''.kkrieger'' (from ''Krieger'',

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

for warrior) is a German

first-person shooter First-person shooter (FPS) is a sub-genre of shooter video games centered on gun and other weapon-based combat in a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action through the eyes of the protagonist and controlling the pl ...

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

created by

demogroup Demogroups are teams of demosceners, who make computer based audio-visual works of art known as demos. Demogroups form a subculture collectively known as the demoscene. Groups frequently consist of students, young computer enthusiasts who spend ...

.theprodukkt (a former subdivision of

Farbrausch Farbrausch, or Farb-rausch, is a German group of demomakers who became well known in the demoscene in December 2000 with a 64k intro called "fr-08: .the .product". The demo achieved its small size through the use of procedural textures, a custom MI ...

), which won first place in the 96k game competition at

Breakpoint In software development, a breakpoint is an intentional stopping or pausing place in a program, put in place for debugging purposes. It is also sometimes simply referred to as a pause. More generally, a breakpoint is a means of acquiring knowle ...

in April 2004. The game remains a

beta version A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

, rendering it a

perpetual beta Perpetual beta is the keeping of software or a system at the beta development stage for an extended or indefinite period of time. It is often used by developers when they continue to release new features that might not be fully tested. Perpetual b ...

Development history

.theprodukkt have developed ''.kkrieger'' since mid-2002, using their tool .werkkzeug (from ''Werkzeug'', German for tool). They used an unreleased version of .werkkzeug called .werkkzeug3. The

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

of ''.werkkzeug3'' engine was made available by the group in 2014, either under the

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

or as

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work A creative work is a manifestation of creative effort including fine artwork (sculpture, paintings, drawing, sketching, performance art), dance, writing (literature), filmmaking, ...

Procedural content

''.kkrieger'' makes extensive use of

procedural generation In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In ...

methods. Textures are stored via their creation history instead of a per-pixel basis, thus only requiring the history data and the generator code to be compiled into the executable, producing a relatively small file size. Meshes are created from basic solids such as boxes and cylinders, which are then deformed to achieve the desired shape - essentially a special way of box modeling. These two generation processes account for the extensive loading time of the game — all assets of the gameplay are reproduced during the loading phase. The entire game uses only 97,280

byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s of disk space. In contrast, most contemporaneous first-person shooters filled one or more CDs or

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kin ...

s. According to the developers, ''.kkrieger'' itself would take up around 200–300 MB of space if it had been stored the conventional way. The game music and sounds are produced by a multifunctional synthesizer called V2, which is fed a continuous stream of

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and re ...

data. The synthesizer then produces the music in real time.

Reception

The game won two German game developer prizes at the Deutscher Entwicklerpreis in 2006, in Innovation and Advancement. Gaming website Acid-Play gave the game 2/5 stars and a mixed review, mainly praising the game's file size, calling it "not a featureless game, but one whose limitations break barriers in terms of what can be done" and ultimately stating that "you’ll never find a game which has this much and comes in such a small package."

References

External links

Official ''.kkrieger'' website
(via

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

)
''.kkrieger''
on

MobyGames MobyGames is a commercial website that catalogs information on video games and the people and companies behind them via crowdsourcing. This includes nearly 300,000 games for hundreds of platforms. The site is supported by banner ads and a small ...

''.kkrieger'' source code
on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

''Documentation about .kkrieger''
on

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kkrieger 2004 video games Demoscene software First-person shooters Science fiction video games Software using the BSD license Video games developed in Germany Video games using procedural generation Windows games Windows-only games

Development history

Procedural content

Reception

See also

References

External links