RPG's are based on immersion and immersion is based on what your graphics engine can get away with that provides wonders onscreen to enjoy. And everyone is sick of paying for new hardware upgrades to play the newest games, and TES games have always been hardware intensive, requiring the best drivers and cards available, and even then the games usually only advance a little in visual quality with each iteration (with the exception of Skyrim which more than doubled its fidelity over previous games).

Bethesda, if you are reading this, be aware that in 2012, a company will be releasing a software-drivable engine (without a fancy graphics card) that can run unlimited geometry and mesh data in realtime. Their current demo runs 20 trillion polygons worth of data at 22 FPS (on unoptimized code) on an old laptop .... They are still a year away from completion. There are several demos out now that I'll link to for your perusal of this discovery ...

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/11/22/exploring-unlimited-detail.aspx This article explains the tech in detail.

I think he even gives a nod to Bethesda by saying the next TES game should use this tech to create the most immersive RPG ever made. (I think they already did that with Skyrim, but if I can get unlimited view distances with no slow-downs and run this game at 120FPS for full fidelity in 3D glasses mode, then I am all for them using it!!!)

Here are some videos that show off it's awesomeness: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_ndZ8ETbqU

And : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6Fdc (In this video, the good stuff starts at about 22 minutes into it)...

Once you've seen what it can do now, and have an idea where this is going, and if their claims are all true, then it seems possible Bethesda could license their technology and adapt it for use in the next TES game, which would then feature unlimited geometric detail, meaning every tree and every rock could be fully depicted without polygonal angular edges or square surfaces, giving the entire world a more organic look from top to bottom.

Plus you'd be able to run the game on any hardware available, from an iPad1 to a PSP, to a laptop, to any console you wanted including xbox 1, because pretty much any hardware can run it in full detail. So you'd be able to market the game across any platform, having developed the game only ONCE for the entire game, no PORTING it down, no re-working the code for every machine ... you run your game through the software on any machine you want to. You can make 10 times the money at 1/10th the workload and time investment, meaning you can pour more time back into the game to make it better and still have time left over from previous development cycles (instead of 4 years, how about 1.5 or 2 ? Yet still totally outdo all previous titles' accomplishments!) You can do anything your imagination can conceive without any limits in terms of geometry and mesh data. Every character could be built without limits .....

At this point, you are saying "but what about the space on the DVD?" Surely it would run out if you just upped the mesh data counts like this ... .? Well, according to the inventor, there are still some other secrets to his engine. One discovery (the way in which to render unlimited data) led to another discovery, the way in which to encode the data so that it is more and more compacted on the DVD ... so that even if you up the mesh counts, you will still have room on your disc. I'm guessing its a new approach to data compaction techologies, meaning one disc will have way more space available. But he won't comment further on that techology because people are having such a hard time grasping the first tech, the unlimited geometry part and doesnt' want to overwhelm them with further strains to credulity.

I hope you are listening Bethesda. If you can get to this tech first, before those other RPG makers like the ones who made Witcher and Dragon Age can use it to finally be able to get a leap ahead of you .... then you can keep your lead. Because now, whoever uses this tech first will have some major head-starts over the competition in the ways mentioned above, but not limited to:

1) MONETARILY: Make the game once, render it down to virtually any platform for sale across every platform.
2) WORKLOAD: Don't have to create 8 to 16 different versions of every object for LOD swapping or "pop in" ...
3) FIDELITY: You can scale into any object with full HD fidelity no matter how far in you zoom on objects they never become pixelated ....
4) COMPATIBILITY: Anything you create in 3DS Max or Maya or LIghtwave can be translated into point-cloud data and instantly loaded into the game without having to figure out ways to lower the polygon count while sacrificing visual fidelity of the object ... Now what you see in your 3D editor is what they gamer can see in the game.
5) NEW POSSIBILITIES: You can create an entire army of soldiers with variations in armour and have an entire war within your RPG setting, allowing for the player's immersion in a real-time war scenario instead of having like 5 soldiers doing some half-baked pseudo-war plotline that doesn't satisfy the Lord of the Rings epic battles craving every gamer has had since these movies came out. Oblivion's war efforts were hideous. I haven't seen any in Skyrim yet, maybe because they learned their lesson with Oblivion. Or maybe I haven't gotten far enough in the plot yet ... but i doubt they'll have advanced that area of gaming yet by much ... but imagine having 5,000 soldiers on the screen, and you're in the middle of this war ... blood flying ... arrows raining down from every direction, fire and smoke, explosions, people dying, body parts being blown off, hacked off ... blood pouring on the field, running down the hills around you like a river with no FPS loss or any kind of LOD tricks needed...

