Shader Minifier: The Secret Weapon Behind Tiny, Stunning Demoscene Animations
2025-05-13
Shader Minifier is a tool that minifies GLSL code, enabling demoscene artists to create complex computer animations in incredibly small file sizes. This blog post details its evolution, from simple space and comment removal to advanced optimizations like static analysis and function inlining. The author recounts how Shader Minifier shrunk a 47KB shader to 5.2KB after compression, dramatically improving development efficiency. The core principle involves leveraging compression algorithms by cleverly reusing variable names and optimizing functions to reduce code size and boost compression rates. While already successful, the author explores further improvements to tackle the challenges of even larger 64KB animations.
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Development
code compression