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[Tenkei]

let's see this in an actual game.

Yeah, it's hard to sell divergent technology without a proof of concept, especially if it has to replace existing rendering pipelines. If I have spent time and money on my own engine or have licensed a proven one, I need to be convinced that this new technology can integrate with what I have, or that I can work with minimal changes to my workflow.

You are underestimating the number 100,000 times better.

I tend to ignore hyperbolic exponential claims, but fair enough. =P

 

[inky]

Has John Carmack commented on this yet?

http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/98127398683422720

 

[54-46!]

I'll be impressed when I see it in an actual game.

 

[Truespeed]

Has John Carmack commented on this yet?

Rumor has it that he's devoting an hour of his keynote to this.

 

[B_Rik_Schitthaus]

Woah bulletstorm looks pretty good. Might try it now.

Dude have you seen how boxy the trees are?

 

[Tenkei]

is the tech used to make Earth Defence Force 2017 on the 360 100,000 X better than the tech used to make Metroid Prime on GameCube?

I'm not familiar with the GC SDK, but I am willing to bet that the 360 XDK is significantly better to program with if only because Microsoft doesn't mess around when it comes to development environments. Also, EDF2017 runs at 1280x720 compared to MP's 640x480, therefore the tech objectively is 3x better, and it has 30x as many enemies on screen, it has next-gen lighting(TM), and...

... the tech comparison completely ignores the differences in programming ability and artistic budget between Sandlot and Retro. Going back to the BBC analogy, an amateur's footage of a Queen Alexandra's Birdwing butterfly will never compare favourably to the quality of the BBC's, unless that amateur were to spend the same resources as the BBC to track down that butterfly with a better camera.

Edit: Oh, I've been assuming that when someone says "100000x better", that person is exaggerating and means to say that there will be a noticeable and significant improvement. 4D and 120fps, to cite examples in this generation.

 

[maniac-kun]

I have much more faith in Atomontage Engine than this.

http://www.atomontage.com

http://www.atomontage.com/?id=gallery

http://www.youtube.com/user/AtomontageEngine#g/u

Looks like that engine is allready working and has some great effects allready.

 

[Xabora]

Credit to Mithos in the AMD: Next Xbox Graphics Will Look Like AVATAR thread

Was wondering what happened to the group that was working on the Voxel Renderer.

 

[xbhaskarx]

100,000 times better

Next they should invent sound technology that is "one louder"...

 

[Andronicus]

guy sounds like he's faking the accent too

 

[Luigiv]

guy sounds like he's faking the accent too

Nah, he just sounds like your typical Aussie nerd. His voice is bloody annoying, though.

 

[ThatObviousUser]

Came up with this idea six years ago. I'm not angry or anything because obviously I never did anything with it, so kudos to these guys. But still, I couldn't believe when I saw this.

 

[Yoshiya]

The narrator's voice is so obnoxious it made me nauseous. If this tech is so amazing (and not vaporware) they could at least have a good looking demo.

 

[CountAntonius]

Sounds like hyperbole need a playable demo running on my hardware with characters and stuff.

 

[GrotesqueBeauty]

Came up with this idea six years ago. I'm not angry or anything because obviously I never did anything with it, so kudos to these guys. But still, I couldn't believe when I saw this.

How magnanimous.

 

[ThatObviousUser]

How magnanimous.

And I'm sure 50 other people came up with the idea at the same point I did. But it seems these Euclid chaps are the only ones to actually bring it to life. Pretty exciting stuff. I thought it'd take 15-20 years before it'd be viable.

 

[Gazunta]

Not sure if it's been mentioned in this thread yet, but these guys got $1,984,652 from the Australian Federal Government as part of their investment into new technologies earlier this year.

http://www.startupsmart.com.au/growth/2011-03-07/government-grants-pump-$2-million-into-new-inventions.html

 

[CountAntonius]

A video that sounded less like a late night infomercial would serve them far better I think. The concept is fascinating and if it's true that's amazing for gaming but i simple can't take them serious how they market themselves.

 

[thehillissilent]

I have much more faith in Atomontage Engine than this.

http://www.atomontage.com

http://www.atomontage.com/?id=gallery

http://www.youtube.com/user/AtomontageEngine#g/u

After looking at their site, I prefer this. They seem much farther along.

 

[Orayn]

After looking at their site, I prefer this. They seem much farther along.

They also don't try to paint themselves as being suppressed by "big polygons" or by belittling useful, established tech. It's like honestly marketing a hydrogen fuel cell car instead of yammering on and how your new super-vehicle runs on water instead of dead animals, and how the man is trying to stop you.

