Every year I look forward to seeing what new demos will be released at Assembly and this year was no exception. It was great to see JavaScript well represented at the event and even more so to see a JavaScript demo walk away with the 1st place award in the 4k demo category.
Highway 4k is a lovely 3D trip through a glowing, pulsating, fully timed to the music Tron like world. As two Tron bikes race each other they reflect the environment around them as the camera masterfully pans and sweeps across the scene.
As with most JavaScript demos they achieve the insanely small file size using a method of packing the entire demo into a PNG file which is decompressed at runtime. The app JSexe is still the current favourite for doing this, indeed we’ve featured it a number of times in CreativeJS before.
If you wish to run this demo then the requirements are very high. For a start it only works in Firefox 22 (Chrome constantly crashes as the PNG tries to decompress) and you’ll need to close down a couple of “Slow running script” warnings that occur as it precalcs everything. But once it does actually run it’s a visual feast for sure and a marvel of 4k engineering.