A windows 4k intro by chlumpie & pestis, released at Revision 2023.
Source: https://github.com/vsariola/fluxerator
Capture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuSruzkIqsg
Rocket is included as a submodule in the repo, so you should clone it
with e.g.
git clone --depth=1 --recursive https://github.com/vsariola/fluxerator
Following tools should be in path:
- nasm
- Python 3
- Shader-minifier
- Crinkler Note: As crinkler.exe, not link.exe
- Optionally: glslangValidator
So far, building has been tested with Visual Studio 2022. Make sure you also installed CMake with it as the build was automated with CMake.
- Open the repository folder using Visual Studio
- Choose the configuration (heavy-1080 is the compo version). Light/medium/heavy refers to compression level, 720/1080/2160 the resolution. Debug versions are for development.
- Build & run.
CMake should copy the exes into the dist/ folder.
Choose the sync-1080 configuration, which has SYNC macro defined. Build it and then:
- Run this rocket server: https://github.com/emoon/rocket
- Then run the sync build intro. Note that if you try to sync.exe before running the server, it just closes. So the server needs to be ran first.
- With the server, open the data/syncs.rocket and start syncing. Then save your changes back to the XML.
If you need more sync tracks, just manually add a new empty track to the
syncs.rocket XML before building the sync target
(<track name="mygroup#mytrackname"/>). When building intro, the file
will get processed and the executable will become aware of the sync
variable. The new track will appear as a const variable in the shader.
For a track named mygroup#mytrackname, a constant
MYGROUP_MYTRACKNAME will be available to the shader, and you can
access the variable with syncs[MYGROUP_MYTRACKNAME]. The # grouping
character is replaced with _ and the string is made uppercase.
Notice that when building the final intro, the sync key values are stored as signed 8.8 fixed point, and as an optimization, all other interpolation modes than step and linear were removed from the player. Thus, never use values outside the range -128 <= x < 128, and never use ramp & smooth interpolation modes (they are still working in some of the older commits, before we removed them as unnecessary, if you need those). Also, since the values are fixed point, only whole numbers are exact, numbers with decimals will likely be slightly rounded. For example, 1.01 will be represented by integer 259, which becomes ~ 1.012.
- DirectSound gives far better sync accuracy than the mmsystem.h I used in the previous intro. In the previous intro, there was a very annoying latency in mmsystem.h, but this might be dependend on the system configuration and what compatibility settings the intro is ran on. Gargaj was kind enough to show how to use DirectSound. Primary buffers are not needed; DirectSound creates one automatically. Thus, setting up a buffer and playing sound is almost as little bytes as using mmsystem.h, so I believe DirectSound is the better way to go.
- Glow: glow can be accumulated in the raymarcher map function with glow += a/(b+d*d), where a and b are constants and d is the SDF distance to object. The glow can be then later added to the pixel color with color += glow * glowcolor after the raymarcher is done. After learning this, I made pretty much everything glow :D
- Rocket: Rocket is awesome, but to fit things in a 4k intro, the player had to be rewritten in x86 assembly. The player is approx. 100 bytes after compression, or since we didn't use any other interpolation than step and linear, with the rest of the interpolation modes removed, it was finally ~ 90 bytes. The sync data was splitted into streams of different types (keypoint values, key point duration in rows, key point interpolation mode and the starting keypoint for each track) and each stream was placed in its own section so that Crinkler can juggle them around. All sync data was compressed to little over 300 bytes in total.
- NvOptimusEnablement is still a thing in 2023: on the laptops own screen, without NvOptimusEnablement, the intro defaults to Intel integrated GPU. On an external monitor, my laptop always uses NVidia GPU. One can of course adjust this from NVidia control panel in a per program basis, but for convenience, we still squeezed in NvOptimusEnablement. ATI: Sucks to be you, can't even test if the intro works.
- Fizzer showed how to get text on screen, with the wglUseFontBitmaps & glCallLists method. Curiously, I had to adjust glListBase when using the text in windowed mode; dunno if it's a bug or if there's something I don't understand.
- Calling
SetProcessDpiAwarenessContext(DPI_AWARENESS_CONTEXT_PER_MONITOR_AWARE);seems to be a good idea to avoid DPI scaling issues.SetProcessDPIAware();was not enough to solve all issues for me.