Just imagine what you could do, Bethesda. I hope you'll take a good long look and think about what will happen if your competitors decide to use this but you don't .... You may lose your golden perch above the rest of the RPG gaming industry ... as your loyal fans, we can't allow that to ever happen. But, in the spirit of fairness to the industry .... may the best company win!

This unlimited detail scam again?

Would be nice...

if its true every hardware and software company will sent assassins and hit-men to destroy and kill everyone involved with such a tech.

remember the artificial cell???? that sweats fuel and water and stuff....yah.....

anyways, if someone makes new tech that blows away all others and is cheap and will make humanity 10000 better off they WILL be destroyed for the sake of a "safe" and "secure" society

This crap is vaporware.

Lets see them animate something, add physics, add collision, etc.

Its not a scam technology.....but it's far from being ready....give it another 5 years and we might be able to use something from it.


Looks more like it would be good for a rendering technology rather then game engine.


As someone studying to go into this sort of field, their claims arent fanasty.....it just isnt as good as they make it sound.....but it is a completely new and unique way of doing things.....and inovation is what drives the next era of technology.

It's a nice theory if it works, but it's been pretty heavily debunked from most reputable sources.

I hope the reputable sources are wrong of course ;p

That voxel stuff again ?

Isn't the trade off a huge amount of memory required ?
That and horrible for organic animation.

Why does everyone call this a scam? Did you watch the video? The man (the inventor Bruce Dell) is very sincere ... he answers every question as fully as he can without giving away his own patents, and lets an independent observer play around with the engine to ensure its not a video loop or some other thing ... and justs asks the world to give them the time to prove their claims. So I am a svcker for believing his story and believing the videos provided? Then I am a svcker. But if everyone is wrong, and he is true, it only takes one company who also believed like me to get ahold of this, and then Bethesda will lose their seat and end up coming along years behind the competition, and I just want them to win because I am rooting for them. Because they've given me some of the best moments in my sad nerd life. hahahaha.

you will not believe how many amazing inventions are now sitting in some dark vault because they would have "effected" the economy and the political balance of the world.

anyways its a nice dream, but we won't see it until it can be "integrated" for the convenience of a few rich monkeys

No it hasnt.....they did a 50mins interview to answer the so-called critics....and everything they say makes sense.

Most of the sceptism comes because they won't let others have it yet and are being very tight lipped.....which is understandable when you have a group of 10 people trying to compete with companies that have thousands of employees.

they will eventually all "disappear" in mysterious "accidents" or they will be scared off or bought off or simply they will just get ridiculed to death.

doesn't anyone remember that artificial cell thing a while ago????????????????? the one that was to solve the world's fuel AND pure water problem!!!!! man they really buried it good.

Voxel rendering has been done in games, not so much these days. You can look it up.

Mainly modern graphic cards don't support it. (No hardware acceleration?)
And technical hurdles that still need overcoming.

Zbrush a good representation of the kind of practical stuff you can do with voxels yes?

This is not voxels in the traditional sense. This is a new kind of voxel. The mesh data and texture data is thoroughly indexed in some way and then the engine uses Google-style search algorythms to determine what objects are visible, then what pixels of each object are visible, and then what color they should be... so that the total amount of data they are working with is merely the screen resolution of your monitor ... meaning if you are running 1920 x 1080 then the pixels required would be .... 2,073,600 pixels times 60 (for FPS) ... meaning only a few billion calculations per second .... hardly enough to strain a computer built in the 1990's, let alone today's tech.

They don't have to hold any objects in memory. All objects and textures are held on the disc, and accessed point-per-point only what is needed 60 FPS on your monitor's resolution. The computer only sees what it needs to see for the monitor's viewpoint at any given moment ... the rest is sitting out of memory on the harddrive. The data accessed is incredibly small.. no need to hold textures in ram, meshes in ram, it's a totally new way of handling graphics that has never been thought of before. It's taken him 10 years to get the engine to this state ... and now he has 100 workers all combining efforts to polish everything before the end of 2012.

So does he have physics, animation, and collision yet?

If so I'd like to see it.

If not... vaporware.

Minecraft? ;p

This system is what's called a sparse voxel octree hierachy. Instead of objects being a "mesh" of vertices that exist as a list, and being rendered wholesale, it uses layers of voxels, that depending on distance/angle etc, can be read from top down and rendered on a need basis. This means you can have extremely complex objects, but only a relevant amount of detail is processed for each instead of having to handle the entire structure.

