Bytes of Art ■ the appreciation
The readme file that ships with Engage explains how it was built, and it does so in one sentence:
Produced with copious amounts of iron oxide, deep-fried with rocket fuel harvested from the lunar surface, sliced to bits live by our special sabre, and finally kkrunched to a fine powder.
That reads like a joke, and it is one, and every item in it names a real piece of software.
Iron oxide is rust, and Rust is the language. Ferris said so himself in the comments under his own release: the tooling and the replayer are written in it, with the synth side left in C++ because the work was already done. Rocket is GNU Rocket, the sync tracker that lets a musician and a coder agree on where in the timeline anything happens, and the readme thanks emoon for a custom editor built for this production. The sabre is WaveSabre, the software synthesiser that Logicoma wrote themselves and published under an MIT licence. And kkrunched is kkrunchy, Farbrausch's executable packer, the tool that squeezes a Windows binary down to something that fits inside the limit.
Four tools, one sentence, no explanation offered. If you are in the scene you got all four. If you are not, you have just been handed a reading list.
Watch it first: Engage on YouTube, three minutes and thirty-seven seconds, or fetch the binary from scene.org and run the real thing.
Sixty-four kilobytes, and a kilobyte left over
I downloaded the release archive to see what is actually in it. Four files: the executable, a readme, a screenshot, and scene.org's own text file. The executable is 64,512 bytes.
The category limit is 65,536. They finished a full kilobyte under it.
That number deserves a moment, because a 64k intro is not a video and not a small download of a large thing. Everything you see and hear is generated while it runs. The geometry, the textures, the camera moves, the entire soundtrack: none of it is stored, all of it is computed by that one file the moment you double-click it. There is no asset folder, because there is nowhere to put one.
The soundtrack is where this gets slightly absurd. Wobble and h0ffman wrote the music, and it has drums that people singled out in the comments at the time. The whole track comes out of WaveSabre, running inside the same 64,512 bytes as the visuals, with two samples in the entire production: a kick and a snare. Everything else is synthesised as the intro plays.
Logicoma did not keep that to themselves. WaveSabre sits on GitHub under an MIT licence, written by ferris and h0ffman with contributions from revival, kusma, cpdt, Wertstahl and others, and the repository carries example productions from 2015 onwards. If you want to know how a scene musician fits a full track into a few kilobytes, the answer is a clone away.
The field at Saarbrücken
Revision runs at Easter in Saarbrücken. In 2017 it ran from the fourteenth to the seventeenth of April, and the PC 64k competition that year was one of those fields where you feel sorry for whoever has to vote.
Engage came third, twenty-one points behind second place. Twenty-one points, in a hall voting on six productions any one of which would have won a quieter year. Guberniya, sixth in that list, went on to take Best Direction at the Meteoriks. H - Immersion, fifth, is the one that people still link when they want to explain what a 64k intro can do with procedurally generated terrain.
Third in that room is a position in a very good queue.
What the jury said a year later
The Meteoriks are the scene's annual awards, decided by juries, with no hall and no voting slips. In 2018 the category Best High-End 64k Intro had four nominees: Yermom and Eidolon from Poo-Brain, Guberniya from Macau Exports, Vessel from Conspiracy, and Engage.
Engage won it.
Two of the productions it beat had finished ahead of it at Revision. Nothing about that makes the compo vote wrong, and this deserves saying plainly before anybody turns it into a story about justice. A hall at two in the morning, watching six intros back to back on a very large screen, is measuring something real: the thing that lands in the room. A jury with a year of hindsight is measuring something else, and the two do not have to agree.
What the jury saw, going by what people wrote about it, was the polish. One commenter called it one of the best synced and polished abstract intros there is, and sync is exactly what Rocket exists to buy. Another said the greetings sequence was the part that stood out, which is a slightly unusual thing to say about the section of a demo that traditionally exists so people can go and get a drink.
Four hours of showing your working
Then ferris did something that the scene does not do often enough. He sat down and recorded a breakdown of Engage, published as episode nine of his own series, and it runs for about four hours.
Four hours of walking through how the thing was made, in public, for free, while the production was still fresh enough that anybody could have taken the knowledge and beaten him at the next party. Most groups manage a trailer and a blog post with three screenshots.
Put that next to the readme's changelog, which is written in the same spirit. The final version reduced startup time by up to eighty-eight per cent, added a music pre-render option for slower processors, improved performance in some scenes, and fixed banding artefacts beyond the fog distance. Somebody kept a maintenance log for a sixty-four kilobyte intro, and then shipped it with the release.
The limit
Sixty-four kilobytes is a rule with an escape hatch, and it is only fair to say where it sits. The limit applies to the file on disk. It says nothing about what the machine underneath is doing: a modern 64k intro leans on a graphics driver, a shader compiler and a sound stack that together weigh rather more than sixty-four kilobytes, and the executable is small partly because so much of the heavy lifting already lives in the operating system. Nobody in the scene pretends otherwise, and the constraint is still the constraint. What it disciplines is the thing you wrote.
And a size class is not a quality class. There are 64k intros that hit the limit and are dull, and demos of four hundred megabytes that are wonderful. What makes a size class interesting is the spending decision inside it.
The list at the end
Every scene release ends with greetings, and Engage greets thirty-eight groups across forty lines, two of them named twice. Farbrausch is there, whose packer they used. Andromeda Software Development is there. Conspiracy is there, who finished one place above them. And Poo-Brain is there, who won.
A year after that party, Logicoma and Poo-Brain released Bros Before Foes together, and it took Best Soundtrack at the next Meteoriks with the music running on the same synthesiser Logicoma had published for anybody to use.
Twenty-one points, and then a joint production. That is a scene, and it is why the greetings list is not a formality.