Doesn't sound useful, if examples are also limiting....

It's not really just about how you ever are going to stuff your newest invention in 5kb without all the loopholes you can think of, is it? It's about what kind of ingenious masterpiece you can make with 5kb. And you still got a month to think of something!
Not that I'm trying to get me any more competition of course .

"the examples must be under 5KB,too?" The source code (including the examples, demos, etc) must obey the 5KB rule; the total size of the code has to be 5KB or less. The beauty of this contest comes from asking you to create great projects using limited resources. We had a similar contest in the past and the restrictions were even tighter; despite all of this, the entries were really impressive.

Just to clear any misunderstanding: I am not talking about a game - I mean a tool.

Of course we could just set the tool as a entry and let you find out things yourself, but that might not always be the nicest thing. Also, limiting source from external script files we interpret but not models etc is not that fair I got to admit. What we do with binary files[for example we have some external information in a binary file] is not different than doing something with a model.

Just to clear that

As a last resort you could save the code inside an MDL file.

I suppose you have to include all uncompiled source code for every non-3dgs-native asset that actively influences data communication in the program.
I think that covers it .

That's just a very odd mdl you got there
*Noted*

The main idea of this contest isn't to force you to disguise the code, but to create something valuable with as few lines of code as possible. Just think how many shaders and function libraries we've got at our disposal; you could set them up and create a nice project with less than 100 lines of code, for example.

If you create (let's say) a tool that can interpret .bas source code, give us an example that uses 10 lines of .bas code, and then include as many links to samples as you want in a readme.txt file. We don't want to (and we won't) be impressed by other's people samples, but by your programming abilities. If the samples are created by you, feel free to post a link to them (if the size of the source code exceeds 5KB) in the readme; I'm sure that they will be helpful, even though they won't influence the jury.

Nahhh.... I'm almost there, but I'm running out of ideas on how to reach the 5120bytes.
Some neat options still exist, but I need to do some more magic to get rid of 300 bytes... >_>

Warlock > nasty source code.