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Little Australian games company invents technology 100,000 times better

F

funkystudent

Member
ok... but does this run on a console/modest PC?

its nice to say "look at this crazy detail" but you can make stuff look good if you just toss enough processing power at it.
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
I remember this from before, it's useless if I remember correct.

EDIT: The pitch is very compelling, better than last time.
 
S

Snubbers

Member
Isn't the whole "We aren't artists" kind of admitting why it'll never work?

Clearly, a massive amount of how real a game look is all down to the myriad of shaders/clever lighting/shadowing etc..

There stuff seemingly has none of this in at all.. and maybe, just maybe, their engine can't do all the 'real world' lighting that is actually required to make things look I dunno.. Real?
 
A

angular graphics

Banned
Ydahs said:
This is a different video. A followup to the one you both linked.

As they've mentioned several times in that video, there's still a long way to go. But the improvement from the old video and the new video shows great progression. Two key points which haven't been illustrated though are animation and collision. If that gets nailed, exciting times await us.
Click to expand...

I am aware of that, however since the dude has been promoting his tech since 2008: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1142124&postcount=16 and nothing ever came out of the tech demos he has made I don't see a great future for this.
 
I

iamshadowlark

Banned
Htown said:
this is old as shit

gets posted every eight months or so like it's new

I guess the company keeps re-uploading it under different accounts so that it seems new.

Here's a version from February of 2010.

The prevailing theory seems to be that it's a hoax with nothing behind it. Google "unlimited detail" and note the search suggestion.
Click to expand...
Did you even watch the video? This is supposed to be a 1 year progress report.

Anyway I could actually see this used for static objects in games of the future, but for some reason I just have to believe that this animates terribly. How would you rig a character made of ,what is essentially voxels, in a video game setting?
 
E

Eccocid

Member
How do they gonna implement animated characters? Do those atoms support rigging?
And the guy who speaks on video sounds like a terrible salesman on those shopping tvs. They could have done more professional presentation.
 
T

TheExplodingHead

Banned
Seems like a promising tech, very interested in seeing it get into a competent dev's hands. Still lots of questions about it's uses and applications vs. polygons, but certainly looks/sounds cool at this stage.
 
A

Atomski

Member
Foffy said:
Remember dudes, they're just doing technology, not games. They don't have any game artists to showcase their works with that "wow" punch like other engine demos.

But if this gets adapted into a game, it'd be cool. Some simulation-like games such as the ArmA games could clearly benefit from this. No more awkward bush textures for cover!
Click to expand...

Then they need to hire some as soon as possible. No one is going to take them serious if it is not actually showing anything fancy off.
 
E

EVIL

Member
I kinda have the feeling that they invested time in tech that will be bypassed in a couple of years by better shaders and rendering, making this pretty obsolete!

raytracing is where the current future lies, and not unlimited detail, especially not in video games.
 
I

iamshadowlark

Banned
Eccocid said:
How do they gonna implement animated characters? Do those atoms support rigging?
And the guy who speaks on video sounds like a terrible salesman on those shopping tvs. They could have done more professional presentation.
Click to expand...

Looking at that post above mine, it seems to work exactly as I envisioned, static objects only. That in itself isn't inherently bad though, I would like to see memory usage and computation requirements. This might really shine on a next gen cell/spu based system combined with traditional polys.
 
Sanic

Sanic

Member
I don't really get the "we're not artists" line. Hire some, you'll need them to show off your tech. It's been over a year since your last demo. Why didn't you hire, like, one at least?
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
Maybe Dev-GAF can comment on this a little, it's pretty interesting. How is this different from Carmack's virtualized polygons concept?
 
M

maniac-kun

Member
StuBurns said:
Maybe Dev-GAF can comment on this a little, it's pretty interesting. How is this different from Carmack's virtualized polygons concept?
Click to expand...
Carmack can make his tech running a real game.
 
X

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
Pandoracell said:
I don't really get the "we're not artists" line. Hire some, you'll need them to show off your tech. It's been over a year since your last demo. Why didn't you hire, like, one at least?
Click to expand...
And there are some really good technical artists out there who can do artistic stuff like modeling, animation, texturing, etc as well as the more technical side of things with rigging, shaders, scripting/coding, etc that you would think would fit in with what these guys are trying to do (and likely have knowledge/expertise they would need to keep in mind for workflow/pipeline considerations - what good's the tech if it doesn't work in a sensible pipeline after all). The really good ones though likely already have a good employment gig somewhere as they're hard to find in games. Plenty of them in visual effects though.
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
maniac-kun said:
Carmack can make his tech running a real game.
Click to expand...
I bet he'd say "cacti" too.

