.kkrieger

.kkrieger (from Krieger, German for warrior) is a first-person shooter video game created by German demogroup .theprodukkt (a former subdivision of Farbrausch), which won first place in the 96k game competition at Breakpoint in April 2004. The game has never been fully released, remaining instead in the beta stage of development as of 2023, which renders it a perpetual beta.

.kkrieger
Developer(s)Farbrausch
Platform(s)Microsoft Windows
Release2004 (early access)
Genre(s)First-person shooter
Mode(s)Single player

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 of .werkkzeug3 engine was made available by the group in 2014, either under the BSD license or as public domain.[1]

Procedural content

.kkrieger makes extensive use of procedural generation 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 bytes of disk space. In contrast, most contemporaneous first-person shooters filled one or more CDs or DVDs.[2] According to the developers, .kkrieger itself would take up around 200–300 MB of space if it had been stored the conventional way.[3]

The game music and sounds are produced by a multifunctional synthesizer called V2, which is fed a continuous stream of MIDI 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.[4]

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."[5]

See also

References
  1. werkkzeug3 on github.com
  2. A single CD holds up to 700MB — over 7,000 times .kkrieger's size. Unreal Tournament 2004 for example, which typically comes on DVD, requires more than five gigabytes, which is more than 50,000 times the disk space in comparison.
  3. Nostalgia Nerd, kkrieger: Making an Impossible FPS, retrieved 2021-04-24
  4. "Deutscher Entwicklerpreis 2006: Hall of Fame" (in German). G.A.M.E. Bundesverband der Entwickler von Computerspielen e.V. 2006-12-13. Archived from the original on 2011-07-22. Retrieved 2011-02-17. Innovationspreis der Jury → The Produkkt - prozedurales 96kb Spiel .kkrieger
  5. "Free .kkrieger download". Acid-Play.com. Retrieved 2014-08-28.
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