Q1K3 manages to pack in two levels, five different enemy types, three weapons, audio, and more.

You can play it in your browser here.

  • mPony@lemmy.worldEnglish
    894·
    5 months ago

    On another forum, I was complaining about how Microsoft was planning to remove WordPad from Win11. I was advised that installing OpenOffice or LibreOffice was an appropriate replacement. I replied that WordPad was only 3 megs large, as opposed to the recommended replacements, which are decidedly larger.

    I guess not everybody appreciates tight code, but I surely do. Things like this are amazingly impressive.

    • MazonnaCara89@lemmy.mlEnglish
      39·
      5 months ago

      Anyway don’t install OpenOffice for any reason, just pick libreoffice or onlyoffice. OpenOffice doesn’t get a functional/security/compatibility update since 2014.

    • IllNess@infosec.pubEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      I just looked at how big LibreOffice Writer is, 210 MB as a portable app… Wow…

      AbiWord Portable is probably the smallest and even that is 15 MB installed…

    • imecth@fedia.io
      714·
      5 months ago

      Size doesn’t matter much when you have SSDs that read upwards of 5000mb/s. It’s why we’re seeing an advent of web-based apps despite them being woefully inefficient, and why games regularly go above 100gb. The reason file size gets so large is that assets can take up a lot of space and they come with plenty of libraries that they just have to bundle. These “small size” software optimize for size at other costs, like speed, asset quality, development time… Reducing file size is just not relevant anymore and if anything you should be wary of software that do it.

      • mPony@lemmy.worldEnglish
        172·
        5 months ago

        yeah, you know what?.. no. This is the kind of attitude that got us here to begin with. Yes, processers get faster, and yes size gets more available. But that shouldn’t be an excuse for poorly-written code.
        An empty Microsoft Word document is larger than the first word processing program I ever used. That is just crazy when you think about it. but “oh people have lots of resources they’re not even using so it doesn’t matter”, right? When companies have this attitude of “oh the resources are there I may as well use all of them for myself” then their code runs like garbage and you need a faster computer just to make it work halfways decently. And because of this we all end up on this goddamned technology treadmill where we have to keep buying bigger and faster and more expensive computers to do the same thing the old computers did just because the programs written for it are too bloated and the people writing the code couldn’t be arsed to make it work well. It wastes our time and our money. I reject that. I think others should too.

        • imecth@fedia.io
          91·
          5 months ago

          poorly written code and tight code

          This is where you guys lose me, it’s just code that not optimized for size and that’s because most people don’t give a shit about that. People want want their 4k assets, their localization, their accessibility features, their application to run on any device… All this comes at a cost. You want to change things, that’s fine, but start by understanding why things are the way they are because shitting on developers won’t get you anywhere.

    • confusedpuppy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      23·
      5 months ago

      A long time ago I came across a game that was part of a 1mb challenge. It’s called A New Zero. I played it quite a lot, just flying around and dive bombing boats was entertaining enough for me.

      I was impressed with 1mb but 13kb and 96kb is pretty amazing. I really enjoy seeing stuff like this.

    • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      5 months ago

      kkreiger is more impressive to me, because it creates itself on execution time. While this 13kB game is willfully ignoring the fact that the average web browser today is already a 2GB behemoth. While kkeiger is pure C++ and it does the whole thing, including the game engine and sound processor and everything else.

      • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        5 months ago

        Is definitely not pure c++. It’s making use of direct x and even fonts available in Windows to create textures.

        • ඞmir@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Without DirectX or OpenGL you’d have to create a GPU driver or do CPU rendering…

    • mPony@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      5 months ago

      kKrieger was always kind of amazing to see. Even understanding a little bit about how the game works, it’s still kind of mind-boggling

      • Coasting0942@reddthat.comEnglish
        32·
        5 months ago

        Instead of actually storing images, sound files, maps, etc, whole program relies on algorithms computed at runtime. Level generated automatically, sound follows a set math pattern with randomization, etc etc

        Benefits of less file size but more processor requirements

  • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    5 months ago

    How much of that is third-party libraries, and/or third-party hosted? Obviously the assets (images and music) aren’t being counted.

    • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
      37·
      5 months ago

      The whole page transferred about 7kB and shows 18.2kB of ressources according to the debug tools.

    • uranibaba@lemmy.worldEnglish
      26·
      5 months ago

      The game also requires a renderer (browser) to play.

      I think what they did is impressive but the claim about the size feels like taking source code and saying “look how small on disk it is”

  • Teknikal@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    5 months ago

    And I was blown away the ps1 game Vagrant Story turned Into 90mb file as a chd.

    That said one of the games I enjoyed most even when I had an Amiga was a 48k ZX Spectrum game called Chaos.

  • Lodra@programming.devEnglish
    1629·
    5 months ago

    Ok that is an impressive number but it feels a little disingenuous. You still need to something on your machine to interpret the js code, right? Is that included in the 13k? How much storage does that take?

    EDIT: Well this is by far my most negative comment here. That’s almost entertaining. I’ll share a few more of my thoughts here rather than respond to individual comments. Maybe the context will make this more palatable.

    First, I expect that the js language is doing most of the work here. Which makes sense. But having a browser installed as a prerequisite is an enormous dependency.

    How would that stack up against other languages? Can I build a 13k binary using C? How about C#? I think Go is maybe the most interesting because the binary is entirely self contained by default. No external dependencies aside from the OS. I don’t think this or a similar game is viable with only 13k. Which is fine! I just that I find 13k is disingenuous.

    That brings up the question of whether or not we should include the OS in the storage size. I would think not. But that’s only because the OS is (usually) the least common denominator when we talk about developing software. It’s generally assumed by default. But if someone wants to compare with a game that interfaces with hardware directly, then yes, we should absolutely include the OS as a dependency.

    Now that I’m giving this more thought, I suspect that the devs wrote 13k of code + assets to make the game functional. Still impressive. But the more I think about this, the more meaningless that number gets. Does pre or post compiling matter more? What if we compress the thing as tarball? There’s just too many ways to manipulate this number.