[RevTorA]

I was admittedly slightly skeptic when I first saw this. I thought that the year of silence meant it truly was a joke or they reached an impassable roadblock; something like that. But after watching this video I was floored. I am quite honestly very excited for the future of the gaming industry. Imagine what you can pull off with this system!



So what do you guys think? To be honest, I'm almost worried for graphics card manufacturers and nVidia/ATI. If this system is real, whoever gets to these guys first will basically ruin the other company. GFX Monopoly? :\

Edit: Check out 22:00 if you want to skip right to the real time demo... simply incredible

This post has been edited by RevTorA: 28 September 2011 - 10:51 AM

[Gorian]

so, first, links to Notch's (minecraft creator) reply to this:
http://notch.tumblr....7075/its-a-scam
http://notch.tumblr....-its-not-a-scam

pasted here:

Spoiler

Quote

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.c...h?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.c...h?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.c...h?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw

And there’s more: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.c...h?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.c...h?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.

...

Why it’s a scam:

* They pretend like they’re doing something new and unique, but in reality a lot of people are researching this. There are a lot of known draw-backs to doing this.
* They refuse to address the known flaws. They don’t show non-repeated architecture, they don’t show animation, they don’t show rotated geometry, and they don’t show dynamic lighting.
* They invent new terminology and use superlatives and plenty of unverifiable claims.
* They say it’s a “search algorithm”. That’s just semantics to confuse the issue. Sparse voxel octrees is a search algorithm to do very fast ray casting in a voxel space.
* They seem to be doing some very impressive voxel rendering stuff, which could absolutely be used to make very interesting games, but it’s not as great as they claim it is. The only reason I can see for them misrepresenting it this bad is that I assume they’re looking for funding and/or to get bought up.

If these guys were being honest with the drawbacks and weaknesses of their system, I’d be their biggest fan. As it is now, it’s almost like they’re trying NOT to be trustworthy.

All this said, voxels are amazing. So is raytracing and raycasting. As computers get more powerful, and storage gets faster and cheaper, we will see amazing things happen.

And a final word to the engineers who worked on this: Great job, I am impressed! But please tell your marketing department to stop lying.

I happen to agree with Notch, he has good logic

This post has been edited by Gorian: 30 September 2011 - 12:46 PM

[RevTorA]

Unfortunately, that was BEFORE the real time demonstration... I agreed with Notch 100% until I saw that. Did you even watch?