Holy shit ! Rendering with atoms !

Quote from twiz

The question is :At the maximum level of detail required for a game - the point where the artists no longer have to think/care about poly count - which technology will perform better? Polygon or this?

i don't think you can ask about performance at maximum details in that sense, but you can benchmark both technologies on a computer with the same specs and see which runs it better.

Quote from Rick_D

thats essentially what deferred rendering is

oh, neat. I thought it was just a lighting technique or something like that, but then the most advanced programming I've managed so far is auto-balancing data trees (and I am very proud of my trees, thank you )

edit: oh wiki says deferred lighting is a separate related thing, but I understand almost none of the upper half of the article

40 min interview with the main dude, he responds to notch, and the lack of animations in their video's.

http://vimeo.com/27522131

Polycount's been crapping over that video for a few weeks now

Carmack v2. Good to have all these nagging concerns people have expressed cleared up: yes the engine can do animation perfectly well, and yes they have solved the memory issues with an equally innovative and groundbreaking approach.

It's actually kind of nice to see this isn't just some overnight hype project that could be duplicated by competitors in a heartbeat and that actually he's been working on it for like a decade, living like a tramp and devoting his life to it like any good dedicated engine programmer.

Got respect for the man! Wish him the greatest of luck with what I personally think is gonna completely transform 3D production.

Lol he looks exactly what he sounds like.

Its good to see this realtime but you can tell that he was disconnected from the rest of the industry when he's confusing terms like LOD. Also, I'm not sure if he realises but scanning or not, it's going to take more work to put together a game (art-wise) if there's more detail involved. It's not like you can scan buildings or other large objects and just import that, also, scanning does not ever produce 100% clean output and you still have to process that. And how about games that are not reproduction of reality? It's going to be even more work than now.

Ah and one more thing, even if they found a workaround for rendering this kind of geometry then I'm not sure how they can do (proper) lighting&shadow calculation with this, everything 100% screenspace?

Buddy well they could always just "convert" a maya building or a fancy zbrush monster we are pretty good and building those right now and i am actually sure that those conversions would get a you a clean result than your "prop on a string" photo-studio they showed there

what surprises me is that not more people are bitching about ( or noticing) that clearly this thing is not made from infinite anything its only made from 20-30 really highres props instanced around ! clearly that saves memory and to be honest our games that we make and play right now are also only made from instances of 50-something highres objects. so this is kind of compatible/comparable

but yeah listening to this guy and hearing him screw up acronyms like level of "detail" is pretty cringe worthy

Quote from Buddy

Its good to see this realtime but you can tell that he was disconnected from the rest of the industry when he's confusing terms like LOD. Also, I'm not sure if he realises but scanning or not, it's going to take more work to put together a game (art-wise) if there's more detail involved. It's not like you can scan buildings or other large objects and just import that, also, scanning does not ever produce 100% clean output and you still have to process that. And how about games that are not reproduction of reality? It's going to be even more work than now.Ah and one more thing, even if they found a workaround for rendering this kind of geometry then I'm not sure how they can do (proper) lighting&shadow calculation with this, everything 100% screenspace?

model scale buildings, clay figures. i mean there's about a million different kinds of game statuettes in collector's editions, what makes you think this will be harder to use? even if there's some post processing going on (let's exclude animation for now), i'm pretty sure that workflow all around will be sped up. you won't need hours on end to sit and work on polygon counts or uv maps of any kind, you can just throw together a clay prototype in an hour or less and go from there. i'd say that's pretty bitchin.

i don't get why people are so negatively biased to something that will end up improving their work speed...? this could mean that games would get released not after 3 years of work, but half that? how is that not awesome?

I think people are worried that if this really is true, then all their skills they've spent years developing will just fly out the window and they will be obsolete, and so they get all angry about it. Billboards used to be hand painted and when ad companies started screen printing them alot of sign painters lost their jobs.

modeling scale buildings and working in clay are incredibly more time consuming than digital modeling. however, i wouldn't be opposed to it in practice, as they're great ways of producing results that you wouldn't necessarily arrive at via digital means.

i think it makes more sense that laser scanning would be more commonly used for found/mundane objects, while spec'd stuff will continue to be digitally produced...you'll just be able to skip the whole normal/tesselation shortcutting and use models straight out of mudbox/modo/whatever.

Quote from Mr. Happy

I think people are worried that if this really is true, then all their skills they've spent years developing will just fly out the window and they will be obsolete, and so they get all angry about it. Billboards used to be hand painted and when ad companies started screen printing them alot of sign painters lost their jobs.

People aren't worried for at least 10 years at a wild guess looking at that latest inteview vid, by then we'll have new consoles that will be the new home entertainment systems. So unless this tech works on those it stands little chance of being popular or at least change the market.

For example what epic did on those 3 x 580 nvidia cards simply blows anything this tech could practically do, and it has a slight chance of actually working with the new consoles.

Just for the record I hate it when graphics guys look at a floor and complain that its not detailed enough, who actually does that? perhaps 1% of your consumers? Bulletstorm looks 200x more impressive than their tech demos to date.

A reason why there are so many haters. it gives the consumer very little if anything in return, compared to that of current methods. Games would take a giant step back just so we can zoom 1 cm into the ground and marvel at the sand grains. Technology must support what the entire team (and ultimately gamers) want, not just artists.

Quote from Mr. Happy

I think people are worried that if this really is true, then all their skills they've spent years developing will just fly out the window and they will be obsolete, and so they get all angry about it. Billboards used to be hand painted and when ad companies started screen printing them alot of sign painters lost their jobs.

This will probably do for game design what CGI did for films: lots of time previously spent on producing vast, complicated set-pieces in a studio will be saved, leaving more time to focus on bringing the actual vision to life as imagined rather than being constrained by real-life complications and technical hurdles. In other words the focus becomes the art and consequently the artists' skills rather than the production which previously limited said art.

This can be good or bad depending on what exactly your job is. And it's kind of inevitable anyway that at some point production will no longer be about endless optimisation, and will instead be about pure craft.

I hear what your saying, except most big budget movies still use sets and miniatures for a vast majority of the work. They'll use CGI to enhance not build everything out of it. *with exceptions of a few movies* even in Avatar they needed to optimize their scenes to hell and back

CGI is a tool, it changed the movie world considerably but did not completely rewrite the rules. This unlimited atom stuff basically changes everything with no real benefit *yet* - they are also avoiding all the main technical problems by saying it'll work, not proving it.

I think it's great that people are doing these tests but until you have something to actually prove it you're going to get bashed to hell -a tech demo doesnt count either, must be a production proven experience ...Still you need funding somehow so throwing out massive statements is one way to go.

games that take less time to develop are bad for both consumers and investors.

and as he stated in the video interview, it is platform independent.

Quote from Sentura

games that take less time to develop are bad for both consumers and investors.

What?

Quote from Erratic

What?

that was obvious sarcasm

yeah, it's gona be really quick to work on 1x1 square meter patches of ground for an entire game! it's one thing having the possibility to add detail, it's another to make it happen without 5 year project cycles.