But seriously, just because he has a famous name you believe he can produce it but these people can't? I'm not saying they can, but that seems an odd stance.
 
P

Prez

Member
Neuromancer said:
Kind of reminds me of the furor over voxels in years past.
Click to expand...

I see now, this IS about voxels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel

"A voxel is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space. This is analogous to a pixel, which represents 2D image data in a bitmap (which is sometimes referred to as a pixmap)."

Which is the same as the "atoms" mentioned in the video.

"Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data."

This was also mentioned in the video.

So this is nothing new really. It's already been tried for games years ago.
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
Actually, didn't some tech guys from Rare recently show of a tech demo with virtualized geometry from voxels running on 360?
 
S

sinxtanx

Member
Seems like they are doing their fucking research on this. Good, not that I didn't expect them to.

There is nothing impossible about this, they have developed a very effective search algorithm for rendering, and as for animation, here is an unrelated video demonstrating animated voxels:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl6PE_n6zTk

For the people wanting this to be proven in the field, they say in the video (you know, the one in the OP that the thread is about) that the API will be ready for developers in a few months.

In five-ten years or so, this technology is likely to be highly present in games.

Stabbie said:
So this is nothing new really. It's already been tried for games years ago.
Click to expand...
Are you even aware of the term optimization?
 
B

Betta Lines

Member
Cptkrush said:
How is it even possible?!

They're the same person
Click to expand...
Yeah but, in the first video he sounds like a fairly normal, if slightly irritating Englishman, whereas in the second video he sounds like he's trying to do a 'movie trailer guy' voice and has picked up a bizarre Australian or possibly New Zealand accent.
 
F

Fafalada

Fafracer forever
StuBurns said:
Actually, didn't some tech guys from Rare recently show of a tech demo with virtualized geometry from voxels running on 360?
Click to expand...
If you're thinking that Milo environment-stuff - then no, that was not doing any of that. But that wasn't Rare either, so I'm probably just not up to the news. :p

That aside - voxel-representations rasterization has been done in realtime a few times over last few years, but there's no research to my knowledge that presented a usable animation solution, or a data-compression/storage solution that would scale to the kind of environments that are common-place in games these days.
Of course, the infinite-poly videos never touch on either of these topics either.
 
S

StuBurns

Banned
Fafalada said:
If you're thinking that Milo environment-stuff - then no, that was not doing any of that. But that wasn't Rare either, so I'm probably just not up to the news. :p
Click to expand...
No idea about the Milo bit, but yeah, I think it was Lionhead actually, so it probably is what I'm thinking.
 
B

B_Rik_Schitthaus

Banned
Why don't they do the source(and other engines) model of putting it out their for free and only charging company's for licenses?
At the very least lots of bedroom programs would make little projects with it and show people its not a scam.
 
O

onQ123

Member
if this was 100,000 better they wouldn't have to try to tell you how bad they are at art because if your tools was 100,000 better your chicken scratch would stll look better than anything that's out now so I call BS on the 100,000 better
 
B

B_Rik_Schitthaus

Banned
onQ123 said:
if this was 100,000 better they wouldn't have to try to tell you how bad they are at art because if your tools was 100,000 better your chicken scratch would stll look better than anything that's out now so I call BS on the 100,000 better
Click to expand...
that makes no sense, cameras are better then they where before doesn't mean anyone can be as good as Kurosawa.
They show what their tech does by having hundreds of thousands of detailed models stacked in pyramids.



kever0nicas said:
If its real then its paradigm shifting, but then again couldnt Carmack make something like this?
Click to expand...

there is talk of the next Id tech not being polygon based.
 
A

androvsky

Member
I like how he waves away the concern about repeated models by saying "we're not artists, we're technology people", but one of the concerns about a method like this is memory usage, and the most obvious shortcut around it is repeating objects like crazy.
 
P

plagiarize

Banned
androvsky said:
I like how he waves away the concern about repeated models by saying "we're not artists, we're technology people", but one of the concerns about a method like this is memory usage, and the most obvious shortcut around it is repeating objects like crazy.
Click to expand...
well yes. this isn't going to be 'unlimited'... it can't be. the data has to stored somewhere, it has to be loaded into memory somehow. there will be limits on how much you can show on screen at once, but that doesn't mean that something like this couldn't essentially pull '100,000 times more detail'.

look at an environment in something like Crysis 1. there's already a lot of repeated details and models. organic environments lend themselves surprisingly well to repeated detail. you could probably pull off a very nice jungle environment with this.

you may not be able to pull off something like Crysis 2 that has much greater variety in terms of the number of unique meshes in each level, but that doesn't mean the technology is unfeasible on paper.

