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Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

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Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#41

Post by mortenjorck »

palish wrote: post #21
chime wrote: post #15

I can understand that adding dynamic objects/shadows is difficult and their videos do not show them being capable of doing that yet. However, why can't 90% of the objects be rendered in the new static way like they do (statues, buildings, tree trunks) and dynamic objects be added on top of it using whatever method game devs use right now? I don't really care if the cactus is moving or not but I sure would like to see…

They can be, and that's likely how it will work. Triangle animated characters + voxel static world.

This hybrid rendering approach has already been used in a video game from a major publisher - in 1999.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#42

Post by leif »

jarin wrote: post #26
prawn wrote: post #12

John Carmack's repsonse: "Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging." https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422...

I trust Carmack's response over pretty much anyone's in matters of rendering engines. The guy is a god of coding them.

gods have been known to be blindsided by revolutionaries

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#44

Post by jxcole »

The most unrealistic things in video games for me are faces. While increasing polygon counts and such will certainly help, I can't help but notice that faces will never cross the uncanny valley unless they can do something about the lighting.

Check out:

http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html

So, unless they can do all this AND ray trace it at the same time, it really won't make my game experience 100,000 times better.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#45

Post by MtrL »

leif wrote: post #42
jarin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I trust Carmack's response over pretty much anyone's in matters of rendering engines. The guy is a god of coding them.

gods have been known to be blindsided by revolutionaries

He, and his company, have done research into the field of SVOs to compliment megatexture.

I don't know enough to say if it's the same approach, but it's certainly the same field, so you'd expect him to know a fair bit about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#46

Post by baddox »

jerf wrote: post #32
palish wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic shadows work in exactly the same way as they do for standard triangle rasterization. Each light has a shadow map (which can be thought of as "the depth of the scene, from the point of view of the light"). During the final rasterization pass, the shadow map is sampled. If the sampled depth is less than or equal to the current fragment's depth, then the fragment is in light; otherwise it's in shadow. So, nothin…

"tl;dr: Dynamic shadows work fine." So... where were they in the video? There's a difference between "some voxel engines can have dynamic lighting" and "dynamic lighting works with this particular engine". It's not like this is some obscure or useless feature that nobody has ever heard of. In fact for all the "detail" one can't help but notice the number of other things missing from the video.

Obviously not every 3D rendering technique in existence would be included in a short demo video.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#48

Post by baddox »

jxcole wrote: post #44

The most unrealistic things in video games for me are faces. While increasing polygon counts and such will certainly help, I can't help but notice that faces will never cross the uncanny valley unless they can do something about the lighting. Check out: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html So, unless they can do all this AND ray trace it at the same time, it really won't make my game experience 100,00…

These days, I don't think rendering technology is what's holding us back from having realistic faces. I think the art and animation is just really hard to get right.

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#49

Post by [deleted] »

palish wrote: post #34
jerf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"tl;dr: Dynamic shadows work fine." So... where were they in the video? There's a difference between "some voxel engines can have dynamic lighting" and "dynamic lighting works with this particular engine". It's not like this is some obscure or useless feature that nobody has ever heard of. In fact for all the "detail" one can't help but notice the number of other things missing from the video.

I didn't mean to imply Euclideon had dynamic shadows. I meant to imply that Euclideon are lazy and haven't implemented dynamic shadows yet. There's no fundamental reason why dynamic shadows wouldn't work in voxel engines. But whether you believe me or not is of course up to you.

[deleted]

Re: Games company claims their graphics are 100,000x better

#50

Post by mambodog »

palish wrote: post #35
mambodog wrote: post #33

Every time this comes up I like to point people to the Atomontage Engine[1], which takes (what I think is) a more pragmatic approach, combining voxel and polygon graphics. Voxels are used where appropriate (eg. landscape, destructible buildings) and polygons can be used for dynamic objects. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sfWYUgxGBE

It would be nice if that demo was more exciting. Also, the detail on the terrain (in the first minute) leaves much to be desired. But it's a much higher quality demo than Euclideon IMO, from a technical standpoint.

I think the videos on the Atomontage channel show something I can actually see being a game, for example it shows destructible environments and terrain deformation, editing tools, and clever use of simulated DoF and a gameplay perspective that plays to the strengths and hides some of the weaknesses of the tech.

I could see it being great for a hybrid-RTS game like Ground Control, or some kind of god-game.

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