There hasn't really been much research into the field, until recently there wasn't the processing power to utilise it properly so most the funding and research has gone into polygon rasterisation to date. if they put serious funding and research into it, it probably has a bright future. ID software's big cheese reckoned the tech is viable but still several years away from home PC's having enough processing power to make decent games with it; Notch (Minecraft's creator and voxel bigwig) claimed it was a "scam", but Notch has a history of shooting his mouth off when he probably shouldn't even if he did create an awesome game once so I'd take his opinion with a pinch of salt.

I remember the strengths specifically applied when given static data, which can be stored on external media. "When the scene doesn't change"

But if you applied transformations to the voxel cloud "aka animation"; that has to go into memory somehow yes? transformations for millions~billions of voxels with data into memory can't be cheap

Animation, yes. (They haven't shown it off on the new engine, but they have showed animation from a really old engine.

Physics, no. Collision no......but you know why? Because it isnt finished yet....they aren't exsactly selling this thing yet...and physics and collision are the last thing s to be added. Up until 6 years ago, such things didn't even realyl exsist....takes time to catch up when you work from scratch.


Even if they can't get though working, it will make a great rendering engine (since renders dont need collision and physics as often).



it's quite sad to see people calling this a hoax just because they have never used it....have some faith.

As for the organic nature ... all objects are made of points ... so small that if you zoom into a pebble, you'll see the entire pebble fill the screen with no spaces between the dots ... meaning we're talking microscopic detail here. At first, the animation will just be things like bones and hierachies that gaming companies are used to, but as this tech evolves with future adaption, you'll see the John Carmacks of the world begin to write code to disassemble all the particles and apply motion affects to them, meaning a monster in a game could get its hand blown off organically and all the pieces could fly into the camera or the wall ... You could make a pool of liquid rise up and become the cloak-shrouded necromancer you've been hunting just after stepping in the puddle yourself ... the transformation could happen in realtime right before your eyes, every particle transforming from liquid into the solid form of the wizard. In the next TES game, you could hack off whatever body part you manage to aim at, and would see the flesh beneath, the blood, the cracked bone protruding ... Walls could be deformed using physics, and all the material inside the wall could come out, it wouldn't just be a two-sided low-polygonal piece of junk, it would be substantial, made of something, and its dust would fill the air. Since the entire world is made of particles, you could do mathematical procedural animations over the entire world at any time that would not essentially be shaders painted over the objects, but the actual objects being deformed and manipulated on a pixel-per-pixel basis. Again, the number of pixels being manipulated still only requires the screen resolution times the FPS framerate... so the total calculations would be way lower than today's current games require due to holding thousands of textures in memory and trying to wrap them onto meshes, and calculate every object's geometry in the scene .... all which take tons more calculations per second, which is why we needed bigger and bigger graphics cards.

I'd argue though, even modern volumetric particle systems haven't gotten that far yet;
At least, not to the point where we could have real time volumetric particles in games...

Else we'd be seeing self shadowed volumetric fire, liquids, smoke that lights correctly in games. You know, actual volume flowing fire breath instead of a bunch of flat billiard sprites
Real water splashes, or true colliding falling snow.

Even if this worked, what would it do to the modding community?

The Creative Assembly already mostly destroyed their great modding community by making an engine too complex for modders to use, Hopefully Bethesda doesn't follow suit.

Revolutionise it.

Octree format can handle a vast amount of data but only read off what is relevant; this means there is essentially no polygon budget, the modeller just sculpts the character as he pleases and converts it to octree format. No need for retopography, normal map generation etc. it's the most natural kind of art asset creation imaginable.

He still has to assign bones and stuff in theory, it's not "easy mode" but the process of creating the basic 3 dimensional object will be more approachable than ever before. It'll be many magnitudes simpler than current 3D modelling techniques

And how does he animate it?

Polygons are relatively easy to animate, and skeletons can be applied to a large range of models.

Easy. You create a standard point-based skeleton, and you assign high-level points in the voxel tree to the bones in the same way you would assign vertices, so that the child voxels inherit the positional data from their parent. Simple?

If its ray tracing into a sparse voxel octree then its nothing new or amazing. John carmack who is arguably one of the best graphic programmers on the planet, mentioned this possibly becoming the next big thing a long time ago before these guys started doing this. I mean is anyone dumb enough to think all these leading game programmers are not smart enough to think of some new ways of rendering besides the age old polygon rasterization techniques? Someday we will not be using the 20 year old rasterization anymore its just a fact so yeah eventually something new maybe this new tech will happen.