Voxels likely will make a come back at some point, even if i put more money on someone like Carmack pulling it off.

heck, Crysis 1 used voxels in part for it's terrain system.
 
C

Cow Mengde

Banned
Here's a thought... maybe they don't have artists right now is because they can't afford it. I'd imagine their budget right now is completely focused on improving their tech, since artists will just be doing exactly what they've always been doing. They can wait until they've completed their tech, then hire artists.

I don't mind if they can't get this to work with animation. We'd still have some amazing environments if it's combined with polygonal characters.
 
eso76

eso76

Member
very interesting tech.
Of course it doesn't look too good here, because it's just a bunch of objects copy pasted all over the place and most the time placed along a very "regular" grid so that at first glance everything looks like it's made of cubes.

The (huge) problem here is animation and shaders.
This tech probably needs a completely new set of tools for devs to work with, and they will probably take years to develop and years to catch up with those available for traditional polys.

I don't know, but i doubt anyone is willing to spend that kind of money and time on something like this.
 
A

ampere

Member
:lol

100,000 times better!!!

I don't see any particle collisions or physics implemented, we've seen this sort of tech before and no it isn't a magic savior to the gaming industry.
 
W

wsippel

Banned
funkystudent said:
ok... but does this run on a console/modest PC?

its nice to say "look at this crazy detail" but you can make stuff look good if you just toss enough processing power at it.
Click to expand...
It supposedly even runs on DS. Yes, DS. Not 3DS.
 
O

onQ123

Member
B_Rik_Schitthaus said:
that makes no sense, cameras are better then they where before doesn't mean anyone can be as good as Kurosawa.
They show what their tech does by having hundreds of thousands of detailed models stacked in pyramids.





there is talk of the next Id tech not being polygon based.
Click to expand...


so you're telling me this video I recorded yesterday http://youtu.be/25ifyzFNof0?hd=1

with my HX9v point & shoot camera don't look as good as the Movies this guy & his team of pros recorded years ago?

what I said made sense even if you don't want to believe it, I didn't say the tech would make them better artistes I said if it was 100,000 X better their bad art would still look better than what's out today,

small time devs can make games that look better than every game that was made for the SNES for smart phones today.

if this tech is 100,000 X better trust me it would show no matter how bad they are at art.
 
O

Orayn

Member
Oh God, not this shit again. I'll believe these guys when they can give me something other than lofty promises. A benchmark maybe? A short game demo?
 
X

XiaNaphryz

LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
Cow Mengde said:
Here's a thought... maybe they don't have artists right now is because they can't afford it. I'd imagine their budget right now is completely focused on improving their tech, since artists will just be doing exactly what they've always been doing. They can wait until they've completed their tech, then hire artists.

I don't mind if they can't get this to work with animation. We'd still have some amazing environments if it's combined with polygonal characters.
Click to expand...
As I mentioned above, there are technical artists out there who would be able to contribute on the tech side in some capacity. If they really don't have any on staff, it's a bit worrying - engineering something completely on the technical side without any artist/user feedback for implementation usually never goes smoothly in the end.
 
R

Ranger X

Member
The only possible tech that could do something like that would be indeed something with dots but instead of working with "dots per models" it would be "dots per screen". Sorta like a printer if you like.
You could have amazingly perfect graphics but simply running the same numbers of dots. Always.
 
P

Pachinko

Member
Isn't this basically just NURBS ?

Like, this has been around for ages but no one used it because it required different architecture on the hardware end then using polygons and polygons + textures was easier to program.

Elements of tech like this will probably be in place for next generational graphics engines, I mean think about how pixel shading started- we had things like rim lighting and bump mapping eventually becoming parallax mapping and depth shading. Now graphics cards use tessellation to interpolate the bump mapping pixel offsets as actual geometry.

I can see a shader technique utilizing 3d pixels (they have an x , y and z axis and take up space inside the game engine just like a cube might) that would add detail to surfaces on top of tessellation and parallax mapping.

Could be an interesting few years ahead of us.
 
A

ampere

Member
Orayn said:
Oh God, not this shit again. I'll believe these guys when they can give me something other than lofty promises. A benchmark maybe? A short game demo?
Click to expand...
Yeah, put out a playable demo or shut it, for real.
 
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