Just found this, while looking for game engines. Since the CK isn't out yet... and I am bored to death now...

Abandon the polygons, join infinite detail from point-clouds... NOT VOXELS, lol.
NOTE: The video is rendered using 100% software. But they just got multiple grants, in the millions.... They are creating a full editor, and expect hardware acceleration in the rather near future.

Millions of polygons.. Bwaaahaaa... try trillions of particles... Details down to the atom, if desired. Finally, a use for my 40TB hard drive... A video-game, well, the first level of the game... JK... Point-clouds are NOT that intensive, when you have them created for a fixed resolution.

http://www.euclideon.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=00gAbgBu8R4

Now I seriously have a use for my 3D laser-scanner. LOL.

Imagine that with true particle-destruction and rag-doll physics!

That guy's accent makes me extremely skeptical, but "if you're still not sure how small that is, these are grains of dirt" made me laugh my [censored] off.

These guys have been touting point cloud rendering for over a decade, I reckon 60 fps fully real time ray traced scenes stand a better chance.

No, I dislike the prospect of this technology coming into play. It looks nice on static scenery but as soon as you put it on a character or something with moving parts things get ugly. I understand the infatuation with it but it is very impractical technology for use in games similar to today's.

That is Aussi-english, lol.

The grains of dirt were laser-scanned grains, is what he was trying to say. (Obviously, not life-sized, unless the trees are only the size of grass-blades.)

Even if not as the "whole game", but for all the lame stuff... like grass, trees, clouds, roof-tiles, fur, hair... You know, things you don't see, until you get knocked down into the dirt, and see the grains of sand, not a blotchy blurred pixel from a horribly decompressed JPEG image...

Part of the secret, besides the floating-point 3D point-cloud data-searching, is the fact that it does not render things smaller than a pixel... ever... Where-as, polygons can have multiple faces in a single pixel. Multiple images per object... You no-longer need bump-maps, as the entire objects detail, including the bump, and colors, and specular, etc... are all in the cloud, as one object.

Look where they were at last-year... Now see where they got, before getting the grants... By the end of the year, NVIDIA and ATI will be fighting over this guy, instead of kicking him out the door, like they did last year.

Weather-stations, hospitals, and all billion dollar industries depend on point-clouds... Rendering isn't the issue... It is consumer-rendering that has always been the problem. A problem they solved. (Using standard transforms, in reverse. Instead of transforming the 3D data, it transforms the look-ups, then plucks only the needed 3D data from the clouds. All they have to do now, is finish applying the reverse look-ups, for lighting, physics, and depth.)

It is animated? The deforms are what is used to render the motion. Adding animated items is just another threaded layer of deforms. Once one pixel is drawn, no more processing behind that pixel is needed. How would animation, other than the full-screen animation, have any greater impact? That is the least taxing thing in a program, unless you are talking about the ugly heavy-weighted bones and tween interpolation. Again, these are not polygons.

I just want creatures with fur that looks as realistic as the rest of the world, not looking like trimmed leaves, layered on with glue. That, and grass that actually looks like grass, not like sprites, next to a beautiful 3D rock, slicing through it like a razor as I get near it. Oh, and hair that blows in the wind... once I find some Rogain!

He sounded like a surfer from California mixed with a wealthy British man from the early 19th century...

Cool tech, but I agree, as soon as you add anything but statics it's going to get messy.

I still see the code being used for sprite-replacement, a major reality. Possibly not for the whole world, as that is billions of items/objects that have to be placed. Unless each object is a full point-cloud, or they figure-out a good way to use fractals and procedural placement in the mix. Like the grass placement that Skyrim uses in this modified engine.

Speaking about transforms.. Does Skyrim have transforms, besides uniform scale?

EG, Can I flatten a POT and turn it into a PAN, or turn a treasure-chest into a flatter jewelry-box, or turn a large urn into a thin and narrow vase?

(Obviously with a more appropriate texture to reflect the deformed structure.)

Previous games didn't, and since I don't see them using it much due to how it would distort textures, I would guess Skyrim wont have it either.

Scale's always been, well, a scalar, as far as I know.

Yea, I read that other games only had uniform-scale... Now I know why... (I used scale-effects in Oblivion, but didn't know if they had standard DX transforms as well. Non-uniform or caged. I was even thinking of using bones, then I could just scale one bone, and not the other, so the handle stayed, or only the depth changed. Scaling the bone normally scales only the attached points. I know that texture-deform is used, because we all look normal when animated. Just not sure how bones in objects would work, since they are not MPC's... but trees and grass seem to have deforms, so I was just crossing my fingers.)

I just figured they might have it, since they made the new facial-deforms, which use the same method/calls.

I also noticed my "plate-armor" seems flexible... lol... as my hands and wrists bend.

Let me play a game with this next gen tech and then I'll believe it. Till then, go choke on a 'grain' of sand.

the animation engine does. I don't think anyone knows about how the entity transforms will work in the engine, like if it can do non uniform scale on them. I personally doubt it for some reason

This has been posted a lot before. The majority thinks it's garbage/a conspiracy..
And of course that guy who made minecraft decided to make a hate post against it, how could he be wrong? (turns his entire fan base+any message board they spam against it).
Then there's people who just keep saying this is nothing new, we've been doing cloud point rendering for 90 years! It's impossible for it to work AT ALL, LET ME SEE ANIMATIONS?

saw this a long time ago and also saw the theoretical math that would suggest that it could work.

One of the best comparison i saw was quit thinking inside the box and do what google did with their search engine... which was totally outside of the box at that time in terms of a real way to produce accurate and fast results out of hundreds of thousands of millions of pages.

It's all about thinking efficiently..

Look at Power VR rendering current engines at faster frame rates due to being significantly more efficient at 1/4 or 1/8th the overall hardware power and transistor counts. The rendering system was completely different and significantly better. Frankly it's pathetic that we still use brute force methods with as many hardware and software side tweaks to make it work "better" but the efficiency of it all is totally garbage still.

If a Power VR technology was available today with as much horse power and capabilities as a top of the line nvidia/ati card.... not only would it grab both by the throats and mop the floor, it would destroy both companies graphics devisions overnight. But there is a reason it's not arrived.... one of which is no one wants to produce the chip.. the other reason may be called tin foil hatters theory. Either way.... a Proven technology that is clearly better but gets kicked to the curb..... yeah sounds like countless other technologies we've heard about that sounded to good to be true and somehow "disappeared" or simply can't seem to find funding.