virtual atoms vs polygons

[Vankrys]

is this thing real or a scam? i'm cluless in graphics technology, so if some knowledgeable people could give their thought on this. If what they claim is true, it seems rather revolutionary.

[Thousandsons]

Sounds cool

[Remilia]

They're essentially no different from Voxels except the name. An example of one used is EQN / Landmark.

For a single player type thing it'd be infeasible depending on the size/density. Increase in RAM and HDD usage becomes obscene.

[Vankrys]

Voxels huh? i'll look it up. is this the tech of the future or just an eccentricity?

[Remilia]

Voxels huh? i'll look it up. is this the tech of the future or just an eccentricity?

Wouldn't call it eccentric but it is something not meant for singleplayer if you want to go crazy and make it Crysis graphics. Multiplayer a good server would be uploading map info to you and load into RAM. Even then size and density needs to be within reason.

[Ratyrel]

This has been around for a couple of years now and nothing seems to have become of it since it first debued. I'm not saying it's a hoax, but it seems that the problems with this kind of rendering are more substantial than one might assume - possibly it is difficult to make this kind of data interact with other modern graphics technologies (reflections, bloom, various kinds of shaders, etc.)? The perceivable level of detail doesn't seem that different from polygon data either and as I understand it this would require a huge cloud for all the data at high levels of detail, so gaming might not be the main area of application.

[Deleted]

Hmm Voxels have been around since the dawn of 3D video gaming (at least). Some Build engine games like Shadow Warrior (1997) utilized Voxels for "3D sprites" of a sort (e.x. http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...6.resizedimage ).

As about "virtual atoms" becoming prevalent: I don't deny the possiblity of Voxels becoming main stream in video games - hell, they open up a lot of very powerful options in video games - but I do remain sceptic. It's kind of a far fetch'd analogy, but I remember NURBS supposedly being the shit back in the early stages of the Lord of the Rings movies, yet they scratched quite a lot of finished NURBS content and fell back to polys.