 

[Haunted]

The way they're releasing these videos looks pretty shady to me. Trying to pitch this to make off with funding grants? Anyone of our internet sleuths/lawyers here want to spend the time and quickly go over the proper legalities checking up on this Euclideon company?



edit:

Not sure if it's been mentioned in this thread yet, but these guys got $1,984,652 from the Australian Federal Government as part of their investment into new technologies earlier this year.

http://www.startupsmart.com.au/growth/2011-03-07/government-grants-pump-$2-million-into-new-inventions.html

hrm hrm

 

[SiriusTexra]

ITT alot of people spurting things they know nothing about.


For an infantile technology to already be pulling this much, animations, physics, shaders, all that shit is both a given and almost unnecessary to show at this point. Polys are the current bottleneck, this is the solution.

This work's via per pixel search algorithms.

Rememeber how polygons started, and where it is now. It's been 10 years since halo 1, and were still using octagon trees.

This is just one bunch of guys who aren't great artists here. You get a whole industry developing the technology, you'll have your real life graphics within a year at most.

Imagine, a game where all the zbrush assets are actually the ingame assets. That should save artists alot of time too, no more low poly modelling.


Also, Carmack knows what's what. He's been experimenting with this very same kind of shit for a few years now.

 

[.nimrod]

ITT alot of people spurting things they know nothing about.


For an infantile technology to already be pulling this much, animations, physics, shaders, all that shit is both a given and almost unnecessary to show at this point. [...]

Please, enlighten us with your knowledge.

From the looks of it, the major thing they've developed is a fast algorithm to determine which voxel is going to be displayed on the screen.
In one of their videos they're talking about how polygons require a lot of vector calculations, which is exactly what has to be done when animating voxel data. It's just 100000x more data that has to be processed.

And unless they plan on ranomly generating a lot of the content or having lots of repetition, storage is also going to be an issue. If we assume they use 8 Bit for every color channel and 4 Byte for every dimension, an object that consists of a million voxels (cube of 2.5cm^3 with 64 voxels/mm^3) already uses more than 14 MByte of space.

Until they get around that, i'm fine with polygons.

 

[angular graphics]

Minecraft's Notch says it's a scam: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.

 

[MrBelmontvedere]

I remember seeing these videos several years ago. I guess they re-uploaded the videos so they would appear to be "new"

amazingly in the years that have passed I notice 0 improvement. yawn.

 

[Durante]

For an infantile technology to already be pulling this much, animations, physics, shaders, all that shit is both a given and almost unnecessary to show at this point.

That's just wrong. Animation in particular is very much not a given, since voxel rendering at this scale most likely involves expensive to create space partitioning data structures, which rarely deal well with scene changes.

Minecraft's Notch says it's a scam: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.

Pretty much.

 

[Hari Seldon]

These guys are trolling for VC money this is nothing at all.

 

[Betta Lines]

Nah, he just sounds like your typical Aussie nerd. His voice is bloody annoying, though.

He's faking something. In the older video he sounds British, and he's not doing a weird announcer-style voice.

 

[Mato]

Lets see how ray tracing is implemented into that. Or collisions. Or any kind of physics or animation. It all lookes so stale, gritty and bland it would be a real feat to produce anything even remotely snappy and interactive.

 

[dacuk]

vaporware, until I see it running on a Wii

Fixed it for fun

Spoiler

...and plain imposibility

 

[Piercedveil]

I can't imagine a next gen Xbox or PS running this, which is what they made it sound like will happen.. I want demonstrations and I'll believe it.

 

[Conciliator]

Several smart, knowledgeable people have poo-pood this. So, as a layman(effectively), it's their word vs. the word of this guy I don't know who talks like a salesman or one of the hype artists at E3. As a general rule, if guy A says 'This new thing is going to change/destroy the world forever, it is incredible beyond words!' and guy B says 'I think it may be a little more complicated than that', guy B is going to be right. This rule has served me well so far. What we want to be true has no relationship with reality.

 

[voltron]

Just wanna hear Carmack's thoughts on it.

 

[voltron]

Nah, he just sounds like your typical Aussie nerd. His voice is bloody annoying, though.

Yeah its weird how some Aussie nerds have this hybrid accent that makes them sound so fucking ridiculous at times. Almost like theyre putting on an American accent.

I dont mind a neutral accent as I find the Aussie accent grating (Im Australian), but the dude in this video is clearly trying a little too hard.

 

[TacticalFox88]

Show it working on a GAME and then you'll get people to buy this. Cause I call bullshit otherwise.

