Title: kkrieger - beta
Description: OK, how about something small?  ;)  It's still in beta, but the program is only 96 KB!! It is Windows only, sorry...  My only gripe (besides low fps on my machine, although some have reported a steady 85 fps) is that currently there's no way to invert the mouse axis.  

NOTE: This is *not* a Trojan - see the readme file or read below: :)

I'll let the produkkt folks explain about kkrieger in more detail:

//from the Download section at http://212.202.219.162/kkrieger //

download
download .kkrieger: chapter 1 beta here (96k)
but remember this is a beta version, and there are a lot of known bugs. in case you have problems, you might want to have a look at the compatibility section.

UPDATE (August 2006): Recently several users report that their Anti-Virus Software reported the file to contain a trojan. This is a false detection, based on heuristics.
We are in contact to ACG and Avira to get this solved.

//from the README//

.kkrieger, chapter I - Beta Version
.a game in 96k
by .theprodukkt
(released at breakpoint 2004)

www.theprodukkt.com



1. about .kkrieger
------------------

  The project was started two years ago and since then many, many hours of our spare time went
into developing .kkrieger. Still, in the end we didn´t have time for the most important thing:
gameplay. So expect some major improvements in our next releases.
However, we enjoyed making .kkrieger a lot and are quite satisfied with the end result and now we
are eagerly awaiting your comments :) So if you have any feedback, may it be acclaim, critique or
bug reports - please feel free to write us. Every email is highly appreciated!
(No, wait - don´t send us bugs until the final version - we know enough already ;)

We will definitely release an uncut "final" version with some more kb, enhanced content and less
bugs, soon. (The first thing we'll do after this release is relax for some time, though :).

  .kkrieger is designed as a trilogy. At the moment we can not tell if and when we will find the
time to develop the next chapters, though. We will keep you informed on our homepage...


2. controls
-----------

W - forward
S - backward
A - left
D - right
[Space] - Jump
Left mouse - shoot
1-5 - switch weapon

Press M1 - M9 to respawn at the different respawn points (also helps when caught in collision ;)


3. system requirements
----------------------

  .kkrieger requires a relatively high-end machine to run properly. To be
precise:

- A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
- 512MB of RAM (or more)
- A Geforce4Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon8500 (or higher) graphics card
  supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
- Some kind of sound hardware
- DirectX 9.0b

  We've done some testing to ensure it runs on all hardware meeting those
requirements we could get, and we checked it runs on all major supported
configurations with current drivers, but with some graphics card/driver
combinations it might screw up. In case you have problems, please try
getting the most recent driver release from your vendor, and only if the
problem persists contact us (refer to the contact section).


4. detailed credits
-------------------

.theprodukkt:
- Thomas "fiver2" Mahlke: Concept, Direction, Textures, Level geometry and lighting.
- Dierk "Chaos" Ohlerich: Editor, Texture generator, Game, Physics, Collision, 'lekktor'.
- Christoph "giZMo" Muetze: Character design, Animation, Weapons, Items, Special FX.
- Fabian "ryg" Giesen: Mesh generator, Material/Lighting systems, 3d Engine, 'kkrunchy'.

freelancers:
- Sebastian "wayfinder" Grillmaier: Music, Sound design, Sound effects.
- Tammo "kb" Hinrichs: Sound synthesizer.


5. contact
----------

  web site: http://www.theprodukkt.com
  contact:  fanmail ,at, theprodukkt.com  (fanmail, flames and cooking recipes)


6. disclaimer
-------------

  .kkrieger is freeware. Permission to spread the archive in its original, unmodified
format is generally given, as long as there is no fee charged for .kkrieger itself. We
want to encourage everyone to send the file around, link to it on webpages, and we also
want to allow printed magazines to include .kkrieger on supplementary CDs and similar
media, within the conditions stated in this disclaimer. Public presentation of .kkrieger
is hereby explicitly allowed and encouraged. We require that proper credit is given to
.theprodukkt in all forms of public presentation or publication of .kkrieger.

