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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

#81

Post by wlievens »

extension wrote: post #56
hristov wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also if they actually make a scene with different things in it. Having millions of objects in your scene is not that hard if they are all copies of the same object. The old demonstration showed a bunch of repeated copies of a single object. This one showed a lot of copies as well, although not as obvious.

It is hard in that you still have to draw every poly in every copy of the object. Instancing allows you to reuse some per-vertex calculations but it doesn't help at all with fragments, which is where most of the power is typically used.

Yeah, it "only" solves the memory use problem.

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

#82

Post by wlievens »

extension wrote: post #58
saulrh wrote: post #2

I'll say the same thing now as I said last time these guys released a video: I'll believe it when I see them make a single blade of grass move, or when they place a single dynamic light source and cast a single dynamic shadow. Until then, this technology is awesome, but more or less useless.

Useless huh? Static geometry and lighting was the state of the art for a while, starting with Quake. It certainly puts some constraints on game mechanics but it's significantly better than useless.

The characters weren't static though. That's what he's alluding to.

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

#83

Post by wlievens »

chipsy wrote: post #74
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...

By "production issues" I would think "pipeline" first of all. It doesn't matter if it's possible to convert a high-res mesh to an optimized voxel format, if the result takes hours of compilation. That is too long an iteration time for a single asset.

Not if it's a scalable thing, i.e. you can get a "decent" conversion in a short time, and only do the full-scale conversions for milestone builds.

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

#87

Post by extension »

wlievens wrote: post #82
extension wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useless huh? Static geometry and lighting was the state of the art for a while, starting with Quake. It certainly puts some constraints on game mechanics but it's significantly better than useless.

The characters weren't static though. That's what he's alluding to.

Yeah, and the characters had to use a completely seperate renderer with much simpler lighting. Likewise, the early voxel engines will probably use polys for dynamic stuff. Someone else mentioned an engine called Atomontage that does exactly that.

Sometimes you have to take a step backward before you leap forward.

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

#88

Post by tintin »

coffeemug wrote: post #76

I think what they're doing is great, but I see two problems with their presentation. First, computer rendering techniques are extremely well understood and well researched. We've picked the low hanging fruit, much of the high hanging fruit, and everything in between. There is no "groundbreaking new technology" to be invented. They're converting polygons into voxels (although each voxel is probably a sphere for cheape…

And there are no moving objects in this demo. Voxel animations are much harder than poly animations.

Then there is memory. The elephant is looking great, no doubt about that. But I think you will need a lot of space for it. On a PC this might work, but I'm not sure it can be used on consoles.

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

#89

Post by alexscheelmeyer »

Regarding the technology used. In this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWujsO2V2IA you can see lots of artifacts and also talk of point cloud data, so it is clearly not raytracing but rather point data rendering. All the repetition seen is because of the memory constraints. The point data is probably preprocessed and compressed in numerous ways, which makes it very difficult to do animations. But as others have mentioned, even as a last resort they should be able to just use this technology to render terrain/background and then use polygons for moving/animated objects. This would probably also utilized current technology better as the polygon pipeline would not just sit there unused.

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

#90

Post by estel »

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…

What do you think of the LA Noire faces?
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