ctrl-alt-test/mouton

The Sheep and the Flower

Ctrl-Alt-Test & Razor 1911 present 'The Sheep and the Flower', a demo in 8kB.

The moral of the story is left as an exercise to the viewer. We're not La Fontaine.

No animals were harmed during the making of this demo. The sheep is a stunt actor. Do not try this at home.

Created by:

• Anatole Duprat (Anat)
• Laurent Le Brun (LLB)
• Pierre Martin (Cyborg Jeff)

Special thanks to:

• Steren Giannini & Xavier Dorémus for the inspiration (CAPODA)
• Zavie & rubix
• gopher & xTr1m for the 4klang support

Tools used:

• Leviathan 2.0 https://github.com/armak/Leviathan-2.0/
• Crinkler https://github.com/runestubbe/Crinkler
• 4klang https://github.com/hzdgopher/64klang
• OpenMPT https://openmpt.org/
• Shader Minifier https://github.com/laurentlb/Shader_Minifier
• KodeLife https://hexler.net/kodelife

In tribute to Maf464.

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Codebase

The project uses Visual Studio 2022.

Shaders

All the graphics are generated using shaders. The interesting code is in mouton.frag and mouton.vert under Intro/src/shader. fxaa.frag is used for anti-aliasing the image.

During the build, the three shaders are minified; the output is shaders.inl. The content of that file is included in the final binary.

C++

The C++ code under Intro is adapted from the Leviathan 2.0 project. There are multiple configurations:

• Debug
• Release: used for building the final binary. The compression step takes around 4 minutes.
• Snapshot: similar to release, except that it uses fast compression.
• Editor: enables a player for live coding.

The C++ code actually used in the demo is main.cc, minus all the things disabled by the macros. It doesn't do much: it starts the music in a separate thread (it calls the function from 4klang.obj), it compiles the shaders and it executes the shader on a fullscreen quad. The shaders have one input parameter: the time in seconds (as a float).

Editor

To run the editor mode, you first need a wav file of the music (see section below). Then run the program.

Whenever mouton.vert or mouton.frag is modified, the shader code is recompiled and the image will be updated. Use alt + arrows for the play / pause / forward / backward commands.

4klang convert

The directory 4klang convert/WavExport contains a project that can execute the music and save it as a wav file. This is needed for running the demo in Editor mode.

The music data is stored in the file 4klang.inc, which is generated by the 4klang VST plugin.

The script compile_and_copy.bat compiles the music and generates the file 4klang.obj. It takes as input the music data, as well as the 4klang synth (4klang.asm and 4klang.h).

mouton.klproj

mouton.klproj is a KodeLife project. We used it at some point during the development, for live coding. As KodeLife doesn't support music, we stopped using it when the sountrack was ready (in favor of the editor inside the demo).