Unlimited Detail

[Gloglebag]

Yes/No?

http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/

[Defrag]

It looks similar to what Carmack was talking about (sparse voxel octrees). Note that Carmack didn't sound like he was going to eat himself when explaining it, though. He was very cautious and stresses the caveats / challenges associated it while also reinforcing the case for triangles. As usual, there is no magic bullet, so my money is on the "unlimited detail" video being implementation similar to what Carmack has already explained. If Carmack doesn't predict the end of graphics cards any time soon, then I'm happy to go along with him rather than this other dude.

Tech demo of sparse voxel octrees:

It looks kickass, but it has many limitations. Besides, geometry fidelity is no longer the final frontier IMO. We can now throw enough polys at stuff that it's not too bad -- this is why we're seeing a lot of new research going into screen space effects and advanced shading models rather than just blitzing through more and more polys. In short, I highly doubt this company's technology will be going mainstream in games. I don't think it's a coincidence that all of the environments in the video were both static and ugly -- the caveats aren't taken into account and there'll be a lack of decent tools. Is anyone going to switch over to some new fangled tech if it produces inferior results compared to what we've got right now?

It's like ray tracing -- people always show 30 reflective spheres in tech demos and people go "OMG!!11 look at that! It's ace!". Where does the rubber hit the road when it comes to games, though? Answer: It hasn't. There are no ray traced games that look half as good as triangle-based rendering because triangle-based rendering is well established and produces good results. I'm betting this 'silver bullet' turns out to be useful in some circumstances but that's about it.

[Sentura]

doesn't sound far fetched from a technical perspective, although i am wondering what running time their algorithms must have and how they got them this low.

if this is real, i think it'll pose a much greater challenge for designers, however, especially in the creation of modular variation. if you can't use two trees that look the same because they look the same, you're going to design a lot of trees...

[Taylor]

Heh, no. He just wants some investment money. Though someone needs to release a game with a pyramid of pictured giraffes in it, maybe they could do it for the new Nintendos or Sonys.

[Defrag]

My favourite bit was when he said "our roof tile has more detail in it than their entire level", while neglecting to mention that the 6 year old game looked better o_o.

[Minos]

Nice programmer art there

[Jetsetlemming]

So do you place those billions of dots manually, or does the "IT'S LIKE GOOGLE GOOGLE MAKES BILLIONS WE'LL MAKE BILLIONS INVEST IN US" engine just sort of generate them on its own.

[cyberjunkie]

Very impressive if true and possible. It would've been nice if he gave us an example of what would be needed for this to work a completely new kind of graphics card or would say, a decent dual-core processor do..?

[Warby]

maybe its just my machine but the video looked like ti has really terrible framerate i

that said was DEMANDING an atom based game engine since ... well longer than i can remember ! so i want this shit badly

and i bet all the "detail" is still derived from polygon based zbrush models and stuff :D

[Gloglebag]

I hope so. Polygons are great to work with when designing. I have no idea how I would go about modeling in 3d with tiny little dots. So hopefully polygon models get converted to those funny points.

[Pericolos0]

It probably isn't the way to go for ultra realistic detail, seems like realtime tesselation has the edge atm, but man I always wanted to do something with a voxel(/point-cloud) based engine. Where are all the digging/building/crazy material manipulation voxel games? The tech has been there for years, check out ken silverman's demos: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap03.htm

This stuff could probably run on a nintendo wii, maybe even iphone!

[Gloglebag]

You know I always wanted an invite to the SC2 beta, but someone hasn't sent me one despide a friendly pm.

[Sentura]

You know I always wanted an invite to the SC2 beta, but someone hasn't sent me one despide a friendly pm.

at any rate passive aggressive outbursts are bound to get you one sooner or later, i'm sure...

[Pericolos0]

You know I always wanted an invite to the SC2 beta, but someone hasn't sent me one despide a friendly pm.

cry me a river

[Jetsetlemming]

You know I always wanted an invite to the SC2 beta, but someone hasn't sent me one despide a friendly pm.

cry me a river

Ice burns like those must be a pretty nice benefit of the job, that and gloating about being able to play Diablo 3 already