 

[GillianSeed79]

Looks cool, but did anyone catch the 20fps thing then but have other things that run much faster bit. Also the scanning thing sounds cool, but wouldn't it involve a ridiculous amount of work if you are scanning things one at a time? Also, couldn't stop thinking of Palpatine when he kept saying UNLIMITED POWWEEERRR.

Still, cool tech if it's actually feasible.

 

[StuBurns]

Bumped for NaughtyCalibur's pleasure.

 

[duckroll]

Not sure why they think it would be impressive by showcasing a static area with no animation at all, and just the same geometry repeated over and over. The dumb "we're not artists, we're just programmers" thing is bullshit too. Show something functioning, and no one will complain that it looks bad artistically. This just looks unimpressive and it seems they just want to promise the sky, while not showing much (because they don't have much), to get as much funding as they can.

 

[Jintor]

Friend Serrels and KotakuAU have posted an interview.

 

[sinxtanx]

Friend Serrels and KotakuAU have posted an interview.

Journalism? At Kotaku? What is this strange world I have woken up in...

Pretty good interview
So we'll only see animation when it's perfect? Good.

I did some thinking last evening, about how there will undoubtedly be an adoption period for high-detail voxels. At first it will probably be used for things that have to be repeated shitloads of times, like leaves and grass. Then we'll see a slow transition towards games that are completely voxel-based and use 100GB of RAM.

 

[DiscoJer]

Friend Serrels and KotakuAU have posted an interview.

“We made a search algorithm, but it’s a search algorithm that that finds points, so it can quickly grab just one atom for every point on the screen.”

“So think about the difference,” he says. “If you had all of the points you are seeing on the screen, like in our demo, it’s going to take forever. You’ll be waiting for a long time. But if you’re grabbing only one for every pixel on the screen, then you don’t have a trillion dots, you have… well, pick a resolution and do the maths!

I believe other types of graphics also do ths, only rendering what is shown. Which I think is sort of spooky, because that's how things are on a subatomic level in our universe. Unless you look, they aren't actually there...saving loads of processing power needed.

 

[Truespeed]

Unlimited Detail is actually an elaborate scam to secure government funding. And, in that respect, they've been extremely successful. But, it's obsolete technology and it'll never go anywhere due to the inherent limitations. The future is really Unlimited Quantum Graphics and, like Euclideon, they've also secured an investment from the Australian government to continue their research and showcase their technology to the world.

Link

 

[MrSerrels]

Unlimited Detail is actually an elaborate scam to secure government funding. And, in that respect, they've been extremely successful. But, it's obsolete technology and it'll never go anywhere due to the inherent limitations. The future is really Unlimited Quantum Graphics and, like Euclideon, they've also secured an investment from the Australian government to continue their research and showcase their technology to the world.

Link

That was awesome.

 

[ColonialRaptor]

Lol... Why is it that when people show off raytracing it's always a raytraced car. It's like the most wrong way to argue this way of doing graphics it's not funny.

Why don't we ever see raytraced walking people? If anyone has a video of a raytraced animated character - please share!!

I don't know what I think of this, it sounds to good to be true but I want to believe. Why fo people have to be so skeptical? Why not give them the benefit of the doubt? If the time comes and goes and nothing comes of it, then we know that they are talking shit. But I think there is potential for creating incredibly realistic environments here. Of course it would be stupid to do 'unlimited detail'. Put in regular game optimizations and like depth of field and tessellation like technology to the way this shows detail so I'd you want to look right at the ground you can see every grain of dirt but the distance is only as detailed as it needs to be.

I doubt this will work with characters, but of this truly is as power free as it sounds, doing it this way would be good because you'd only be processing what's close to you so you could allocate a huge amount of resources to active elements in the environment such as characters, enemies, ai, and fx.

I can see this being used pretty much as the environment rendered and saving a shit load of resources for all of the other stuff for the player to see.

I wonder how it would work with destruction, whether you could accout atomic and cellular bond information to the atoms. Thats exciting, I'd like to get my hands on it honestly.

 

[midonnay]

sigh..... reading that beyond3d thread is cringeworthy.... 2 million bucks down the drain it seems.

 

[ColonialRaptor]

Friend Serrels and KotakuAU have posted an interview.

Reading this interview gave me some more insight into how the system works.

It's an extremely cool idea. The whole thing isn't really 'unlimited voxel' or 'unlimited atoms' really at all. I mean it is, they're using voxel based graphics, in the sense that it is the crazy super human over the top ultra intensive graphics technology that everyone knows about, but their approach as to how to display that on the screen is totally different.

