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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."
(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).
If they really could do realtime graphics that were "100,000 times" more detailed than current stuff, they'd do one of two things:
1) Release a demo so people could actually try it and see it working on their systems, to prove it was real. Or more likely...
2) License that shit to a company in the industry. Intel would be extremely interested if it ran on CPUs as they'd love for people to spend more money on CPUs and none on GPUs. Any game engine maker would be extremely interested either way. Wouldn't matter if things still had to be hammered out, at the point they claim to be, that would be more than plenty to sign a licensing deal and get to work.
So I'm calling bullshit and saying it is a con. This is classic con man strategy: You show a demo, but one that is hands off, where the people watching only get to see what you want them to see and don't actually get to play with your product. You make all sorts of claims as to how damn amazing it is, but nobody actually gets to try it out.
This has been a con tactic for centuries, I've no reason to believe it is any different here.
So to them I say: Put up or shut up. Either release a demo people can download that will let them see this run on their own systems, or get a reputable company to license it. If Intel comes out and says "This is for real, we've licensed the technology and will be releasing a SDK for people as soon as it is ready," I'll believe them, as they have a history of delivering on promises. So long as it is some random guys posting Youtube videos, I call bullshit.
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
Which is the whole trick, this was shown off at least a year ago, it pops up now and then.
The tech precalculates a LOT, for that it needs static model information.
The site of the creators is http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=11624.30 they talked about it last year.
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/).
The idea that they've come up with a new LoD algorithm for point cloud data is reasonable. It would then allow their ridiculous claims to be (technically) true about the size of datasets. But, if everything is held procedurally then it must have a low complexity description in order to compress that vast dataset (say 20,000Gb) into something that can be processed. Low-complexity descriptions tend to exist for highly regular geometry, and if you look at their demo they appear to have very high detail objects in a very coarse, regular and repetitive mesh to the extent that when they zoom out it looks like Minecraft.
No need for it to be a hoax, I'm guessing that they can make horrific looking (regular, craply lit, static) graphics as they claim in the video with the projected datasizes they refer to. What they gloss over is that it can't just be translated onto a real level design and scaled up to the level of complexity that you see in real level design.
It would be kind of like me saying "hey, I can draw circles at an infinite level of detail, equivalent to trillions of line segments. Can't draw more complex shapes like faces yet though....."
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Ok, so we don't see them all at once. To be honest, if a middleware company can't write a furstum cull, they would be closed by now!
But what do they do then when they are not seen? Sod off for a holiday in the cloud? Seriously. I think you are missing the point. Where the hell is this data being stored, and what is the size of the data set? It's got to be in memory *at some point*, and hard disk if it's not. So how much ram/disk space will this thing use exactly? Ok, so 'most of it is calculated, somewhat like fractals', well ok. But which bits? Are the trees fractals (or L-systems maybe)?. Just the leaves? The Models of the rocks they have scanned in? The 3ds max models they have converted to point clouds? The whole island? Answers to these questions need to be provided before any games developer would even bother looking at this tech. Either it's all procedural (in which case it's utterly useless for game designers), it's primarily procedural (in which case the art director will struggle to achieve a consistent look), it's partially procedural (which will annoy the modelling & texturing departments), or it's a load of made up lies. I'm erring towards the latter.....
Procedural generation works better than you would expect. .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.
Look at these two examples:
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)