.werkkzeug

.werkkzeug (Werkzeug in German means tool or something to work with) is an authoring application made by .theprodukkt, a division of German demo group Farbrausch. Its purpose is to enable graphic artists to create high-quality visuals using procedural methods. It is famous for being the production tool behind several important demoscene productions, such as "fr-019: Poem to a Horse" and "fr-025: The Popular Demo", of which the latter is available to download as .werkkzeug data files.
With .werkkzeug, one is able to create textures, 3D meshes, camera-movements, animation and synchronization to the music. Apart from generating data from scratch, it is also able to work from external files, such as JPEG, XM special format V2M (used by the Viruz II VST plugin), Ogg or XSI.
Concept
The point of .werkkzeug is creating visual data the same way one would do in commercial applications, the only difference being the way of storage — instead of exporting the final image or model into raw pixel or vertex data, .werkkzeug stores the steps that were made to achieve the final result. This allows high resolution textures to be stored on less than one hundred bytes of space. This technique is known as procedural generation.
Operator Stacking
The power in .werkkzeug lies in its user interface, a concept named operator stacking. The classic idea of layers has been extended into 2 dimensions. Plus a single document can hold many independent stacks. Together these ideas allows you to have stacks that are unused and others used for experiments. Operator Stacking is now being copied by several other demoscene programs.
Revisions
The most well known .werkkzeug is version 1.0 (or WZ1), which was released to the public in 2004. Two further non-public versions also exist, WZ3 being the most recent one (and still under development), used for the creation of the first person shooter game .kkrieger.
Credits
.werkkzeug was created by Dierk "Chaos" Ohlerich and Thomas "Fiver2" Mahlke. Credits also include Dirk "DOJ" Jagdmann, Fabian "ryg" Giesen, Bastian "Tron" Zühlke and Christoph "giZMo" Mütze.

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