121–130 of 144 posts
Color me skeptical. However, I'd like to pose a question to HN: If the claims from this video are legit, is this level of innovation deserving of a patent? (Yes, a software patent.)
Maybe, you'd have to be an expert in rendering engines to know. Too bad none of those work for the patent office or are ever likely to.
This has been "announced" since 2010 all the while being only "a few months" from release. So far nothing has materialized. Vaporware. Also note this is nothing but voxels plus an advanced search algorithm, for resource conservation.
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This is somewhat the state-of-the-art in realtime ray-tracing (actually path-tracing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qntMz2QPA_E using the Brigade renderer. It's using both the GPU and CPU.
That game looks like it has been filmed with a cheap digital camera with the ISO setting too high.
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…
This video is not that fresh. I have seen it already last year and the way how this guys speaks has not changed since then (speaks like a salesmen) ;) Their technique is based on point cloud rendering. My supervisor has proposed already in 2004 how this can be done on a standard PC. Look at his PhD-Thesis [1]. This technique is usable for static objects as well as for dynamic objects; however, using it for dynamic sc…
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.
Granted, both of these features are somewhat hacked into the static BSP level structure, but this only shows that it's "necessary" to have dynamic lighting and moving stuff to offer a good experience.
Yes, they might implement some kind of a hybrid approach but then they will lose all the things they hype about.
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Yeah I think so. A tree-lookup can make things easier, but then you have to estimate the bounce direction. But overall it's a great demo. And you see more and more games using voxels for surroundings. So ofcourse you could combine this technique with polys.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that of the three pure voxel problems (rendering, animation and collision), rendering is probably the low-hanging fruit - Though I'm not sure if creating a hybrid poly/voxel engine is any harder or easier. Here's to at least getting a hyper-real Myst someday :)
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Even if it's absolutely impossible to animate this technology I don't think it would be "useless". I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to have the static elements (buildings, tree trunks, ground, debris, etc etc) of a level rendered using this tech, and polygons used for everything else. It used to be this way in the bad old days (Doom etc) - Polygons for level structure and sprites for animation. This would at l…
Would this not be perfect for films where you are rendering per frame?