Unlimited Detail

[Istrebitel]

Animation is not the problem here (there are demos about that, Notch had link in his blog), it is the storage. Do you understand that each of those "unlimited detail" dots has to use some bytes to store. Each one has three colors and alpha. However you simplify that, its still going to take some bytes. But even if we'd talk one byte. Now imagine how many dots its going to take to model something like a Deathwing, or a Rogue, or just a Tree in "unlimited detail" (meaning you can never see the detail limit with your eyes). And how many trees and entities are there in a single level that has to be loaded into memory? That is why it cannot prevail. Notch explained that in detail, and he never admitted being wrong about those calculations, he only said that he may not be sure about what kind of engine they are using, and being wrong about animation, if i'm correct.

[Imnick]

Want it to be real, expect it's not, can't be arsed to look it up either way because I'll find out when it does or does not start being used for games.

[Deleted]

Animation is not the problem here (there are demos about that, Notch had link in his blog), it is the storage. Do you understand that each of those "unlimited detail" dots has to use some bytes to store. Each one has three colors and alpha. However you simplify that, its still going to take some bytes. But even if we'd talk one byte. Now imagine how many dots its going to take to model something like a Deathwing, or a Rogue, or just a Tree in "unlimited detail" (meaning you can never see the detail limit with your eyes). And how many trees and entities are there in a single level that has to be loaded into memory? That is why it cannot prevail. Notch explained that in detail, and he never admitted being wrong about those calculations, he only said that he may not be sure about what kind of engine they are using, and being wrong about animation, if i'm correct.

Notch outright said it was a scam - even after John said it was possible.

[Cyanotical]

Not sure if serious... But if you are... The lead programmer of id Software, done some major 3D graphics work like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake etc... I'm fairly sure that the guy who basically responsible for everybody having a 3D accelerated video card knows something about the technology and what's possible.

a.k.a. the father of all modern 3d games and first person shooters



anyway, i have seen the videos, i even had one on my youtube favorites list for a while, i thought it was a nifty idea, but when i sat down and thought about it, i realized that point cloud rendering will never work, at least not with current technology, as others have said, there isnt enough storage on a home computer to hold the point data, you are talking zettabytes of data for a game like BF3,

and there is also the matter of processing the data, the UD method is to search for the points needed to display, ie your resolution, but it doesnt take into account that you need to also process the non rendered data, the point has to exist in order to be searched for

its not the GPU that is the limiting factor, its the CPU, and we just don't have the CPU power to do it, we have 2 generations left before current computer technology is obsolete and no longer able to improve, and i highly doubt that any of them will reach the t-flops needed to track the all the points

[Istrebitel]

2 clampy
Yes, he said it was a scam, then he corrected himself that he just thinks they do not address several problems that are obviously going to prevent that from working. It was incorrect to cal it a scam, but it wasn't correct to call it "future tech unlimited detail right now!" either.

[Deleted]

2 clampy
Yes, he said it was a scam, then he corrected himself that he just thinks they do not address several problems that are obviously going to prevent that from working. It was incorrect to cal it a scam, but it wasn't correct to call it "future tech unlimited detail right now!" either.

Once again, watch the video.
He goes through every one of Notch's claims and throws it into the water.

The guy seems to know what he is talking about, and it seems like they have a good direction, it will be fun to see where it goes. They even show real time footage of the demo that we saw, on an average laptop, and it ran 15-25 FPS "without using the graphics card".

[dicertification]

Hardocp's interview with Euclideon.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/...dell_interview

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

[Radaney]

Notch made a good twitter post response to this if I recall?

But hey if it does work, good for us. I don't care either way.

[Deleted]

Honestly, while i agree it'd require too much space for a decent game, it could be possible to make maps that use a simple 1-0 system, similar to binary where 0 represents off (a particle doesn't exist there) and 1 represents on (a particle is there), with map dimensions and such being defined as separate instructions. Perhaps compile it so that it's smaller in size, and then do something similar to what WoW says it does and load areas dynamically via streaming threads. Perhaps even go as far as using standard methods of creating terrain (i.e. polygon-based) to use as a mesh of sorts, as well as providing a lower quality but still acceptable level of detail for long range view as well.

There's a few ways it could be done, but honestly, it's not that developers aren't willing to increase quality and go batshit crazy with current tech, it's that most systems simply can't handle that alongside actual gameplay overhead. Even BF3 has held back to allow it to run on a wide enough range of systems. One consideration is VRAM and how limited we are with it. We can't go using 2048x2048 size textures that are high enough quality for medium sized objects, there's simply not enough VRAM to do that with a whole map.

