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

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."

Comments

The company got back to me

[trawg]

(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).

Re:The company got back to me

[Suiggy]

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

Other voxel engine

[binkzz]

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

Re:Voxels

[XDirtypunkX]

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/).

Re:In other news...

[war4peace]

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.