The file that won the PC 4K competition at Revision 2012 is 4,029 bytes long. The text file in the same archive that explains who made it and on which graphics cards it was tested is 5,060 bytes long. The screenshot beside them is 1,871,691 bytes, which is 464 times the size of the thing it shows, and that ratio tells you most of what there is to know about a 4K intro.
Watch it first: Hartverdrahtet on YouTube, captured by Annikras for the Demoscene High-Quality Videos channel the day after the party ended, or fetch the archive from scene.org and run the real thing. The capture has been watched 339,000 times. The author uploaded a quick capture of his own on the day and still recommended the real thing over any video, because the codec, in his words, really hates fractals.
One name on the code and on the music
Hartverdrahtet is the work of Demoscene Passivist, who wrote the code and the music, with support from Retired Demoscener and Tokra. The three of them are Akronyme Analogiker, a group that signs its readme as the paladins of procrastination and whose other productions run from an Amiga invitation for Evoke 2018 through a 4K procedural picture for the Amiga in 2021 to a demo for the Commodore PET in 2024 and, last year, a demotool called the Copper Showdown Editor. The machines on that list suggest where the craft was learnt, and the readme leans the same way, with a line of greetings to the glorious never again reached Trackers and the word AMIGAAAA in capitals.
The readme also greets the JogAmp community, which maintains the Java bindings for OpenGL, and thanks, by name, the people on fractalforums whose formula the intro draws and the man whose notes on ray marching it follows; the authors of the two tools that made 4,029 bytes possible get their lines as well. More on all of them below. It is a generous document for something that weighs more than the intro it describes.
Four thousand and ninety-six
Every Bytes of Art piece has a restriction at its centre, and this one is the hardest the scene sets: 4,096 bytes for everything, the program, the graphics, the music and the camera's path through it, with nothing loaded from outside. A single 1080p frame of the result, stored uncompressed, would be fifteen hundred times larger than the file that generates three minutes of them.
The concept on top of the restriction is in the readme's own words: A 2012 interpretation of "Hardwired" in 4096 bytes. Celebrating more than 20 years of a legendary classic. Hardwired is the Amiga demo by Crionics and The Silents that took second place at The Party in December 1991 and has lived at the top of the Pouët charts ever since, where one early comment reads this demo isn't a classic, it's simply THE DEMO. Hartverdrahtet is simply the German word for hardwired.
A formula and a ray
There is no model in the file and no texture. What the viewer flies through is a Pseudo-Kleinian fractal, a formula of the kind developed on fractalforums by knighty, Rrrola and Theli-at, all three thanked in the readme, and the picture is made by a method called sphere tracing, for which the readme thanks iq of rgba, for his thoughts on sphere tracing and real-time fake ambient occlusion, as it puts it.
The method works like this. For every pixel on the screen the graphics card sends a ray into the formula's space. The formula answers an odd question: how far away the nearest surface is from any point you care to ask about. So the ray steps forward by exactly that distance, asks again, steps again, and stops when the distance becomes very small, which means it has arrived. Depth falls out of how many steps the ray needed, and so does the soft darkening in the corners (the fake ambient occlusion iq described), from how close the ray came to the walls along the way. No triangle is ever drawn. The whole cathedral of folded stone in the video is a few lines of mathematics evaluated two million times per frame at 1080p.
That is also why the readme recommends 1280 by 720 for about 25 frames per second on a GeForce 500 or a Radeon HD 6000, the fast cards of 2012, and lists eight machines on which it was tested. The archive holds seven party builds, one for each of seven resolutions from 640 by 480 to 1920 by 1200, all between 4,029 and 4,041 bytes and all compiled on the fifteenth and sixteenth of February, seven weeks before the party. The final version of 12 April added three HQ builds with 2×, 4× and 8× supersampling, which run a few bytes over the line, outside any competition, and come with the author's note that you will probably have to buy a new GPU.
Two tools the scene built for itself
Two names in the thanks explain how a fractal world and three minutes of music fit in the space of a short e-mail. Crinkler, written by Mentor of TBC together with Blueberry of Loonies, is the compressing linker built for exactly this class of production: it packs the program so tightly that the executable's own header is interleaved with the code, which is why the file begins with the usual MZ of a Windows program and then, twelve bytes in, with the PE signature where no ordinary compiler would put it. 4klang, from Gopher and pOWL of Alcatraz, is the synthesiser: the music is a small instrument and a score, rendered at start-up from the same 4,029 bytes as the picture.
Both tools are given away by their authors, and the readme thanks them for sharing/developing each one, in that order. The scene's smallest works stand on a commons that two or three groups maintain for everyone else, and the custom of saying so in the readme is how that commons is paid for.
Revision
Revision is the Easter party in Saarbrücken, and in 2012 it ran from the sixth to the ninth of April. Nine intros went into the PC 4K competition, and the hall voted.
Seventy points clear in a field where the top three sat within a hundred of each other, and two of those three were fractal intros, so the hall was choosing between interpretations of the same idea and chose this one. On Pouët, psonice put the reason in a sentence: with fractals you need either great direction or a fractal people are not yet familiar with, and this has both. Rouquemoute wrote that it is not quite your run-of-the-mill raymarched fractal, there is something more to it.
The party version carried one fault, which the readme of the final calls really annoying: on some machines Windows showed its busy cursor over the picture and, on a few Radeon cards, stopped the show altogether. The fix arrived in the comments within two hours of the upload, from Seven of Fulcrum, whose own intro had just taken third place behind it: add one message-pump call to the render loop, about 20 bytes, as you have like 50 bytes left. He was off by seventeen; there were 67. The final of 12 April thanks him and las of Mercury by name, and the author's reply to another correction in the same thread, about a mistyped forum address, was that the beer at Revision was probably too cheap.
Twenty-one years in less
Twenty-one years separate the two productions, and the second fits inside the first many times over. The intro honours the original the way the scene honours anything: by doing it again in less.
Hartverdrahtet by Akronyme Analogiker is 4,029 bytes of fractal formula, sphere tracing and 4klang music, a 2012 interpretation of the Amiga classic Hardwired that took first place in the PC 4K competition at Revision 2012 with 1,303 points, ahead of eight others. The readme in its archive is bigger than the intro.