One other thing to remember is that a lot of developers scale textures up to match objects. Look at the walls of Orgrimmar in WoW, there's an absolutely perfect example. What might have been a 256x256 texture, get's scaled to more than double it's size. WoW has to run on a lot of systems, but because of this, they've severely limited the size of textures which hinders the graphic quality in a lot of areas. They've worked to correct this in some areas, but some places are still really lacking, much to the point the most i've seen is 850mb VRAM usage and that's including about 150MB of ultra shadow detail -- i think it was in AV during the "Road of Death" chokepoint near Stonehearth, so with essentially 60+ characters + NPC's, vram usage isn't that bad in that regard.

So, while the tech can work, it'll take some compromises if we want to see it on current systems. Even 1 such as my own with 8TB of storage would struggle to hold even a small full details particle-built map. If a game goes above 25GB usage, it's either a triple A title, or an exception to the rule. If it happens to be neither, then it's just a badly optimised piece of crud.

Not to rain on your parade, but in the video he shows the area on an average laptop that isn't even using the graphics card. So if he isn't talking out of his ass it won't be that much more demanding.

[Drunkenvalley]

The problem is that this doesn't just sound too good to be true; it sounds so far-fetched, and the source material showcased is extremely picky.

It's not hard to get that video together with today's cloud computing or render farms, but I do not believe a lick of it until I have an actual demo on my own damn hands that I can positively confirm that I am interacting with. And which doesn't sneakily try to use OnLive-like services.

[Coldchaos]

The thing that makes me heavily skeptical of this kind of thing is using any kind of vector based program/data; which as far as I understand with the limited information is pretty much what this is applied to a 3D environment. Most modern desktops can barely handle the work I do that has a few hundred paths/points, this would have millions.

If they can provide something more solid, I might consider it as having something to it. As of right now I don't see much to make me optimistic.

[Drunkenvalley]

This isn't more vector than any existing technique, Coldchaos...

[Cataclysmic Skyris]

completly fake btw (okay so they dident say it themselves but its nothing new)
EDIT:
http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=30214

4th post about sums everything above and also notch mentioned this in his twitter thingy...

http://kotaku.com/5827034/minecraft-...-graphics-hype

[Drunkenvalley]

completly fake btw they said it themselves

^{[Citation needed]}

[I stand in fire]

I'm calling bullshit on Unlimited Detail until someone brings solid proof that it works.

[Coldchaos]

This isn't more vector than any existing technique, Coldchaos...

My vector traces from illustrator for a flat 2D image use up a GB of RAM and are huge(hundreds of MB).
I'm highly skeptical on how you could not only design these maps in any reasonable timescale but apply dynamic rendering to it on anything that isn't a supercomputer.

Edit - If they found a way to do it, more power to them. But I won't be lining up at their door until they can present something that is usable/testable.

[Deleted]

Seriously.

They vanish for a year and come back with basically nothing at all. Why not just agree that this tech is possible in theory, but in reality it is not remotely possible as things stand. The memory alone prevents this from being plausible to make it out on the market. It might have a use in the sciences, but no chance for consumers for at least 5-10 years easily.

I say that because to make higher capacity HDDs we'd need to decrease the size of the magnetized molecules that make up our current ones. And from research I've looked at they're struggling to do that. So it'd mean either SSD storage suddenly becomes cheap and smaller or we'd have to have a bank of 3tb HDDs lying around.

[Diaxx]

The problem is that this doesn't just sound too good to be true; it sounds so far-fetched, and the source material showcased is extremely picky.

It's not hard to get that video together with today's cloud computing or render farms, but I do not believe a lick of it until I have an actual demo on my own damn hands that I can positively confirm that I am interacting with. And which doesn't sneakily try to use OnLive-like services.

You obviously didn't watch the video, the ceo guy lets the reporter control it, it is extremely obvious that it isnt a video, he even unplugs the computer from the internet to show he isnt using other computers cpu/storage.

[Coldchaos]

You obviously didn't watch the video, the ceo guy lets the reporter control it, it is extremely obvious that it isnt a video, he even unplugs the computer from the internet to show he isnt using other computers cpu/storage.

Because there isn't a medium where we can connect to the internet without cords, right?

None of their videos have animations or anything dynamic at all, it's just stationary point data. Which isn't impressive or new.

[Cyanotical]

the best point I've heard about this technology showing it's false is that Nvidia and AMD would be trying to buy it out for sole rights, but they are not even interested