Non Sequor on 19 October 2007
ssj12 said:
actually the 96kb is a lie. It installs a large chunk of data into your temp files while the game loads up. The data is deleted when you exit the game. |
That doesn't change the fact that the Kolmogorov complexity of this game is less than or equal to 95KB, which is really amazing. The Kolmogorov complexity of an object is the length of the shortest computer program capable of outputting the object and represents the smallest size that a general purpose compression algorithm can compress a representation of the object to.
This demonstrates that most games are egregiously suboptimal in their usage of long term storage. This game achieves something that's probably within spitting distance of optimality, but of course it's at a trade off for loading time and temporary storage space. However, if hardware provided acceleration for these methods, space on game discs would never be an issue again.
Of course sound and video are the most difficult sorts of data to adapt to these methods, but it is possible. Video can be replaced with in-engine cut scenes and it's not inconceivable that voice acting could be replaced by a sophisticated voice synthesizer that simply "reads" the game script with parameters for a wide variety of human/humanoid voices. That last one's more than a bit impractical now and of course even when it is possible I'm sure that storage capacity will have vastly outstripped the requirements for even uncompressed sound data.
"Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!" -- Daffy Duck
5275 posts since 07/07/07
fkusumot on 19 October 2007
So it's kind of like an optimized compression scheme built around game code? Interesting. I played it for a little and I never thought 96k of anything could look like that.
