pinguy/murkk

Source: https://github.com/pinguy/murkk

.murkk

A 96K-spirit homage to .kkrieger (.theprodukkt, Breakpoint 2004). Native Linux, single C file, no engine, no assets. Everything you see and hear is synthesized at startup or runtime: the textures, the level, the creatures, the gun, the sounds, the font.

Stripped binary: 51,336 bytes. Budget: 98,304. Headroom: ~46 KB.

Build

Arch / CachyOS:

sudo pacman -S --needed sdl2 mesa gcc
./build.sh

Debian / Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libsdl2-dev libgl1-mesa-dev gcc
./build.sh

Or just: gcc -Os murkk.c -o murkk -lSDL2 -lGL -lm

Play

./murkk                # fixed seed — it's a demo, same world every run
./murkk --seed 1982    # different complex
./murkk --smoke        # headless self-test: renders, screenshots, exits 0

WASD move, mouse look, LMB fire, ESC quit. The creatures are low — aim down, same as the original’s spiders. Find the green beacon. Red cubes heal, yellow cubes are ammo.

What is synthesized where

• Textures (startup, ~260 ms): tileable value-noise fBm over power-of-two lattices → heightfields (brick bevels, plate insets, bolt bumps, brushed streaks) → Sobel-derived tangent-space normal maps + albedo ramps with per-brick hash jitter, grime, and rust thresholds. Four 256² maps, zero files.
• Level (startup, <1 ms): seeded xorshift carves rooms, chains them with L-corridors, places lights (alternating warm sodium / cold mercury — the kkrieger murk), items, creatures, exit. Geometry batched into interleaved client arrays; tangent frames derived from axis-aligned normals identically in C and GLSL so the bump mapping lines up by construction.
• Lighting: GLSL 120, eight nearest point lights per frame with quadratic falloff, per-pixel normal mapping on all level surfaces, distance fog, muzzle-flash and impact lights injected as temporaries, sqrt gamma-out.
• Creatures: box-assembled quadrupeds posed per frame by column-major mat3 composition — sin-swung legs while chasing, rear-up windup before the lunge, squash-and-stay-dead on kill. Emissive eyes.
• Audio: one SDL float callback mixing a detuned-55 Hz drone with filtered rumble under one-shot synth voices — noise-burst gunshot with a pitch-glide thump, hit ticks, descending-saw death, footsteps, pickup chirps. No samples.
• Font: 37 glyphs, 5×7, hand-packed bit array, 259 bytes.

Verification

--smoke runs headless under Xvfb + llvmpipe: synthesizes everything, renders the title and a staged firefight, writes both frames as PPM, exits 0. This build was verified that way — the screenshots in this folder are its actual output, software-rasterized.

Honest deltas from real 96K practice

kkrieger’s 96 KB was won with tooling this homage deliberately skips, so the 51 KB here is gentleman’s-rules size-coding, not compo-grade:

• No packer. kkrieger shipped through kkrunchy (ryg’s executable compressor). The Linux equivalents — sstrip, a vondehi-style stub over xz/zstd — would put this binary somewhere under 20 KB.
• No -nostartfiles/custom _start, no shader minification, no symbol diet. All left on the table as headroom.
• Dynamic linking against system SDL2/libGL/libc, excluded from the budget the same way kkrieger leaned on d3d9.dll and the MSVC runtime.
• kkrieger’s levels were hand-authored inside werkkzeug, their operator-stack tool; mine are generated. Different trade, same philosophy: the level is data born at runtime, not bytes on disk.
• The RAM trade is faithfully reproduced: kkrieger famously unpacked into hundreds of megabytes of 2004-era RAM from its 96 KB. Disk was the only budget. Same here.

CC0 / public domain. Greets to farbrausch and .theprodukkt.