Simple Demoscene

This repo contains a simple Win32 demoscene starter project that can be compiled and compressed down to an executable size of less than 3 KiB with the aid of the Crinkler compressing linker.

Project Structure

All the source code for the project is contained within the /src/ directory, and can be compiled using the simple-demoscene.sln Visual Studio 2022 solution provided. External tools such as crinkler and yasm are provided in the /extern/ directory, and have been setup to work out-of-the box with Visual Studio.

⚠️ Anti-Virus Warning ⚠️

A lot of virus developers use similar executable compression and packing tools to avoid detection from various anti-virus software. At some point one or more trojan devvelopers decided to use Crinkler to pack their malware, which has unfortunately caused the unpacking runtime shared between every Crinkled executable to be permanently flagged in the databases of various anti-virus vendors.

Basically, don't be surprised if your Crinkled demoscene executable is immediately flagged as malicious after compiling. Apart from adding manual exclusions, so far I haven't seen a better way around this false-positive.

Build Configurations

Debug

No optimizations, ideal for development
Includes asserts and extra cleanup code useful for catching bugs
Uses the standard MSVC linker

Release

Full optimizations, as close as possible to the final compressed executable while still allowing for fairly quick iteration
No asserts or cleanup code is compiled in
Uses the standard MSVC linker

Crinkled

Same as Release but instead uses the Crinkler compressing linker
Expect a long delay on startup as the executable unpacks itself

Rendering

The demoscene uses Direct3D 11 for all rendering work. Currently everything is bundled into a single compute shader cs_scene_render.hlsl that writes into a swapchain backbuffer UAV each frame. Lighting is calculated using signed distance field path tracing, for which there are number of primitive shapes with intersection functions defined in common.hlsli for convenience.

Future Work

Sound & Music
Resolution selection on startup
A rudimentary scene system with timeline

Licenses

The source code in this repository is licensed under the MIT License.

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