  .kkrieger comes with absolutely no warranty. It has been carefully written, but still
we can make absolutely no guarantees that .kkrieger runs properly on every configuration.
.theprodukkt can not be made liable for any kind of damage or data loss caused either
directly or indirectly by .kkrieger.


7. technical FAQ
----------------

  In general, if you have any technical questions concerning .kkrieger, either refer to our
web site or contact us via email. However past experience shows that there are some rumours
and misunderstandings about our work that are very hard to correct, so we'll state the truth
here, in written form, for all the world to see :)

- We do .not. have some kind of magical data compression machine that is able to squeeze
  hundreds of megabytes of mesh/texture and sound data into 96k. We merely store the
  individual steps employed by the artists to produce their textures and meshes, in a very
  compact way. This allows us to get .much. higher data density than is achievable with
  normal data compression techniques, at some expense in artistic freedom and loading times.
- .kkrieger is not written in 100% assembler/machine language. Not even nearly. Like the
  vast majority of game projects being developed today, .kkrieger was mostly written in
  C++, with some tiny bits of assembler where it is actually advantageous (notably, there
  are a lot of MMX optimisations in the texture generator).
- A kilobyte is, historically, defined to be 1024 (2^10) bytes, not 1000. Thus .kkrieger is
  a game in 96k even though it's actually 98304 bytes.
- The concept of the texture/mesh generators was developed by fiver2. We do .not. want to
  claim that the techniques we used to develop .kkrieger are new inventions. It´s rather a
  selection of useful operations and their parameters to optimise the results.

//from the website faq http://212.202.219.162/faq //

.kkrieger faq

.kkrieger doesn't run on my machine!
please refer to the compatibility section. if your system meets those minimum requirements, it's a bug on our side and will (hopefully) be fixed in the final version. the final version will also have somewhat wider hardware compatibility than the beta - notably, GeForce 3 cards will be supported. we will not support graphics cards below that level (that concerns especially GeForce 4 MX owners - even though it's labeled a GeForce 4, it's technically on GeForce 2 level). .kkrieger makes excessive usage of the capabilites of GeForce 3-class (and better) hardware, and a version that doesn't rely on this features would not only be difficult, but also look a lot worse.

.kkrieger runs very slow here.
the final version will have notably better performance, and will also allow you to tune rendering quality and resolution to give optimal performance.

when will the final version be ready?
we plan to release it in late July or early August.

come on, not everything I see is in that small file, you use DirectX standard textures, right?
there's no such thing as DirectX standard textures. everything you see in .kkrieger is procedurally generated at the beginning, in the "loading" Phase. there are neither stored images nor stored geometry in the executable file, everything you see is generated procedurally (the one exception being the menu/HUD fonts, which are generated from standard Windows fonts). if you are interested in the details, refer to our technology section.

this isn't really 96k, it depends on megabytes of DirectX, drivers, Windows DLLs and the like.
so does every other Windows game, so we don't see how this is of much importance. we never claimed it was a 96k completely independent operating system with game (and having to boot .kkrieger would have limited our audience considerably :).

You need that fast graphics cards to calculate the textures, right?
no. all the textures and models are calculated entirely doing the loading phase and by the CPU. in case you wonder why, different graphics cards render things very similar, but not quite the same. even a small level of unpredictable inaccuracy is unacceptable - some of our textures and models are made in hundreds of steps, and very small errors in each of those steps can (and will) cause an entirely different result. The reason we need fast graphics cards is because we use rather expensive (but also visually exciting) techniques like per-pixel lighting and realtime shadows in rendering.

nice technology showoff, but really, what's the point of making a 96k game?
well, it is exactly that, a technology showoff for our procedural content creation system, the .werkkzeug3. if you're interested in the details, refer to our technology section. there are two primary application areas for our technology: first, in producing high-quality premade content to be distributed over relatively low-bandwidth connections like the internet. second, as part of a more conventional content creation pipeline - the system isn't suited for everything, but there are things it can do a lot better than existing solutions. and all that aside, we also thought that a 96k game was a damn cool thing to try, don't you think?