[For Gamers]Euclideon's New Technology

[Daxis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Okay first of all, I'm not that updated on the newest technology and only have a base grasp on data storage and the other eccentrics that ar einvolved in such a thing.

But barring that, this seems like a rather amazing piece of technology, if it's real.

To summarize the video:

• Atom graphics can go unlimited
• Progressing p fast
• Gonna look basically better than any game or anything once it's finished
• gonna finish in a couple months

There's speculation whether it's real, lots of excitement over it, and the video legitly seems really really awesome. [YOU GUISE LET'S LOOK AT ROCKS]. Anyone wants to comment on this?

 

[DeM0nFiRe]

They still won't say what hardware that is running on. If it's running on like 4 video cards, or an i7 980X or something, it's entirely uninteresting. Basically anyone could do what they have there given enough resources, the issues is getting it to run on enough consumer computers to be actually useful.

Anyway, it's not really any breakthrough in technology. It's just raytracing through point clouds, the only thing they have is a different way to pick points from the cloud (Assuming that we believe what they've said, which is not very much).

Also, as far as finishing in a couple months, they said it would be ready to use in 6 months 2 years ago.

As you can tell, I am really skeptical. Maybe it will turn out to be something, but based on what I saw 2 years ago or however long ago it was, there wasn't anything too impressive, and that new video doesn't really show enough to change that.

 

[Jason]

Fuck you Daxis, I JUST saw this on another website and was about to make a thread for it, then I saw yours and my dreams were shattered

I think that, if they can get this to run on the majority of current hardware (Well, current when it releases... so maybe a year or two from now, even though they've said 6 months), then it'd be amazing and would make games a whole lot more immersive in terms of graphics, it's great that they've found a way to eliminate polygons since now that I look back and forth in that video between the polygon items and the atom items, well, it just makes the games we have now, even the ones like Crysis 2 and I'm sure Battlefield 3 when it releases, look like shit, lol, these people have ruined any current game which has been praised for amazing graphics, lol.

 

[gRaViJa]

If this technology can be used for PS3/xbox36/that new Nintendo console than we will enter a new era of gaming. But it's still a big if.

 

[DeM0nFiRe]

The chances it would run on the hardware of gaming consoles is slim at best. If they managed to do that, then it would be impressive.

 

[DeM0nFiRe]

Heh, notch just posted a pretty decent explanation of why Unlimited Detail is most likely BS. He said it's using voxels, my guess is it's using a point cloud because you can generate a point cloud that takes up less space because it's not as strictly aligned to a grid and you can ignore data in the middle. But everything else he said still applies. They are either scamming or they just genuinely don't understand that what they've done has been done before and just isn't practical :P

(Or I could also be wrong :P )

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

It’s a scam!
Perhaps you’ve seen the videos about some groundbreaking “unlimited detail” rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Well, it is a scam.

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

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.

There’s the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y

Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw

And there’s more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.

http://notch.tumblr.com/