Making Graphics In Games '100,000 Times' Better?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKUuUvDSXk4

http://www.ausgamers.com/news/read/3093969

I've been following every of their videos just hoping that their technology isn't full of caveats and it'll end up becoming pretty much vapour-ware.

jazz

Looks like it has potential, but I don't understand why they don't hire someone with an eye for design to do their demo reel because that island is hella tiling.

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:08 PM, BCM said:

jazz

This is nu-jazz (unless of course it got posted yesterday that is ...)

was posted last year i think...unless this is new, new jazz.

Yeah it's an update of what they've been up to since last year.

ah ok. i retract my former jazz insinuation.

Cool if it works but they never show any animation, they don't even talk about it. Must be a tool to make pretty non-moving things. Anyway, that guys voice is annoying, kept thinking he was gonna break into Arnie.

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:19 PM, BCM said:

ah ok. i retract my former jazz insinuation.

'BCM's Jazz Insinuation' would be a good name for a (jazz)band

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:20 PM, Pennywise said:

Cool if it works but they never show any animation

Yeah that's the one thing I'm concerned about. The whole thing seems pretty static at the moment .....

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:30 PM, Stoppit said:

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:19 PM, BCM said:

ah ok. i retract my former jazz insinuation.

 

'BCM's Jazz Insinuation' would be a good name for a (jazz)band

*jots it down*

ok, so the objects are made up of point clouds, unlike polygons which are...also point clouds?

I'm blown away (by those rocks)

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:39 PM, mcbpete said:

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:20 PM, Pennywise said:

Cool if it works but they never show any animation

Yeah that's the one thing I'm concerned about. The whole thing seems pretty static at the moment .....

  Quote

(Yes grumpy forum people, we do have animation, but you'll just have to be patient.)

  On 8/2/2011 at 3:07 PM, ericsosh said:

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:39 PM, mcbpete said:

  On 8/2/2011 at 2:20 PM, Pennywise said:

Cool if it works but they never show any animation

Yeah that's the one thing I'm concerned about. The whole thing seems pretty static at the moment .....

 

  Quote

(Yes grumpy forum people, we do have animation, but you'll just have to be patient.)

 

Be very patient because it might take 20 years or so. lol

He lost all credibility at "cactuses".

If they can show more variation in that insane amount of "detail" and also get (like has already been mentioned) some animation and collision detection going then I'll be more interested. I'm guessing this would make production time for games a good bit longer as well.

  On 8/2/2011 at 3:40 PM, umop_apisdn said:

He lost all credibility at "cactuses".

yeah, everybody knows it's 'cactises'

Oh man, a hundred thousand times. It's going to look a lot better than reality.

I don't see what all the fuss is about. It's basically the same as poligons, but impossible to animate.

Graphics don't need improvement, gameplay does

  On 8/2/2011 at 4:13 PM, ThatSpanishGuy said:

Graphics don't need improvement, gameplay does

This, my dear, is very true !

I remember their video from last year, it's great to see how far they've come. This is all very exciting...

Hmmm.... his accent and his way of speaking sounds like he's taking the piss... constantly. Like the whole thing has a sarcastic undertone.

maybe he's just australian?

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:

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:

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:

And there’s more:

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.

NOTCH