Euclideon
Koruyo
AUT Join Date: 2009-06-06 Member: 67724Members, Reinforced - Shadow
AUT Join Date: 2009-06-06 Member: 67724Members, Reinforced - Shadow
<div class="IPBDescription">Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology</div><div align='center'><center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/00gAbgBu8R4"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/00gAbgBu8R4" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center>
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&list=UUPaIcvTAcRrA" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4...t=UUPaIcvTAcRrA</a></div>
:O Wonder how it will look in a year or two... (atm it looks like there are no dynamic[moving] things)
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&list=UUPaIcvTAcRrA" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4...t=UUPaIcvTAcRrA</a></div>
:O Wonder how it will look in a year or two... (atm it looks like there are no dynamic[moving] things)
Comments
<center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KSvptZCJGyI"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KSvptZCJGyI" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center>
Seems they are at it again on the /v/ board. Here are some quotes that sound reasonable.
Edit: <!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->>physics and animation
>detailed models are made up of a million atoms
>they need to be moved every frame
>60 million calculations per second if you're deforming the atoms with bones like modern animation
>alternatively need to have the frames for the animation predone so you have a million points times however many frames which means a lot of ram is wasted
>then any physics calculations at the very least collision detection which isn't going to happen unless you're using simplified polygonal version of the enemy or whatever
>multiplied by however many enemies or whatever are on screen<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Engine Dev here. In modern polygon engines, we use skeletons for animations. These are simple representations of the skeleton of a model, and each vertex in the mesh is linked to a bone. When we calculate the position of a vertex on the GPU, we simply combine the matrices of the bones according to how much weight each bone has for that particular vertex. This is EXTREMELY cheap on a modern GPU. And the skeleton updating is also cheap and done on the CPU. Before GPU skinning, we used vertex animation which means every vertex stores its position for every frame. This was fine in the past when models had hundreds of polygons, but it's incredibly memory intensive as you have to store all the data for every frame. Animation with this "tech" would have to be like vertex animation. It would require inordinate amounts of data. Also, anyone wondering why this island is made of cubes? Because it's all instance cubes, you cannot represent a 1km x 1km heightmap with voxels of that density.
Don't care if noone believes I'm an actual professional engine dev, just thought I'd shed light for anyone who cares. Oh and, this technology is bull###### btw, hence why they've attracted no real artists or investors.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Provided this is real to begin with.
<a href="http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam" target="_blank">http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam</a>
He's not very positive about it. (To say the least)
Provided this is real to begin with.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Animation is just one of many problems with their system.
If you look at their "island" everything is boxed off into cubes, and the cubes are copy pasted in orientations that make them appear to be unique, but they are actually many four or five templates copied many times. This is how they get that huge area populated, they don't actually have much world data. They haven't shown that it's actually possible to make a "realistic" environment and store it on memory. If the model data alone for an environment is 3 gigs, you can't actually use that in a game.
Also: I'm not exactly sure, but renders tend to be pretty low level technology... I'm ambivalent on how realistic it would be to use two very different rendering technologies in the same scene. It's not on the same level as "sprites and polygonal models" because sprites are trivially posted onto the side of a polygonal object and then just rendered into that polygon. I'm not willing to say it'd be impossible though.
I don't feel like Googling, you guys can do that. And yes I do realize by typing this line I could have very well Googled the thing, but here we are at the end of this sentence and my stance on the subject of me going onto Google to do some Googling on this subject hasn't changed one bit...
I don't feel like Googling, you guys can do that. And yes I do realize by typing this line I could have very well Googled the thing, but here we are at the end of this sentence and my stance on the subject of me going onto Google to do some Googling on this subject hasn't changed one bit...<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
From notch's post:
"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: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw"" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw"</a>
:P
I think polygon lovers consider voxels to be an annoying fly you just can't swat down. Voxels refuse to die. For the same reason that finding the "secret" to intelligent programs refuses to die. You feel like you're SO close to something special. We're almost there! We're almost to the brink of evolution!
Soon, voxel based games will have full physically deformable environments and each bit of matter will react in it's own way and the intelligence in it- oh, the intelligence!
And we'll get there; just don't make the mistake of thinking that you're absolutely sure of what it will be made of when we do get there. Hell, we may be rendering some kind of entirely new geometry. Kick Euclid to the curb.
Provided this is real to begin with.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Nearly everything you see is animated in modern games, they put lots and lots of animated textures, foliage, particle effects, lighting, shader effects, everything. A general rule is that as much of the screen as possible should have movement in it, because real life is never static.
You either render with voxels or you render with polygons, trying to do both is like hybrid cars, you end up carrying around twice as much engine and you waste a lot of time carrying the extra weight and shifting between the two, it's also twice as easy to break and takes twice as long to build.
<a href="http://www.tigsource.com/2011/04/15/ace-of-spades-beta-0-26/" target="_blank">http://www.tigsource.com/2011/04/15/ace-of-spades-beta-0-26/</a>
<a href="http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/11/22/exploring-unlimited-detail.aspx?PostPageIndex=1" target="_blank">http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/arc...PostPageIndex=1</a>
Looks like Game Informer got to take a peak at it and its not full of ###### like everyone claimed.
According to the article, the engine is actually so good it <i>doesn't even use a GPU</i>
Well, GPUs are designed to do floating point calculations quickly. That's different from a classic CPU which is for integers and first order logic. It's the hardware pipelines for DirectX and OpenGL on the card that are bent towards polygons, not the GPU itself.
In the same sense that an FPU is a specialized CPU. :P Don't get me wrong, modern GPUs are definitely designed to push lots of parallel floating point calculations and memory manipulations that certainly assist in rendering with polygons. It's just that the video card itself is pretty much it's own computer. It can be used as a supercomputer to get teraflops or petaflops of computation power, and I'm sure you could make it run a word processor if you really wanted. It's when you start talking about shaders designed to be programmed and invoked from OpenGL or DirectX code that it starts to be the 'enemy' of voxels.
It's really a silly distinction on my part; basically when you say GPU you mean "the video card as a whole that is meant to display polygons quickly."
So that chip, whatever we want to call it, is basically a variant of FPU?