Whoever thinks of the smallest shooter in the world, in terms of data size, probably thinks of ancient titles like Doom. However, there is one shooter that is even smaller than these gaming classics and yet runs smoothly, with acceptable 3D graphics.
Which game is being referred to? It is the 21-year-old shooter “.kkrieger”, developed in 2004 by a demo group of the German company “Farbrausch”. At first glance, the game looks like a regular 3D shooter from the old Doom era, you have weapons and fight against demonic beings.
What is interesting is not the setting, but the amount of data that the game brings to the hard drive – a mere 96 kilobytes. So the game is so small that it could fit into Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 up to 812,500 times.
In comparison, Black Ops 6 is about 78 GB (just the base game, without add-ons like Warzone). However, the 96 kilobytes of .kkrieger were already astonishing in 2004, because even Doom 1 had up to 2.39 MB.
Refined technology saves data
How did the developers manage to reduce the data size? To compress the game’s data, the developers used procedural generation. Images, pixels, and 3D models are not stored, only their creation history is.
Through this process, no files or assets need to be provided because the program handles this assembly when starting the game. However, it cannot work completely without storage, as once the game world is generated, the program must have access to it – and this is done with the help of RAM, your memory.
As for the music and soundtracks, they are also generated in real-time using Farbrausch’s in-house V2 synthesizer – this additionally saves data that would otherwise end up on the hard drive.
The game emerges from nothing, builds itself, and then temporarily stores itself in RAM. The result is a smooth and even visually appealing game.
Why isn’t this impressive technology used for modern games? One might think that the technology behind .kkrieger would be groundbreaking in game development. Games like Black Ops 6 wouldn’t need to exceed 70 GB to run. However, even if a modern game could theoretically work with the technology of .kkrieger, it would face many problems.
First, there is the loading time. For gamers, it cannot be short enough. But since .kkrieger generates its game world in percentages, players would have to wait every time before they can dive into the game. If high-resolution graphics are involved as well, the loading time could take so long that fans might completely give up playing.
Furthermore, the strain on memory would be a problem. If a studio could manage to reduce Black Ops 6 to 1 GB, the generated data would need to be stored uncompressed in memory – which could push many gaming PCs to their limits.
Finally, the creativity and character of the games would be restricted. To save space, assets would have to be simple and not high resolution for the game to effectively generate its world. However, many games want to present themselves primarily through beautiful and unique graphics and their own style – this would unfortunately have to be sacrificed.
And even if all of this seems bleak, many contemporary games still utilize at least part of this idea. Whether it’s No Man’s Sky, Minecraft, or Helldivers 2 – all these games generate their game worlds procedurally and thus implement a certain part of the groundbreaking idea behind .kkrieger.
In line with Helldivers 2, a new major update was recently released, where the fate of Over-Earth lies in the hands of the Helldivers. Do you want to help with democracy as well? Then feel free to check out the latest info: The new update in Helldivers 2 brings back humanity’s greatest threat
