Unlimited Graphics in Games

[Cysticcraze]

Has anyone posted about this yet? I think this is in the right section... thoughts?

http://www.moddb.com/groups/editors/new ... s-in-games

[SotaPoika]

I think I have seen that here already before. I remember seeing video about "unlimited graphics" where objects consist of point/vertexes only.

Also, when they get something not so artificial looking, I start becoming interested. Until then, I stick with polygons.

[stoopdapoop]

we're talking about it in the randomthread right now. Not sure why it's suddenly so popular, it's quite old.

Basically, it's just a bunch of hype describing an impractical technique that's being sensationalized so that it can get funding.

[Jangalomph]

Which inturn came to the conclusion its a scam, And disappointed me.

[Zecrah]

I don't think it's pointless. But I also don't think it's currently any use. But I still believe that people trying different, not necessarily new, techniques and approaches to graphics are important. It may seem useless and pointless and a 'scam' now, but so has the majority of all new technology in the past.

[TheDanishMaster]

At least Valve has an excuse to delay Ep3, "We are updating Source to use Unlimited Graphics!"


I just don't get how greater detail can run greater?

[nub]

If I recall, the original tech demo they were showing at some conferance had a guy narrating the whole time.

He mentioned that this tech only renders the "points" on models based on the number of pixels your monitor's resolution has, so I guess that's how it runs so well for being so detailed. I think they called it Point Cloud Data or something crazy like that.

I don't see this becoming anything big at all, at least not for several more years. It would take a new line of GPUs that are made for this new system rather than the polygon system, and every studio out there uses polygons (well, unless they make 2D games) so I highly doubt they would want to move away from polygons. It would take a massive amount of effort to get something so new and different to become the new standard, let alone useful.

Besides, I'm sure Nvidia or ATI will buy out whatever company is working on it if it does start to become something big. Just like Aegia and their PhysX technology (which I find shitty, to be quite honest).

[poisonic]

this unlimited gfx concept is a bit stupid.... you dont here them about the wasted cube's.... its a SCAM to get fast money..... hmmm it only renders the pixels of your monitor hahahaha pfffff..... realy bullshit if it worked that way i t would be very fast.... but i doubt it.....

[LordDz]

I read they had trouble with animations etc, can't you use this system for the world, and use normal graphics for animated, dynamic objects?

[ScarT]

Sparse voxel octrees store voxel data in an octree. Long story short this can't be animated.

The developer admitted that he has been working in a vacuum for the last 10+ years - so he knows very little about how current renderer's work.
(Which was very apparent during a Q&A) It appeared that the demos used DX8 to do blitting to the screen. It was also stated that the demos were single core and written in plain non-optimized C, so someone who knew what they were doing could make it run much, much faster. (was a bit distressing to learn he did not know what a memory cache was however)

[nub]

You still have to admit it's pretty cool to look at.

If I recall, the tech demo was running entirely on software and not hardware. I say it was running ok considering that.

[pk_hunter]

Quite surprised at this overall negative response from you guys. Why are some of you treating this as a scam rather than a neat, innovative idea?
It's certainly not practical at the moment, but I think it's quite exciting to see companies trying to break the mould a bit. The videos sensationalise it, sure, but what company wouldn't want to grab media attention?

[Dr. Delta]

Quite surprised at this overall negative response from you guys. Why are some of you treating this as a scam rather than a neat, innovative idea?
It's certainly not practical at the moment, but I think it's quite exciting to see companies trying to break the mould a bit. The videos sensationalise it, sure, but what company wouldn't want to grab media attention?

He's presenting it as if it's a game engine, yet all the stuff he's showing can't be animated. So his game is gonna be rather static... :')

[MNM]

Text based game with insanely high res images?

[marks]

Why are some of you treating this as a scam rather than a neat, innovative idea?

Because it is.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

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.

...

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.

...

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.