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fr-041: debris.

farbrausch's 177K city that tears itself apart

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A Windows demo by the German group farbrausch that won the PC demo competition at Breakpoint 2007 with 1,474 points, ahead of Andromeda's Noumenon on 815. Its city, bridges and swarms of cubes are generated by the program as it starts, from an executable of 177 kilobytes.

For two years, whenever Thomas Mahlke walked through Hamburg, he imagined “rotating houses, moving objects, diving bridges, crushing streets”. Mahlke, the farbrausch artist known as fiver2, directed fr-041: debris., and that is what it shows: a camera moves through a city that begins to twist, crack and fly apart. At the Breakpoint party in Germany in April 2007 it won the PC demo competition with 1,474 points, well clear of Andromeda’s Noumenon on 815 and Synesthetics’ Lucy in the Sky with Deities on 775. The executable that draws all of it is 181,248 bytes: 177 kilobytes.

Fast facts

  • Group: farbrausch.
  • Released: April 2007, at Breakpoint 2007 in Bingen am Rhein, Germany.
  • Competition: first in the PC demo competition.
  • Size: 181,248 bytes (177K).
  • Credits: fiver2, signing as theunitedstatesofamerica (visuals and direction); Chaos and ryg (code); Ronny (soundtrack); kb (synthesiser); wayfinder (sound effects); giZMo (additional graphics); Tron (additional code).
  • Needed: at least a 2 GHz Pentium 4 or Athlon 2000+, 512 MB of RAM and a graphics card with pixel shader 2.0 and 128 MB of video memory, running DirectX 9.0c.

A demo, not a 64K intro

Breakpoint 2007 ran separate competitions for 64K intros, but debris. was entered as a demo. A few days after the party Chaos explained why on the scene site Pouët: “this is not a 64k intro that missed the size limit. we just wanted to see where we end with our intro technology if we don’t care about size. no compromises, no months of tweaking, no throwing away of ideas because we need another kilobyte.”

The technology was the engine farbrausch had built for its 96K shooter .kkrieger three years earlier. “At its heart this is still the werkkzeug3/kkrieger engine,” the readme says, “except with a new lighting/material system. models and textures are still generated.” Because size was no longer the limit, the group used the ordinary versions of its routines rather than “the sizeoptimized versions of everything, which made our lives a lot easier”. The executable is compressed with kkrunchy, the packer ryg wrote for the group.

How it was made

The collapsing buildings look like a physics simulation, and they are not. “If you wonder about the great physics engine we’ve built, sorry, it’s all faked,” Chaos wrote. The demo used only shader model 2.0, “so we had to move all the particles by hand”. The readme warns that this makes it hungry for processor time, “especially towards the end, since we have to transform a lot of the animated models by hand”, and that it casts real-time shadows with shadow volumes.

fiver2 listed the films behind the look: Dark City first, then Panic Room, Spider-Man 2 and Koyaanisqatsi, among others. A bridge sinking into the water came from a photograph of flooded New Orleans, and the title from a documentary about 11 September 2001: “the word ‘debris’ was burned into my head… i just loved the phonetics of it.” Chaos credited fiver2 as “the creative mind, artist and hard working craftsman of this production”, thanked ryg, who “tuned and rewrote everything over and over again”, and Ronny, who “really saved the day when he did the last minute soundtrack. we were so close to the edge.”

Source released

In 2012 farbrausch published the source of its tools on GitHub. The release includes Werkkzeug3, the tool debris. was made in, and the demo’s own source data, under a BSD licence, with kkrunchy and kb’s V2 synthesiser in the public domain. “werkkzeug3 is a mess,” the release notes admit, “but come on, debris - you know you want to… :)”

Sources

See also

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