Future game engines? Death of the polygon

[George]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4#

 

[CosmicCastaway]

As they said in the video it is still probably a ways off, but when this eventually does come around to developers the results could be astounding.

[Autosaver]

Something smells fishy, and a lot of this sounds like a lot of hype. Why is this being shown by a small group of people. How come ATI or NVidia isn't showing us this? (And they are what.. a huge group of incredibly talented people?) I'll have to wait and see until they finish this.

[George]

Seems like its pretty possible, according to John Carmack, but not soon. As we already know. Also he said on twitter there will be production issues. Also they haven't showed how animation is done on there, just static items. There is a reason for that, having realistic animated things is a bitch.

http://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422720

[Waffle]

Eh, all my gaming cacti had spines on each end. Not sure where this guy gets his cacti.

[Sharky]

Something smells fishy, and a lot of this sounds like a lot of hype. Why is this being shown by a small group of people. How come ATI or NVidia isn't showing us this? (And they are what.. a huge group of incredibly talented people?) I'll have to wait and see until they finish this.

Because the technology is being developed by a small group of people?

[Autosaver]

Because the technology is being developed by a small group of people?

The question is WHY is it being developed by a small group of people and not a huge expert division like Nvidia? Or is Nvidia already working on something similar to this?

Wasn't there another type of "unlimited graphics" thing a while back? Wasn't it called Vertex.. something? (If anyone remembers, tell me.)

[George]

These guys introduced their theory about this in like 2003, it might be them you are thinking about. They are trying to get it off the ground and actually show it working.

Unreal engine is made by a small group of people. Epic wasn't that big, till like Gears of War.

[Waffle]

Since when do uncreative corporations with excess employees innovate? They just churn out the same thing and buy up projects, nothing else.

[Autosaver]

I knew something was fishy!

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.

posted 3 days ago

I knew this wasn't anything new and someone else did something similar. (Which is why I mentioned in my other post that I remember seeing a video similar to this a while back) Oh, and I was right about it being a load of hype. But Notch is right, we should still be excited over the whole voxels idea.

[Waffle]

Voxels are the way of the future. You cannot really deny it. Just accepted it.