Dragon's Lair by Desire [web]
"Dragon's Lair" - 256b intro
by HellMood / DESIRE
for the pc 256b competition
@Revision 2021
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" The ancient scrolls say that
these will hatch at easter "
- runs on freedos,winxp,dosbox
- Respect to all sizecoders
- powered by: Řrřaymarching
- Greeting to everybody ♥
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When you achieve something outstanding
it is not the cheers that you remember
it's the critics: "Unfortunately every
individual part is really ugly." (hfr)
So this time,instead of cramming a lot
of effects into 256b,i went for trying
to make it look and sound as good as I
can. In the JS1K competition 2014, one
entry stood out to me - "Dragon Stash"
At the time, i was not exploring these
techniques. But what is a more fitting
motive for Revision.. than the egg? ;)
I did a lot of 8bit CPU fixed step ray
casting,never touched the FPU for that
But Rrrola did =) Recently, his Gyroid
blew us all away, and of course i sure
as hell dissected that pearl to pieces
While SDF raymarching itself isnt that
impressive,the code density was surely
After understanding, i tried rewriting
but couldnt save bytes, without either
breaking the code or making it not run
anymore on Win XP and FreeDos. On many
occasions,my versions were same sized.
After short time i decided to not golf
anymore or obfuscate the code , but to
focus on the content rather than code.
Starting off with a core, that is sped
up with sine tables i replaced the SDF
by a lattice structure with preserving
its center. Tuning the distance wasn't
easy , since it affected both the cave
and the egg. Afterwards , i went on to
the coloring.As friend of light colors
i decided for the orange/blue split to
avoid coder colorish green/pink styles
While a brownish cave, with light blue
egg looks more natural, a more fantasy
version with a blue cave + golden eggs
was more convincing to me, and that is
what you find in the final version.The
small iterationcount represents a real
problem . My solution was to hide that
behind a combination of position based
texture and procedural noise . Mingled
with RNG pixel drawing order,iteration
borders are barely visible.A next step
was camera movement, preventing boring
pathes and not touching any object can
be quite a challenge !! The final task
was to add some ambient sound. Goblins
are a very fitting MIDI instrument for
creating a mystic atmosphere.Like said
before,the main goal here was not size
coding, so a very strong bass boosting
and vibrato application(thx 2 Kuemmel)
were implemented to waste some bytes;)
When doing a 256b entry,many bytes can
be saved by just ignoring the specific
OS version, resulting in lots versions
Not today ^^ The submitted 256b binary
runs as is on Msdos/Freedos/Windows XP
and of course on DosBox. A final touch
was applied to the scene with glowing.
The eggs and the walls of the cave too
are subject 2 sublime lighting changes
hopefully supporting mystic atmosphere
asm source file is a mess , cleaned up
version is in the making . stay tuned!
--- G R E E T I N G S ---
sensenstahl,homecoded,rrrola,frag,T$
Optimus,Trixter,igor,gentleman,VileR
JinX,iONic,psenough,gasman,las,deater
Whizart,g0blinish,Rudi,ryg,Orby a.k.a.
orbitaldecay,wysiwtf,Kuemmel,p01,Lara
Dresdenboy,baze,Tomcat,superrogue
Oscar Toledo,Drift,maugli,Harekiet
& everybody i forgot right now :P
--- C A P T U R E S ---
freedos : https://youtu.be/ZPTZzxgm7ao
dosbox : https://youtu.be/_vHcZmUM-zI
winxp : https://youtu.be/7I9eivW4XfE
--- C O N T A C T ---
discord : HellMood#0314
helmut.toedtmann@gmail.com[ back to the prod ]