http://www.moddb.com/groups/editors/news/unlimited-graphics-in-games

If they get it done, will this be the future of gaming as we know it?

Can someone explain how these 'atoms' differ from polygons? This sounds absurd.

It will allow more detail because the "atoms" will be more densely packed than polygons.

I read that these people are a scam though. They create a pre-rendered video and then put it up on youtube. They then get investor money and disappear for a while before doing it again. I'll believe it when they put it in a game, till then they are just one of many promised features that we never hear more of.

Meh, figures. Removed.

Saw this video a couple hours ago on Facebook actually. It looks pretty nice, and I want to see what games can look like when running with "Unlimited detail". If they say they dont need a powerful machine to run, I cant wait to see what my machine can pull of with that technology.

>unlimited graphics
>edges look like Minecraft

Great start!

Well they did say that they're a tech firm, not game designers (Dammit, Jim, I'm a tech, not an artist!).

Of course, I really have my doubts that any of this is true. It just seems to good to be true. If it is true then hell yeah! If it isn't then whatever, I don't really care. I may be a bit disappointed though.

Speaking of Minecraft, Notch has http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam..... :tongue:

I had a feeling something wasn't quite right about this. As soon as they mentioned the number of atoms per cubic millimeter I knew the memory footprint would have to be enormous. The repeated meshes in the video also seemed a little suspicious since I knew about how rendering instances of the same model greatly saves on memory and processing.

There's great potential for voxel rendering but it will likely involve a good bit of procedural generation to save on memory. However we will never have "infinite" graphics. Anyone who advertises anything as being infinite is a liar.

Of course, they don't have to render it all at the same time. In one of their previous videos they mention using an algorithm akin to a search engine to selectively only render the "atoms" needed to fill the screen, or pixels. Like how there are in reality a lot more colours than say truecolour can provide but our eyes can only differentiate between so many before we can't see any difference thus only use enough of it to notice those differences rather than every colour.

Still, like Notch says, even for a small area you'd need an ungodly amount of space. You know it's a scam when the actual file size of what they're advertising would extend into the petabytes.

Now it definitely sounds like a scam. Do you have any idea how much processing power it takes to search through all the billions of atoms and run an algorithm on every one to determine whether or not they get to be rendered every single frame?

Let me put this in perspective for you. On the games I work on there are generally no more than 5,000 basic objects that get processed every frame. This includes particles, projectiles, NPCs, item pickups, stuff like that. 5,000 is being generous. Some of these objects have more complex algorithms running on them than others. But if I were to try to push that up to, say, 25,000, even the most basic of calculations would start giving me a noticeable drop in performance. I've tested this.

Now there are definitely smarter programmers out there than me. But I can't imagine they could get that number much higher than 100,000.

However with video processing you can go a good bit higher. The Playstation 3 is capable of rendering 275 million polygons per second. Assuming your game is running at 60 frames per second that is roughly 4.5 million polys per frame. I'm not sure if this is the case or not but for the sake of argument let's assume that it's possible to calculate visibility on every one of the polygons every frame. That's 4.5 million objects that you're running calculations for every frame. Maybe they have some clever searching method to get that number much lower. I honestly don't know.

But that's 4.5 million compare to the possible trillions of atoms they claim this system can accommodate.

It's not really the amount of data used at any one time that is the problem. The problem is moving all that geometry in and out of memory at a rate that the game would run smoothly. They're mis-advertising a bit by claiming unlimited detail. That is not true there is no such thing as unlimited geometry unless you're using procedural generation, all that geometry has to be stored somewhere and at the scale they're shoving that data would fill up the largest consumer-grade hard-drives thousands of times over. That geometry then has to be possible to be fetched into memory at a moments notice. Euclideon might have very fast rendering with high detail scenes but the memory footprint of their program is going to be massive no matter what, that's the problem. It's like what http://procworld.blogspot.com/ is doing (he's also incidentally written about this). He expects that his gameworld is going to be several terabytes large at less than a hundredth of the scale of Unlimited detail. His solution is to keep everything on a server to stream the geometry to the user when necessary. And as he and Notch pointed out what Euclideon is doing is not revolutionary, its being done by other people, who are far further ahead already.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4

Old vid, they changed thier name and with the other stuff posted, it just seems like a scam. People should ignore them.

i dont know so much about computer things but if you want 100000000000000000 polygons in a game world wouldnt it require a MASSIVE amount of cpu?

Sounds like scam...probably is.

http://imgur.com/g0gXt

The potential detail might be "unlimited" but our computer power sure as hell isn't. Kind of odd how he never actually said *anything* related to how well it actually runs compared to traditional polygons. Unless these voxels "atoms" somehow magically use less processing power and memory than polygons, I don't really see the point of them. I mean, there's a reason we don't have a kajillion polygons per cubic fathom, and I fail to see how replacing them with fancier shapes will change that.

Here is a new video, hi res

http://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4?hd=1

Looks legit to me

Yep. And RAM. And hard drive space. And pretty much everything else.

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.



-Taken from Notch's blog

I'm more interested in how this is supposed to make things easier for artists. Animating and UV mapping become exponentially harder the more polygons you have, and I can't imagine how they will work for a billion little points.

Im willing to risk it, after all dat dirt.

Here is what Notch Persson has to say about it: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

Looks like "voxels" are old news:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI&NR=1&feature=fvwp

It's funny, you'd think they outright said this technology works flawlessly, this technology is faster than polygons and should be put in every game immediately, and it's feasible right now, judging by the outcry on these forums. They make no mention of this at all guys. Zero, that I've seen.

Why is everyone so quick to jump on the hate bandwagon?

Sure, it may very well be a scam. To me though, it looks like a tech demo. It looks like these guys are doing their very best to get payed for their work, trying to perfect a new/maybe not new technology they think might change the way games are played in the future. What do you want them to do, just say look we have no faith in our technology??

Besides, if it's government funding they are looking for and it fails, it won't be the first ridiculous thing your government has invested in.