After reading all the comments it seems there are people who are playing with this kind of technology. Is there any open source code which can be studied?
Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#72The article sensationally positions this as some incredible breakthrough that the "old guard" of gaming is trying to suppress. More likely, the code works, but has limitations -- the same limitations that led old guard luminaries like Carmack to defer the idea for another few years. As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical "3D Dot Game Hero" for…
W/R to low-res voxel and octree engines, I think we can develop their visual detail considerably further without throwing over the table and trying to eliminate polygons. Nadeo has been taking the "large model blocks" approach and refining it for almost a decade now:
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Dell refuses to say what the engine can't do yet. I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest it can't do real-time animation, texturing, lighting, shadows, collisions, etc. All the maps / screenshots shown seem to be static, procedurally generated and not artist-created. Dell keeps throwing around this 'Unlimited Detail' marketing phrase which is very offputting. Until it's seen in action in an actual game it can be n…
I agree with you 100% - my comment was mostly wishful thinking, a description of how Dell could make me change my mind. This kind of marketing is one I can't quite understand. I mean, what is he after? Buzz? Funding? What's his endgame? Why & how is he paying people to work on it? Is his marketing strategy to troll the profession & the audience, and he really has something big up his sleeve? Why is he using the Vapor…
Generate enough press to keep funding going, particularly from the Australian government? They already got one such grant, I believe. Are more possible if they can put together enough clippings?
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#74There's supposed to be 42 trillion "voxels" in that demo.
If each "voxel" took only a single bit to store, this works out to require [42 trillion / (1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8) = 4 889.44352] gigabytes of memory.
How do you store that while you calculate the screen pixels? Modern PCs only have 4 or 8 gigabytes of RAM!
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#75There's supposed to be 42 trillion "voxels" in that demo. If each "voxel" took only a single bit to store, this works out to require [42 trillion / (1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8) = 4 889.44352] gigabytes of memory. How do you store that while you calculate the screen pixels? Modern PCs only have 4 or 8 gigabytes of RAM!
This is addressed in the article: they used many replicated objects. They stored one rock, then rendered it a gajillion times. They claim they were able to do this by applying something like a search algorithm to the objects being rendered.
That's the magic of it -- they are able to create worlds with insane amounts of detail, but in an intelligent way that means they don't need an insane amount of computational power to render it.
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#76Voxel engines are "new" in the same sense that social networks are "new" from the POV of someone who remembers using modem-based BBSes and Unix Usenet groups back in the 80's. Meaning: mostly old, maybe new in some small subtle corner aspect of it, or some twist. But not really new.
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#77I am surprisd by the lack of interest in the search algorithm Dell proposes he designed and is using.
Searching such a large problem space for 1 to 2 million results 25x a second is amazingly impressive... This is what i am most curious about at the moment... Also how he is storing the full voxel point data for any given world that needs to be searchd in real time. Replicated data or not (i.e. similar to GIF color data deduplication) you still have location data for every voxel position or offsets or something that still results in a hellacious amount of data that needs to be searched efficiently.
Havent seen details from Dell or others on either of these aspects that I feel are cornerstones to the engine.
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#78Interesting article. Judging by Dell's (the CEO) calm attitude towards "haters", I personally believe that he truly has something revolutionary to offer. Only time will tell though.
How is that indicative of anything but a thought-out publicity strategy? If one were in the perpetual-motion machine business, taking a calm attitude towards haters would be pretty much the only option, since there would be no way to argue with them.
... and if he were not in the perpetual-motion machine business taking a calm attitude wouldn't be a bad idea either. So logically it's not a very informative data point.
Nevertheless, I did watch him interviewed and give the real-time interactivity demo to an AU gamer mag a few months ago (I think it's still on Youtube).
I know a bit about the traditional polygon rendering pipeline and I was quite impressed with his response to his critics.
I'm reserving judgment since there are still big unanswered questions. But I would not expect him to be satisfying my curiosity with answers if his strategy is a legitimate attempt to develop the technology with a bigger partner (e.g. a console company or first-party studio).
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#79The article sensationally positions this as some incredible breakthrough that the "old guard" of gaming is trying to suppress. More likely, the code works, but has limitations -- the same limitations that led old guard luminaries like Carmack to defer the idea for another few years. As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical "3D Dot Game Hero" for…
You have missed the point. The claim is that Unlimited Detail offers real-time voxel rendering with unlimited detail now, not when there's more powerful computers. It doesn't need a GPU. They supposedly have a new algorithm, which would indeed be revolutionary if true.
If someone were to post an article on HN about a new technology that gets recursive compression (you can compress something 80%, and then do that again and again) because "they have a new algorithm", they would be laughed off the front page.
Re: Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine
#80The article sensationally positions this as some incredible breakthrough that the "old guard" of gaming is trying to suppress. More likely, the code works, but has limitations -- the same limitations that led old guard luminaries like Carmack to defer the idea for another few years. As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical "3D Dot Game Hero" for…
I thought I'd read the whole article since some are still commenting on it. First of all, if someone were to post an article on HN about a new technology that gets recursive compression (you can compress something 80%, and then do that again and again) because "they have a new algorithm", they would be laughed off the front page. Some people just don't know that that is impossible. Is this is what is being claimed here? There are three ways to get "unlimited detail" in computer worlds. 1) magical compression. 2) algorithmic generation 3) hierarchical composition, and as we know, 1 doesnt exist.
Looking at the article, this is clearly using method 3. Lets look at this "new" hierarchical composition. Hiearchical composition is when any given space is composed of smaller objects, and those smaller objects may also be composed of smaller objects.
When you do this in 2D games from 1980, we use the technical term "tiling the crap out of everything". You have a bunch of obviously repetitive pieces. If each tile is 16x16, and there are 256x256 tiles on a map, then one could say that there are 16 million pixels in the world, on a computer that had only 1Mb of memory.
So that right there is your clue that this guy is a fraud. 42 trillion voxels? Are they 42 trillion unique voxels, or are they tiled? [1] Right. (a "voxel" is the 3d equivalent of a 2D pixel).
The thing about tiling is it doesn't just apply to pixels or voxels. Tiling is just a spatial subdivision algorithm that splits space up in to 2d or 3d grids. You can store a color in each grid cell, and then its a voxel. But you can just as easily store the head of a linked list of polygons. And you can also store a pointer to another tile array, and that tile array can then store voxels, or polygons, or more tile arrays. When you do this, its a hierarchical data structure.
Do games/graphics programmers know all about this? Yes. Do we use hierarchical composition? Yes! All the time! Do we use axis-aligned hierarchies? Yes, e.g. octrees? Do we use regular grid composition all the way down? Fuck no. Why not? Because splitting up space along predetermined, regular, axis-aligned divisions is fucking awful for modeling interesting 3D worlds [3]. What you get is a brick world: [2]. Such rigid, regular, axis aligned hierarchy fits the real world poorly.
[1] http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/featured/gameinform... [2] http://media1.gameinformer.com/imagefeed/featured/gameinform... [3] Ok, minecraft being the exception =)
