Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine "atoms" are back and they make a Hologram game to show it off
63 replies, posted
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uYkbXlgUCw[/media]
Anyone remember these guys from a few years ago? Facepunch had a shit storm debating if it was real or not.
I always forget this exists until it pops up again just to make itself not die. I'm glad to see they still have their amazing announcer, who could convince everyone at my funeral that I was in fact not dead and that everyone is talking about how I will be the next big thing.
Also I loved how they are jumping in on VR being like "oh yeah well our magical god-particle graphics can do that better too JUST saying" *wink*
Yeah, the animation really doesn't look good at all
And everything looking "flat" isn't even a big complaint when people talk about problems with VR.
[QUOTE=Laserbeams;51039864]Yeah, the animation really doesn't look good at all[/QUOTE]
I'm willing to give them some time. I don't think they are trying to scam people because they aren't asking for kickstarter money. I think he believes he can actually do it.
I mean the engine is genuine and it is pretty cool
But please, please give the engine to someone else
This isn't your forte
It's like the solar roadways of game engines
[QUOTE=Metist;51039870]I'm willing to give them some time. I don't think they are trying to scam people because they aren't asking for kickstarter money. I think he believes he can actually do it.[/QUOTE]
I mean, Sean Murray thought you could do anything in No Man's Sky, too..
The bottom line is it kinda looks like ass and you could set up the same thing, probably even better, using any VR headset and a decent computer
They come up with a new trailer every few months and everytime they can't help themselves making grandiose statements that anyone with a VR headset can see are complete bullshit
The announcer is so annoying
He's mentioned "Those are flat, cartoony polygons, and we're using uh tiny little atoms" so frequently despite, still, not going into the technical detail behind it
This holo-gram of theirs have potential.
I'm pretty sure they'll show us more of the animation at later date.
All things have to start somewhere right?
Polygons also had bad animations bad in the day.
[editline]12th September 2016[/editline]
[QUOTE=Instant Mix;51039939]The announcer is so annoying
He's mentioned "Those are flat, cartoony polygons, and we're using uh tiny little atoms" so frequently despite, still, not going into the technical detail behind it[/QUOTE]
You have a point there!
Can anyone explain to me why this is supposedly impossible? I get that he's making some really big claims, and the whole "unlimited power" thing doesn't sound very believable, but I also haven't seen/heard any counterarguments other than "haha that's not real".
Also, I'd like to know how they got funding for 40 holodeck rooms.
"normal mapping doesn't work at all"
This is false. Normal mapping just doesn't work [I]as well[/I]. It can still add detail to models.
From what people have said in previous topics, this shit only works when you have a whole lot of heavily repeated elements because of the massive amount of space each object takes up in memory. It's not going to replace polygons in games any time soon.
That also explains why the animation for those enemies is at such a low framerate. Each frame of animation is being stored as its own object, it can't have a whole lot of them in memory at once because it takes up a ridiculous amount of space.
So has it been confirmed to be working in a practical sense yet, then, or are we still forced to take this annoying presenter's word for it?
If they really want to prove they are on to something with point clouds, they should release documents detailing how exactly they are doing it, instead of repeating the same thing over and over again and saying we are all wrong to be dismissive of it
[QUOTE=AJ10017;51039982]If they really want to prove they are on to something with point clouds, they should release documents detailing how exactly they are doing it, instead of repeating the same thing over and over again and saying we are all wrong to be dismissive of it[/QUOTE]
Especially since the first video was released, what, over 5 years ago? And we've yet to see any publicly released games with it. That alone shows there's probably huge limitations with it that they aren't telling us.
It's the same issue with No Mans Sky, the less they show, the more skeptical you should be.
[QUOTE=Instant Mix;51039939]The announcer is so annoying
He's mentioned "Those are flat, cartoony polygons, and we're using uh tiny little atoms" so frequently despite, still, not going into the technical detail behind it[/QUOTE]
After watching it I skipped around in the video, and I don't think I clicked at any point in it where he didn't say either "flat" or "atom" or something along those lines. This engine of theirs sounds a lot like scam to me.
[QUOTE=Helix Snake;51039987]Especially since the first video was released, what, over 5 years ago? And we've yet to see any publicly released games with it. That alone shows there's probably huge limitations with it that they aren't telling us.
It's the same issue with No Mans Sky, the less they show, the more skeptical you should be.[/QUOTE]
all the demos they are showing look like they are running at a whopping 10-15 fps as well, not good enough for a real gaming experience. not to mention the lighting and shading on the world looks abysmal, it all just looks like a noisy mess
These make for pretty prerendered/very-choppy live demos, and I want this to be a real thing and for the tech to mature, but every time they come up with another video, it's just the same shit. I'd like them to just prove it with a simple tech demo released to the public. Like, let me play Pong in a birds-eye view over the highest-detail table tennis board ever used for a game background, but let me freeze the Pong game at any moment and fly around the scene in 3D.
If they can't scan a room dressed up to look like a mancave/rec room and run a game of Pong over top of it with a scanned ball, their tech is just pretty cutscenes. It's [I]Pong[/I].
[QUOTE=MrGreed;51039961]Can anyone explain to me why this is supposedly impossible? I get that he's making some really big claims, and the whole "unlimited power" thing doesn't sound very believable, but I also haven't seen/heard any counterarguments other than "haha that's not real".[/QUOTE]
It's just a voxel engine. Voxel environments are not new or revolutionary. They just made a nice looking voxel environment a couple years ago and were like "WE CAN PUT IN UNLIMITED DETAIL!!" because the only other voxel games at the time were typically procedurally generated games like Minecraft.
