Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam

Post by sambeau » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 11:09 AM UTC

esrauch wrote: post #29

Geee wrote: post #10

I think the unlimited detail refers to rendering speed, not memory requirements. The data has to be redundant to fit in memory. He also claims it runs on a laptop without GPU. So it can't be just octree or any other regular acceleration structure. So if it isn't scam, it's something new. From the author (old post on Beyond3D): "firstly the system isn’t ray tracing at all or anything like ray tracing. Ray tracing uses…

I'm fairly certain that "sorting to find the one atom for each pixel on the screen" is exactly the definition of raytracing.

I agree with what I think your unstated point is (namely this is basically raytracing). I think the detail here is that this is essentially a sorting/data-organisational solution rather than a geometrically calculated solution. Ray tracing generally takes into account more than one atom (often at complex geometric angles to the directly visible surface) to create a pixel. This claims not to (but to look really good I would have thought it will eventually have to).

So yes. This is a kind of raytracing but I think that the implementation is radically different to the commonly used raytracing implementaions.

Post by sambeau » Wed, Aug 03, 2011, 11:22 AM UTC

The big unanswered question here is can they dynamically sort their data in real time?

If they cannot they can never have movement through the environment - something that they have failed to demonstrate so far.

Dynamic animation is a similar problem but can be solved using key-frame point data (although this could severely limit the fluidity of animation and greatly increase memory usage). You cannot do this smoothly for movement (without using tiles or a combination of tiles and key-frames).

There are many cool games that could be made despite these limitations but Euclideon is promising more than this: their comparisons are with modern FPS's.

I really hope that they have solved all these issues. But if they have, why aren't they demonstrating them?

If they haven't I hope they are being more honest with their investors than they are with the general public.

Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam

Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam