This is absurd. Created 13 years ago2011-09-03 06:35:07 UTC by kraken

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=channel_video_title

This company is claiming that they can run a particle rendering system that has no particle count limitations.

How do you even store that much data practically?

Finally.

You don't have any doubts Dragos?

I always knew we will get rid of those stupid triangles one day. I'm pretty sure this is real.

quite epic. By the time i get into the games industry maybe this technology will already be released :D, but I'm wondering how those things will be runnable on a normal pc, they never mentioned how it works or how they planned to make it work on these pcs.

This is really old.

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.

That's the point I was trying to make Archie, numbers always make an argument seem more valid. After reading that though, my belief that this is a load of crap has been reinforced a fair bit.

I love my polygons

Plus, everything is static in that video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6Fdc This is a little surprising, it look quite legitimate. Head to about 23:00 for what you want to see.

You stupid lazy bitches. Of course you wouldn't understand how it works. It took them years to do that.

What is that sound?

That is the sound of a thousand lazy bitches.

Regarding topic, this has been discussed to hell on other forums and the end line is there is a lot not shown like animation, dynamic lighting, shaders etc and for a reason.

Damn, if this is real, than explain how do they render all those little atom shitz.

Watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6Fdc

Now I pretty much understand how it works. I'm really impressed. It's simple and genial. Turns out I was right: it's all about efficiency. Now my GTX 580 will be enough till I die.

This is not absurd. This is genius.

It it indeed genius.

First time I saw this when it first was announced I didn't believe it but they have me convinced.

Now I'm only not sure if this is hell or heaven for artists

What Archie said.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam and http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8423008802/but-notch-its-not-a-scam sums it up nicely.

Particle rendering in realtime and without limits? No way freaking hell.

Just watched that whole video. It's certainly quite convincing in many ways and I'm glad they addressed specific criticisms, for example those said by Notch.

The guy's a total twat, though. Like the sort of person I imagine Crollo being in real life; making really awkward jokes and having a very elitist air about him.

Also, seriously, the only time they'll ever let someone in to their company to have a peek, and it's a single-camera one-man operation with the interview skills of a stick of celery?
I've seen better produced and edited videos by the class of 11 year olds I teach it to.

Anyway, I think triangles are really enough to make a great game without too much realism and physics. Yet way easier and more simple to make. However, I'm very optimistic about combination of both technologies.

His voice... I want to hurt people!

I'd rather listen to Carmack, who's been in the graphics business for 20 years (and is a fucking genius in the graphics field), as opposed to Notch, who made one simplistic 3D game in Java.

He doesn't disagree with Notch, but he has some more sensible comments on the tech in general.

"No chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now."

"I do not think non-polygonal renderers will be the winning choice in the next five years, but someone will probably have a go at it and learn something."

"You can real time ray trace a static world on high end hardware today as a demo, but there is a long path between a demo and something that is competitive with rasterization in a real product. My plan for such technologies has always been to emit a depth buffer as well as color from the voxel/point cloud renderer and continue to use existing technologies for characters/particles/etc."

What I still don't understand is how they stored the 32 trillion coloured atoms, has this been addressed in the videos? I didn't hear anything about it.

Also I'd like to hear more from Carmack, in that quote above he hasn't really addressed any actual reasons as to why a demo is so far off a finished product, suitable for games.

Apparently the demo from Euclideon doesn't use the GPU at all, and is completely software rendered.

As I said it took them years to do that so of course we wouldn't understand it so easily. Anyway, I guess the trick has something to do with procedural generation. Have you ever seen those massive demos or games which fit into a few kilobyte file?

Those demos are compressed assembler code if i remember correctly, and they call on pure Open Gl rendering.

@Kraken: You asked for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hapCuhAs1nA&t=17m13s

Text transcript below:

Okay, for one thing, I think it’s important to separate the notion of infinite detail and Voxels. You can have Voxels [that are not infinitely detailed] because many of the Voxel engines that I’ve written have been at finite coarse levels of detail. The fact that you can instance detail in [Voxels]... in may ways it sounds awesomely cool: “infinite detail,” but if we look at all of the trends that we’ve been doing and Rage epitomizes in many ways, procedurally generated detail is usually not what you want. This has been an argument going back decades: “now is the year of procedurally generated textures and geometry.” We’ve heard that for a decade and it never has come true. What has won is being able to manage the real data that we want. Procedural-ism is really just a truly crappy form of data compression. You know, you have the data that you really want, and procedural-ism makes you something that might resemble what you really want, but it’s a form of extraordinarily lossy data compression that lets you produce something there.

And that really is the problem with the voxels. Infinitive detail is basically procedural-ism and you can do that with polygons, voxels, atoms, splats, whatever. They are tied together now with people talking about the recent demo that came out, but they are really orthogonal topics. I don’t think the notion of infinite detail is actually all that important. It is more important to be able to get the broad strokes of the artistic vision in there, and if you take uninspired content and look at it at the molecular level, it is still uninspired content. It’s not really going to make a big difference. What is potentially useful about voxels is that it allow you to access them in a certain way that may be more efficient than say a rise pipeline of dicing polygons, doing displacement mapping, and things like that. They are both ways to give huge amounts of geometric detail, which is obviously the next frontier after we uniquely texture everything. We want to uniquely “geometrify” everything. We all want to go there, but it’s also important to realize that I was showing MegaTexture demos five years ago. It took five years for it to turn into a production quality game, and you could make a cool, flashy demo of like “look, isn’t this amazing, we can stamp down stuff and everything looks totally different? There’s no tiling, and we can use procedural information to generate all of this,” but there is a huge amount of work that goes into building a robust production quality system that you can build real game worlds with.

I’ve revisited voxels at least a half dozen times in my career, and they’ve never quite won. I am confident in saying now that ray tracing of some form will eventually win because there are too many things that we’ve suffered with rasterization for, especially for shadows and environment mapping. We live with hacks that ray tracing can let us do much better. For years I was thinking that traditional analytical ray tracing intersecting with an analytic primitive couldn’t possibly be the right solution, and it would have to be something like voxels or metaballs or something. I’m less certain of that now because the analytic tracing is closer than I thought it would be. I think it’s an interesting battle between potentially ray tracing into dense polygonal geometry versus ray tracing into voxels and things like that. The appeal of voxels, like bitmaps, [is that] a lot of things can be done with filtering operations. You can stream more things in and there is still very definitely appeals about that. You start to look at them as little light field transformers rather than hard surfaces that you bounce things off of. I still wouldn’t say that the smart money is on voxels because lots of smart people have been trying it for a long time. It’s possible now with our current, modern generation graphics cards to do incredible full screen voxel rendering into hyper-detailed environments, and especially as we look towards the next generation I’m sure some people would take a stab at it. I think it’s less likely to be something that is a corner stone of a top-of-the-line triple A title. It’s in the mix but not a forgone conclusion right now.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere about a voxel engine that uses a search-like algorithm. I don't know if this engine demo was the case, but it compared the algorithm to what a search engine like google uses: it doesn't store millions upon millions of website read to be accessed, rather, it "searches" for what you want to view at the moment.
In theory, that means that world of trillions of particles can exist in a simulated virtual world. In practice, the world will be dynamically rendered.

It's much like in quantum theory probably: you observe it, it exists. You don't, it doesn't( might be wrong about this, I know quantum theory refers to changing state of a quantum scale object if observed but meh, you understand me).

Let's wait for quantum computers though.

@Carmack

I find that image disturbing. This is not ED.

I just searched head explode. No idea where the image originated from.

The movie Scanners iirc.

Edit: Yup