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Elevated by RGBA and TBC

BUTTONTANG7 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2009–2025
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demo · general · evergreen · 2009–2025 on HN

Elevated is a 4 kilobyte PC demo by RGBA and TBC from Breakpoint 2009. It fly-throughs a realistic procedurally generated landscape with synthesized music and post-processing, all from a tiny executable.

HN repeatedly holds it up as the benchmark for what procedural generation and size-coding can achieve in 4K.

12 comments from Hacker News

@TacticalCoder2014-02 · in “As much Stack Overflow as possible in 4096 bytes”

In a different style, the "Elevated" demo, coded in 4K (you'll have a hard time believing it if you haven't seen it yet): ▶ this video

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@karteum2025-04 · in “The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden”

It's 12 years old now, but I am still extremely impressed by this 64k intro link and also by this 4k intro ▶ this video :) And overall this website is extremely interesting with tutorials and code and great explanations link

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@dwrodri2020-05 · in “The Vanishing Of Ashlar: 4kb demo using GPU for sound and pathtracing”

I know that a huge part of the demoscene culture is keeping your trade secrets close, but I'd love to see a YouTube playlist where authors or people with significant graphics experience do in-depth teardowns. Those of us like myself who only take a passing interest from afar are still blown away by how amazing results of demos like "elevated" from 2009 [1]. I've heard Iñigo Quílez, but I am curious if there are people interested in doing teardowns of winners moreso than elementary concepts (although of course the latter is much more applciable outside of the demo scene). 1= ▶ this video

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@userbinator2016-07 · in “Show HN: A simple infinite world in WebGL”

Indeed, keep going, and you may reach this level of awesome: ▶ this video (Quite realistic terrain generated by a 4 kilobyte binary, along with music . Source code and its discussion here: link )

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@vmind2012-05 · in “Infinite complexity in 4096 bytes”

Cool, but I think my favourite 4k demo is still Elevated, which is much less obviously procedural. ( ▶ this video )

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