Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
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Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
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Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#2Calling their tech "infinite detail" instead of "voxels" feels no different than calling the iphone screen a "retina display" instead of listing its resolution details. Good marketing is not inherently evil.
Here, though, they're suffering a huge PR backlash, which I suspect is because they're out-marketing the work of passionate amateurs and academic researchers instead of e.g. big phone companies.
It admittedly does feel dirty not to give due credit in this scenario, but I can also empathise with their desire for a descriptive term which can resonate with the general public.
On an unrelated note, I'm often impressed by how large a portion of the game development community manages to stay aware of the bleeding edge in their field. I haven't seen any other arena where that's quite so much the case.
Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#3Calling their tech "infinite detail" instead of "voxels" feels no different than calling the iphone screen a "retina display" instead of listing its resolution details. Good marketing is not inherently evil. Here, though, they're suffering a huge PR backlash, which I suspect is because they're out-marketing the work of passionate amateurs and academic researchers instead of e.g. big phone companies. It admittedly doe…
"Infinite" has a specific meaning. Had Jobs said "infinite pixels" he'd have suffered the same backlash. "Infinite detail" is deceptive because we know there's a practical limit. "Retina display" has no similar connotation. They chose that phrase so they could then give you a definition. "Infinite" already has a definition.
Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#4It's weird because from the tone of the presentation it sounded like a parody. Then it felt like a running gag everyone seemed to be in on. So they were actually serious?
Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#5> I’d just like to say that I would absolutely LOVE to be proven wrong. Being wrong is awesome, that’s how you learn.
This is the best possible attitude to have. I think calling it a "scam" is perhaps going a bit too far, I believe they can actually render what they are showing us... but I agree that this isn't really that exciting, and definitely isn't practical for the applications they talk about.
Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#6John Carmack's Tweet on the topic:
"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...
Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#7They have shown animation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF8A4bsfKH8
Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#8Calling their tech "infinite detail" instead of "voxels" feels no different than calling the iphone screen a "retina display" instead of listing its resolution details. Good marketing is not inherently evil. Here, though, they're suffering a huge PR backlash, which I suspect is because they're out-marketing the work of passionate amateurs and academic researchers instead of e.g. big phone companies. It admittedly doe…
"Infinite" has a specific meaning. Had Jobs said "infinite pixels" he'd have suffered the same backlash. "Infinite detail" is deceptive because we know there's a practical limit. "Retina display" has no similar connotation. They chose that phrase so they could then give you a definition. "Infinite" already has a definition.
Wouldn't a fractal voxel octree generation algorithm technically be "infinite", though? You could zoom into objects as far as you pleased, and never run out of detail—which seems to satisfy any practical usage of the term "infinite detail" I can think of.
Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#9I think the biggest problem that people aren't talking about is that LOD for geometry simply isn't as important as texture quality when getting close to a surface. I'm pretty sure the reason they have so many duplicate objects in the original presentation is because they simply ran out of memory to store all the texture data for the scene, because you need really high rez textures to be able to zoom in so close to each object.
Notice that most demos which zoom in on the model don't use textures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI, because they don't have textures with high enough resolution.
Re: Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Infinite" has a specific meaning. Had Jobs said "infinite pixels" he'd have suffered the same backlash. "Infinite detail" is deceptive because we know there's a practical limit. "Retina display" has no similar connotation. They chose that phrase so they could then give you a definition. "Infinite" already has a definition.
Wouldn't a fractal voxel octree generation algorithm technically be "infinite", though? You could zoom into objects as far as you pleased, and never run out of detail—which seems to satisfy any practical usage of the term "infinite detail" I can think of.
This gets into subjective perceptions of the detail in question. Mathematically, you are correct that fractals have infinite detail. Visually, however, it's noticeable when you've run out of interesting fractal detail and that the technique has failed to produce more detail (that the brain will acknowledge as such.)
Had they said "fractal detail" not only would they have received less grief for it, but they would have provided us with an explanation for part of their system. That last part seems to not be something they're inclined to do.