Also, it's not unlimited; there is a limit to how many voxels your GPU can handle, and each unique voxel takes up storage space (if not randomly generated), and RAM (when playing the game). The devs were claiming some outlandish figure of unique voxels that would have taken petabytes of storage space to store.
[editline].[/editline]
[URL="http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam"]Notch did a write-up back when the original video came out.[/URL]
[QUOTE=AJ10017;51040001]all the demos they are showing look like they are running at a whopping 10-15 fps as well, not good enough for a real gaming experience. not to mention the lighting and shading on the world looks abysmal, it all just looks like a noisy mess[/QUOTE]
By the way, wouldn't that... "atomic" structure require a brand new system to render realistic dynamic lighting?
imagine if they actually spent 6 years rendering the graphics for this presentation.
i'm sure it's all possible, but is it plausible? are the benefits of "infinite detail" really more important than the ease of modeling that comes from polygonal shapes? all of this seems like it's really difficult to create real projects with it (i mean, it's only taken them 4-5 years to make an animation.) Polygons just work because we don't actually ever need to zoom into a detail that closely, even in VR or AR. you'd be about a centimeter away from detail before it just gets reasonably culled by the camera or the player's head collides with it, and most of the time good textures will keep you from unmasking the veil. plus, that much detail isn't what's important to make an engine work, and the amount of processing that'd be required to draw all this detail would be instantly shut down by common LOD systems that games already have in place.
the amount of work that is required for euclidian's engine to be not only functional, but attractive will outweigh the benefits of it. on top of that, they're trying so hard to push this tech into games when it should be used for [I]literally everything other than video games.[/I] they're barking up the wrong tree.
[QUOTE=MrGreed;51039961]Can anyone explain to me why this is supposedly impossible? I get that he's making some really big claims, and the whole "unlimited power" thing doesn't sound very believable, but I also haven't seen/heard any counterarguments other than "haha that's not real".
Also, I'd like to know how they got funding for 40 holodeck rooms.[/QUOTE]
Nothing is impossible, it's just impractical. Any modeler will tell you to fuck off if you tell him you want a model that is detailed down to the molecular level, especially if they don't even get to use the polygon modeling tools they're used to. Using displacement maps instead of normal maps would be more than enough to get rid of any "flatness" in VR.
[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;51040008]These make for pretty prerendered/very-choppy live demos, and I want this to be a real thing and for the tech to mature, but every time they come up with another video, it's just the same shit. I'd like them to just prove it with a simple tech demo released to the public. Like, let me play Pong in a birds-eye view over the highest-detail table tennis board ever used for a game background, but let me freeze the Pong game at any moment and fly around the scene in 3D.
If they can't scan a room dressed up to look like a mancave/rec room and run a game of Pong over top of it with a scanned ball, their tech is just pretty cutscenes. It's [I]Pong[/I].[/QUOTE]
Honestly, something else like displacement mapping is probably going to become standard before anything like this ever is. Voxels have advantages but if the only thing these guys can make with them are things that look worse than normal games in every situation besides looking at something way up close, there's not a lot of hope for this technology, not as a replacement for polygons anyways.
[QUOTE=gudman;51040026]By the way, wouldn't that... "atomic" structure require a brand new system to render realistic dynamic lighting?[/QUOTE]
Possibly, but voxels have been around for a long time. Forget this "atomic" buzzword crap. What they're referring to is how a voxel is more or less a 3D "pixel".
It's not new technology, and they didn't invent it. Minecraft, for example, is a voxel engine and came out long before it. Several voxel environment games have come out since then.
This video also predates the company's original video:
[video=youtube;Gshc8GMTa1Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y[/video]
It's not just overlaying a decal onto the environment; it's depressing the voxels under the tire to create a tire track.
[QUOTE=Laserbeams;51040052]Nothing is impossible, it's just impractical. Any modeler will tell you to fuck off if you tell him you want a model that is detailed down to the molecular level, especially if they don't even get to use the polygon modeling tools they're used to. Using displacement maps instead of normal maps would be more than enough to get rid of any "flatness" in VR.[/QUOTE]
It's also impractical to render a model with detail down to the "molecular level~"
Even the Titan X would be crying for mercy with even one model on screen.
So basically it's just fuckloads upon fuckloads of voxels?
Because if that qualifies as "Unlimited Detail™", then Worms 3D had "Unlimited Detail™" back in 2003.
[QUOTE=Durrsly;51040092]So basically it's just a fuckload of voxels?
Because if that qualifies as "Unlimited Detail", then Worms 3D was doing it in 2003 for it's maps.[/QUOTE]
yep. Like I said, they just made a nice looking voxel environment and ran wild with the marketing.
[QUOTE=Dr. Evilcop;51040014]
[URL="http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam"]Notch did a write-up back when the original video came out.[/URL][/QUOTE]
Notch isn't exactly the worlds most efficient programmer. Voxels aren't stored specifically in a grid like 2D bitmaps are, Sparse Voxel Octress aren't stored as a 3D array of data, they're stored as a series of nodes than link to data for higher and higher detail. So a voxel object might be a 2x2x2 array and as you raycast each node links to another 2x2x2 node, so on and so forth until you reach the smallest level of detail. Now the trick is, if a node contains no data, meaning if a node is empty space or on the inside of the object, it doesn't need to contain any more subdivided data (the Wikipedia entry Notch actually linked to confirms this). That's why voxel images take up WAY less space than you'd think.
So Notch's estimation for how much data the island would take up is flat out wrong. It would still be a ridiculously huge amount of data, don't get me wrong, but it wouldn't be "512 petabytes" of information.
