I stumbled upon this: http://www.soyoucode.com/2011/coding-giant-under-microscope-farbrausch . . . and promptly fell in love with the demos there from Farbrausch:
That melding of music and animated 3D graphics grabs a hold of me like nothing else. I don’t really know why.
The fact that it’s done in such a small space (e.g. 64 KB for the first one) makes it more impressive, of course. Maybe that should be a sad reflection on just how formulaic the things I like are, if they’re encoded that small (although, that ignores just how much is present in addition, in the CPU and the GPU and the OS and the drivers and in the design of the computer), but I don’t much care - formulas encode patterns of sorts, and we’re pattern-matching machines.
But leaving aside the huge programming feat of making all this fit in such a small space, I still find it really impressive.
It’s been a goal for awhile to make something that is on the scope of that (highly-compressed demo or not, I don’t much care). I’ve just not made much progress to accomplishing that. My early attempts at Acidity were motivated by the same feelings that draw me to things like this.
(Obligatory Second Reality as well. Maybe I am putting myself too much in the context that it came from - i.e. 1993 and rather slow DOS machines - but I still think it’s damn impressive. Incidentally, this is also one of the only ones I’ve run on real hardware before, since apparently the only fast machine I have that runs Windows is my work computer.)