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Making Graphics In Games '100,000 Times' Better?

Posted by Soulskill on from the future-of-gaming-or-complete-bunk dept.

trawg writes "A small Australian software company — backed by almost AUD$2 million in government assistance — is claiming they've developed a new technology which is '100,000 times better' for computer game graphics. It's not clear what exactly is getting multiplied, but they apparently 'make everything out of tiny little atoms instead of flat panels.' They've posted a video to YouTube which shows their new tech, which is apparently running at 20 FPS in software. It's (very) light on the technical details, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they say an SDK is due in a few months — so stay tuned for more." John Carmack had this to say about the company's claims: "No chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging."

8 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. The company got back to me by trawg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (I submitted this article) I fired off a request for more information from the developers about this and they got back to me indicating they're willing to answer some more questions, so I've summarised some of the main ones that I've seen around the place.

    We're based in the same city as this company (Brisbane, Australia) so I'm hoping that I might be able to actually go out there and eyeball this stuff myself to get a feel for it (and possibly drag along a graphics programmer to do some grilling).

    1. Re:The company got back to me by Suiggy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Don't bother, they're taking credit for other people's work. You want to know how their technology works? Here's a couple of research papers:

      http://research.nvidia.com/publication/efficient-sparse-voxel-octrees-analysis-extensions-and-implementatio
      http://artis.imag.fr/Publications/2009/CNLE09/

      Want some source code? http://code.google.com/p/efficient-sparse-voxel-octrees/
      Want a video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HScYuRhgEJw

      Euclideon is just spinning up the marketing bullshit and trying to make a profit off of it all. They don't even have good lighting, they're just doing forward shading for each voxel ray-cast intersection using diffuse lighting with a single global point light source. And they haven't demonstrated robust animation yet.

      Guess what, it is possible to animate voxel octrees, but Euclideon never came up with the method either. Some researcher in Germany came up with a working solution for his bachelor's thesis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl6PE_n6zTk

    2. Re:The company got back to me by gmueckl · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The technology is rather related to point cloud rendering which is about 10 years old now. This is the most clever implementation of point cloud rendering that I am aware of and it is pretty cool: http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/qsplat/ It renders amazingly fast.

      It has its shares of problems including requiring a lot of precomputation and as far as I know noone was able to do proper anitaliasing on point clouds. Texture interpolation in the traditional sense has also not been solved to my knowledge because with these point clouds all you can do is give individual points colors, so you will always have hard edges between points. Those two combined result in a lot of visual noise that destroys the illusion in the demo videos that I have seen so far.

      --
      http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
  2. Other voxel engine by binkzz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This russian guy made his own voxel engine as well, which I believe is hardware accelerated and also pretty impressive: http://www.atomontage.com/

    --
    'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
  3. Re:Voxels by XDirtypunkX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is probably not actually what is generally called "voxels", but a hierarchical point cloud system consisting of points on the surface of objects, rendered via some kind of weighted splatting mechanism. There was a lot of research into such systems for visualising some of the very high resolution point clouds coming out of digital laser scanning systems (for example QSplat, which came out of the Digital Michelangelo project http://graphics.stanford.edu/software/qsplat/).

  4. Re:In other news... by war4peace · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Procedural generation works better than you would expect.
    Look at these two examples: .debris (http://91.202.41.234/debris/) and .kkrieger (http://91.202.41.234/kkrieger) - they occupy virtually no space, are lengthy, interactive and perfectly playable on any modern machine with average CPU capabilities.

    --
    ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
  5. Re:In other news... by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Something where if you take a shovel, and dig, you can dig up rocks, and other bits-- or even bury loot, or build a house out of ambient materials, and have it be persistent.

    Yeah, that'd be awesome. A game where you could mine and craft all kinds of stuff... what to call it...

    I don't know about you but I would call it "Nethack"

  6. Re:Unfortunately for us gamers... by Monchanger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most games recently just kind of suck and rest upon the shoulders of innovative graphics. This does not make me hopeful for the future of gaming.

    Generally speaking, I'm in agreement on the suck part, but hold on a second there with the conclusion. If this technology is real and games do see a massive jump forward in graphics, wouldn't that allow for an end to each successive title needing to simply out-polygon the competition? Isn't it equally likely this would force a paradigm shift, where if nothing else art- real art, would supplant technical graphics specs?