The newschool competition at Nordlicht is combined, which means a demo of any size at all may enter and stand next to a four-kilobyte intro. Nobody has to work small. In Bremen, on the first weekend of July 2016, the hall voted like this:
Watch it first: Nordic Cathedral on YouTube, two and a half minutes of raymarched stone and light, or fetch the release from scene.org and run the real thing.
Four thousand and ninety-two bytes
I downloaded the archive to see what is inside it, because the number is the whole point of the category and it deserves to be exact rather than approximate.
intro_720.exe 4,092 bytes
intro_1080.exe 4,092
lj_virgill_-_nordic_cathedral.nfo 5,147
scene.org.txt 3,377The limit is 4,096. They finished four bytes under it, and anybody who has worked in this category knows how thin that is.
Two executables, one for each resolution, because a settings dialogue would have cost bytes that were not available. And the file in the middle of that list is the one worth sitting with: the .nfo, the text file carrying the group logo in ASCII art, is a kilobyte larger than the programme it describes. It has its own credit line, ASCii by mrplow, because somebody drew it and the scene names the people who make things.
What those 4,092 bytes contain is a cathedral. There is nowhere to store a picture of one, so nothing is stored at all. The geometry is described as mathematics and drawn by raymarching, which sends a ray out from the camera and steps it forward until it hits something, a technique the scene settled on years ago precisely because a distance function costs a few lines of shader and a mesh costs megabytes. Stone, arches, the light falling through them, the music underneath, all of it computed the moment you double-click.
The synthesiser the group built for itself
Music is the part of a four-kilobyte intro that sounds impossible to people meeting the form for the first time, and the answer is that nobody stores the music either. A software synthesiser goes into the executable, the score goes in as data, and both play as the intro runs.
The one used here is 4klang, and this is where the thing turns into a proper story. 4klang was written by Dominik Ries and Paul Kraus, who go by gopher and pOWL, and released in June 2009. They are Alcatraz. The group that took first place in Bremen with a four-kilobyte intro had built, seven years earlier, the instrument that lets a four-kilobyte intro have a soundtrack at all, and then handed it to everybody else as well. Look through the PC intro competitions of the following decade and you keep finding it in the credits of productions that were competing against its authors.
Two more tools sit in the chain. Crinkler, by Loonies and TBC, replaces the ordinary linker with one that compresses as it links, and its decompressor is about 220 bytes, which come out of the same budget as everything else. Shader-minifier shortens the shader source before it is compiled in, renaming every variable down to a character or two, because in this category whitespace is a cost.
Alcatraz themselves go back further than any of it. The group started on the Amiga in Switzerland in 1988.
Bremen, the first weekend in July
Nordlicht ran from the first to the third of July 2016 in Bremen, with eleven competitions covering everything from tracked music and ASCII art to oldschool demos and photography. It is a mid-sized German party, the kind where the hall knows most of the people in it.
The 219 points that won the newschool competition came from that hall. Second place went to Nordausgang, an eight-kilobyte intro by the same coder with music by xTr1m, and third to Requiem for a CPC, another four-kilobyte piece with Virgill's music. One person coded the top two entries, and one musician wrote for the first and the third.
For LJ, whose name is Jan Scheurer, this was the first thing he had ever shown at a party. It won. His profile now lists more than sixty productions, the most recent from this year.
Virgill was not a beginner. Jochen Feldkoetter has been writing demo music since 1990, first as Dr. Headcrash, through Panic and TRSI and Sanity and Coma, joining Haujobb in 2000 and Alcatraz in 2009, the same year 4klang came out. He later built AmigaKlang, a modular synthesiser of the same kind for the Amiga and the Atari ST, and said plainly where the idea came from: he had seen what 4klang did on the PC and wanted the old machines to have it too. So the instrument travelled backwards, from the PC to the machines that came before it.
The honest note
The reception was warm and not uncritical, and both halves belong here.
What the comments praised was the geometry and the light, the crystalline look of the stone, and the music sitting exactly where the camera was. What several people raised was a white flash that recurs through the piece, and a feeling that some scenes hold longer than they need to.
LJ answered that himself, in the thread under his own release, and the answer is more interesting than the objection. The intro was finished in an all-nighter at the party. The synchronisation, the business of telling each scene when to appear, was done in the last 47 minutes before the deadline, standing without a table and unable to hear the music, working from timecodes alone. The flash was a debugging aid he had been using to see where he was in the timeline, and it stayed in because removing it and rebuilding under 4,096 bytes was not something the remaining minutes allowed.
That is worth knowing, and nobody offered it as an excuse. A party production is a form made under a clock, in a room full of other people working against the same one. The version the hall voted on is the version that existed at the deadline, and the hall gave it 219 points.
A cathedral is the traditional example of a thing built slowly by many hands over centuries. This one was assembled overnight by two, fits in 4,092 bytes, and keeps four in reserve.