Unlimited Detail

I look forward to yet another WATMM controversial video game technology debate.

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

Hype or the real deal?

heh, i was going to post this yesterday.

check out their other video, too.

http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/videos.html

Ready to get conned ?

"it's the end of geometry"

oh well, that's a shame, nice knowing it tho

Looks good to me, though I'm optimistic sucker (no not like that you dirty boy) !

yet, I will always love vectors

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinteresting

yeah, not sure if this is vapor or not. but i'd love to see polygons die.

nice. sounds like the idTech5 engine

If this goes through it would be like having flying cars or something.

Artists will have so much more freedom, then again...more freedom always brings more problems.

i like how that guy is attempting to demolish the graphics card industry. he should hire a bodyguard.

its inevitable.

Hmmm. Dunno - seems like it would require a very powerful CPU to "search" for the point cloud data quickly enough to render a scene. There's still texture resolution as well.

wow

I would be impressed except in the "unlimited detail" demos nothing is moving and it's a lot of repeated shapes. I want to see it work with animation and lots of varying shapes.

  On 3/11/2010 at 10:44 PM, patternoverlap said:

I would be impressed except in the "unlimited detail" demos nothing is moving and it's a lot of repeated shapes. I want to see it work with animation and lots of varying shapes.

true.dat

  On 3/11/2010 at 9:50 PM, affliction said:

 

its inevitable.

glad i'm not the only one who was thinking that.

Hmmm, for a company touting how awesome their graphics are that website they run sure looks like a piece of shit. The logo looks like it was compressed to 1996 standards.

Seems nothing more than branded voxel technology? Voxels are incredibly impractical, creating a game entirely out of voxel data instead of triangles, textures and shaders is madness. Let alone animating all those points. I don't think this technology will get more important as memory bandwidth and CPU power rises. It's just way too hard to work with.

the detail has to come from somewhere. getting it from somewhere costs CPU, Memory, etc.

what was that venture capital truism? "Never invest in anything that violates the laws of physics?"

  On 3/12/2010 at 12:30 AM, Ego said:

Seems nothing more than branded voxel technology? Voxels are incredibly impractical, creating a game entirely out of voxel data instead of triangles, textures and shaders is madness. Let alone animating all those points. I don't think this technology will get more important as memory bandwidth and CPU power rises. It's just way too hard to work with.

he claims an alternative to voxel

it is a new style of technology as far as I know, the way that it searches through the billions of cloud points like a good search engine searches through billions of pages for at the moment relevancy is pretty interesting.

like some have said this technology would probably completely fall apart with detailed animations, physics etc.

the Id Tech 5 engine looks like an actual practical approach with a similar idea

  On 3/12/2010 at 12:45 AM, Blanket Fort Collapse said:

it is a new style of technology as far as I know, the way that it searches through the billions of cloud points like a good search engine searches through billions of pages for at the moment relevancy is pretty interesting.

  On 3/12/2010 at 12:49 AM, hahathhat said:

  On 3/12/2010 at 12:45 AM, Blanket Fort Collapse said:

it is a new style of technology as far as I know, the way that it searches through the billions of cloud points like a good search engine searches through billions of pages for at the moment relevancy is pretty interesting.

 

explain the facepalm.... Excuse me I'm hungover and cant recall seeing any tech demo's for (graphical rendering) engines that were same and especially on that scale.

  On 3/12/2010 at 12:31 AM, hahathhat said:

  On 3/12/2010 at 12:30 AM, Ego said:

Seems nothing more than branded voxel technology? Voxels are incredibly impractical, creating a game entirely out of voxel data instead of triangles, textures and shaders is madness. Let alone animating all those points. I don't think this technology will get more important as memory bandwidth and CPU power rises. It's just way too hard to work with.

 

he claims an alternative to voxel

His attempts to make it scale doesn't mean it isn't voxel. It looks to me his "compression" and "search" algorithms are largely based around creating a large number of instances of the same object so he can keep memory usage down. Voxels are a total game-changer. You can't just put a shader on something, it needs to be defined in the voxel data. You can't just rig the model and expect all the points to know how to behave. It's completely unworkable. Even if they'd be able to develop tools for it, the overhead to just render a simple surface is ridiculous.

There is no real need for this in gaming anyway. Polycounts will only go up and shaders can add more than enough detail. Look at the most realistic renders today. All polygons. New real-time lightning algorithms are probably the next big step since programmable shaders. Crytek is doing some great stuff with real-time global illumination. Much more important than trying to reinvent the wheel to eliminate slightly visible triangles.