It's a very interesting an amazing idea actually - the idea that they're just picking the pixels to output to the screen rather than rending the whole scene and then picking the pixels to display, it is ONLY picking the pixels that need to be rendered and that is the entire point of having so many billions of little atoms because that single atom that needs to be displayed becomes the pixel in reference.

It's an amazing concept and an amazing idea. Thinking about how to get around the complexities of animating something like that, is a baffling prospect. I think it could be done, but that's where the horsepower is going to start to come into things. That is where things may start to slow down a bit, and the problem is - they CAN'T mix polygons and voxels using this pixel picking technology so it will have to be ALL voxels because of the way the 'unlimited detail' works by picking just the pixel it needs to render.

So. For what we've seen here, a still scene with amazing levels of detail, that's the easy part, and I fully believe that what they've achieved so far is legit and is doable - it's the next step, making it into a working game engine that is feasible and usable on current technology... well, that's going to be the hard part - as everyone has said.

I really think they are onto something here, it's kind of mind numbingly obvious to just like "FACEPALM" just render the pixel you need to with the colour for the screen, but getting it to work...

I'm just trying to think about how they would do it. If they're picking the right pixel needed from the perspective of the 3D scene to essentially make a 'bitmap' for each frame, then to animate everything you're going to have to pre-render everything - but then that's just going back to regular old graphics rendering techniques...

BAH! How the fuck are they going to do it... Interesting times!

 

[FieryBalrog]

I don't understand. Why does it look so bad? Giant stacks of really primitive looking plastic animals? A jungle environment that looks like graphics from 5 years ago? I'm completely clueless about graphics tech, but I'm not going to be impressed by your claims if you put out stuff like that. Maybe it is impressive, but the stuff I'm reading on top of that makes it seem even worse.

 

[Pikelet]

I believe other types of graphics also do ths, only rendering what is shown. Which I think is sort of spooky, because that's how things are on a subatomic level in our universe. Unless you look, they aren't actually there...saving loads of processing power needed.

I won't derail, but this is a very loose interpretation of quantum physics

 

[Clear]

These are the 3 points that you need to understand about all technology of this type:

1. As soon as people start spouting about "infinite polygon engines" or similar, don't forget that that the detail needs to be created and imported in the first place. So if you want every flower in every flowerbox, of every apartment in your obsessively detailed high-rise expect to spend a huge amount of time creating these assets. Because if you tesselate everything using the same handful of instances its going to look unconvincing. There are serious issues relating to acquiring, storing and manipulating the vast amount of data required to replicate a natural looking environment.

2. An associated point is best expressed by the question "How much detail is appropriate"? There are two prongs to this: First of all you need to consider the scale and scope of the game-world you are seeking to create. Using billboarding is a perfectly valid and sensible approach for filling in background detail that is unreachable by the player. Why expend the effort to do more than is neccessary? Especially when simulating distant objects convincingly requires a whole lot more work than simply having the geometry on-hand. Rayleigh scattering and other atmospheric effects play a huge role in their appearance all of which needs to be simulated. Which brings me to the second prong of the argument: detail needs to be consistent both visually and physically. If you spend months building a tree and hand detailing every leaf and twig are you capable and prepared for animating each of these elements? Are you able to simulate their material properties both in a visual and physical sense. Organic scene objects aren't going to be rigid and static as a rock, their reality is more than their appearance its how they behave.

3. Current graphics technology is all based on processing polygon data, and is very efficient at doing so because as these devices have been continuously iterated upon for the last 15-20 years. Voxel techniques are all largely software-based which places them at an enormous performance disadvantage comparatively. And as we are talking about real-time graphics generation, as Carmack hints, because this makes it non-competitive on current gaming devices, its uptake is highly unlikely to happen without a major technological sea-change.

Bottom line: Its a technical curiosity.

 

[ColonialRaptor]

I have much more faith in Atomontage Engine than this.

http://www.atomontage.com

http://www.atomontage.com/?id=gallery

http://www.youtube.com/user/AtomontageEngine#g/u

This shit is amazing.

I want this tech in a Battlefield game... Imagine having to worry about sand dunes and shit while you're driving tanks across a desert... oh sweet lord that would be so awesome!

The destruction is pretty awesome too. This is the shit that I'm talking about.

Ahhh, it makes me feel swell, I just think that we're on the verge of some very interesting changes to humanity in the next 25 years, amazing things. What happens when we figure out exactly how it is that the universe operates at a subatomic level, and we can program that into a powerful computer and run proper simulations.

What happens when we can run atomic scale simulations and plug our brains into it. If the simulation is real enough, who's to say it's not real if it's using the same mathematical code as the universe?