable music without using too much bytes. In Expi, all instrument channels are looping a simple 8 note pattern of notes: you can hear it easiest in the bassline. But higher channels are playing the same pattern octaves up, yet with slower notes.



That's why the disclaimer in NFO: "prefer Chrome or Edge." The flashes are because the glitch effect is done by grabbing a compressed JPG of the screen, randomly setting bytes of the stream to 0s and then setting it as the background. Obviously, Firefox jpg decoder is not as happy about that as the decoder in Chrome/Edge.

Thank you for the nice and more critical comments 🙇🏻


@Starchaser: EXPI exhibits real JPG corruption.
To do that, every few frames we encode the Canvas to JPEG, corrupt some bytes in synch with music, and set the corrupted JPEG as background of the Canvas. This highlights the difference of image codecs between browsers and how they deal with corrupted images in a beautiful/artsy manner or less so.


@Navis: Thank you. I see how it can be hard to gauge 1kb vs 256b and 4kb intros. Here's my own impression of the categories. Take this with a handful of salt.

• 256b is ruthless, and something inevitably has got to give in the visuals, music or direction department.
  
• 4kb is big enough, and have enough tooling, that one can achieve pretty much any kind of visuals and sound they want with 1-3 different scenes. Not saying it is easy at all. On the contrary. This raises the bar so much higher and gives room for beautiful mini demos, with a story and tons of details calling for a thousand viewing to discover.
  
• 1kb is the sweet spot where you can start to do something interesting in terms of visuals, sound and direction, but it's hard. There are no tools apart for the packers, yet people expect "hints" of 4kb intros but with far, far less space to achieve.
  

Looking at 1kb intros on modern platforms, what we tend to see is:

• visuals = 900-1400 bytes of GLSL or some simple shapes and/or emojis rendered in a single buffer with 1-2 parameters with linear camera movement or rotation
  
• music = A drone and some Midi notes for native entries, some byte-beat for JavaScript
  
• direction = A few scene cuts (same scene, different angle/position) and one surprise/show element
  

They rarely feature any post-processing beside vignetting, more elaborated camera, composed music, text, voices, "story", perfectly synchronized music & visuals, multiple scenes, ...


Sorry for the long comment, and I hope I'm not putting my foot too far into my own mouth.
Happy to read other impressions/opinions about the 1kb category, bar, and expectations, ...

💁🏻‍♀️The EXPI post-mortem is available, with tons of info and details about how we made EXPI, some of the challenges we faced, esp. with regard to CPU usage and compression.