Yes, but all of that is based on assumptions about how their 'technology' works. I know they have released barely any details about it yet, which raises suspicion in itself, but there are obviously people out there willing to fund the development of this for whatever reason. Also....lol: http://imgur.com/g0gXt
But it doesn't "Work". It's just a gag, and not a good one either. "Obviously" you are believing some of the things they claim. I in turn believe non of them. Actually, now I've seen that pic I'm a covert.
I never said that at all, you're obviously misinterpreting my intentions. Ever heard of Devil's advocate? I'm deliberately not siding with either side because neither has produced any evidence that the other's claims are incorrect.
I'd like to believe that it's possible, but you need more to go on than just a video. Their site gives no info whatsoever; only wishy-washy terms like "a new sort of method". 21 trillion data points? People throw the terms "billion" and "trillion" around freely (especially when you're talking about the US budget! ), but these are significant numbers. Even in the commonly-used short scale, a trillion is number with 12 zeros after it: 1,000,000,000,000. How is this trolling? If they've provided no information about how they claim to achieve this then are we supposed to take them at face value? Everything we know about current rendering techniques (polygons and/or voxels) says that this should be next to impossible to achieve with consumer hardware. Someone comes along and says "Yeah, but we can blow that out of the water" and we're supposed to swallow it without a hint of evidence? That's not trolling, that's just a healthy dose of scepticism (or skepticism - I'm not getting into semantics). This. The onus is not on us, or others, to prove that their claims are not possible. The onus is on them to prove that their claims are possible. Also remembering that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I understand the need for secrecy with new technology - especially with potentially lucrative technology - but if they are to be beleived then people need more than just a demo vid which is extremely easy to fake. EDIT: They're willing to fund it because they see the dollar signs. People also fund "free/unlimited" energy research because they see the dollar signs. It doesn't mean that either of them actually work. The only ones making any claims are this company. Without any evidence to actually prove their claims, we can only conclude that there is no basis to them. The video is not sufficient because it cannot be proven that it was rendered in real-time and it does not prove their claim of "unlimited" detail - they could simply be using an extremely complex world based on traditional polygons & textures, and rendering it on some seriously beefy hardware. I'm not trying to pick on you, but it's important to make the distinction between who needs to prove what. Based on what I've seen of "unlimited detail" - especially the lack of convincing evidence - I can only conclude that it's B-S.
I think everyone's forgetting things here; The island is, what, 38-quadzillion "points"? There's probably about 20 unique models in all. Just repeated and some basic terrain mapping in there to glue it all the something. Exactly the way most modern engines sort things, especially in open-world games (Creation Engine springs to mind here) Plus if my suspicion is correct; it's theoretically possible for them to remove points without loosing detail. They can safely assume noone will have a resolution over a certain size, and remove enough points that the "Full Detail" variant is more than enough to fit on whichever resolution, regardless of how close the camera is to the object, that, in and of itself would save issues, plus the points only seem to need 3D coords, and possibly the material. Textures would, I think, still be applied normally. Ignoring the scepticism and people who outright believe it's possible, if we entertain the notion that it is more than just a hoax: Destructible environments would be absolutely amazing on models with that kind of detail. The only point I doubt, from the information on their site, is the off-hand manner which they go "And we can compress them down to very small filesizes." Ultra-High-Compression is absolute murder on Processors, so it should be interesting to see how they've done it.
But if it is truly unlimited detail, that implies that all 21 trillion "points" can be rendered by the engine. Maybe not all at the same time - maybe only where the camera is pointing - but the data about those points still needs to be created, stored and/or processed. According to their video, the method is different to procedural generation - even if they do use procedural generation and generate these "points" on the fly, it still has to be processed by the hardware. Then we start getting into the crazy realms of the 6 million terabytes of data. These are the kind of questions that need to be answered if they're going to be taken seriously. It would be an impressive achievement if it's possible. Even if it's not truly "unlimited detail" and just a better or more efficient rendering technique, then it'll still be impressive if it lives up to their claims of being run on lower powered hardware. At the moment however, all we've seen is a dubious video and some impressive-sounding waffle (it doesn't sound impressive to me, but to the layperson it might).
Leaving aside the true/false argument completely here, I would mention another point: Content creating is going to be a nightmare. Building models at present polygon detail levels in itself is already time consuming and costly. Building an "unlimited detail tree" for example would take forever. 40 million points in, and some guy will go "but I can't see the atoms". That's one of the issues games developers are haing with destructible environments, for example: Suddenly, you can't just place a wall. Nope. a wall is made up of bricks, which are made up of brick pieces. All of these have their own collision detection, so they don't look crud when flying about. And their own textures. So while I won't be drawn into the debate of this being real or fake, I simply doubt the real world usage of "unlimited detail".
Ehh, already covered this. See my post above And why does no one give me credit for explaining the RAM usage? Everyone quoted him I feel unloved.
I could have sworn I saw somewhere that it only rendered the points you could see. So if you are looking at a phone's screen, it would only render the bits of the phone in your field of vision. Or maybe that was just me being clever or mixing up this for some other tech.
Hey, island looks like Minecraft. I suspect that this is a combination of clever use of point cloud graphics, creative language and some wishful thinking that the technology will have caught up with minimum requirements by the time this comes out of beta. A bit like MS Windows for Tablets, then. Keep in mind: there are the videos. Sure, they run without the overhead of game dynamics, lighting effects and are possibly even an accelerated playback of something that takes seconds per frame to render, but if this is a flakey little bunch of bluffers and dreamers then they are probably not sitting on a supercomputer or a huge render farm. I think that the truth is somewhere in-between. They are using a different technology, and one day it may be great, but right now they are fudging things a little bit and are being creative with terminology. It is not really rendering unlimited points; it is just rendering a small, rezed-down window of a virtual world of the same limited set of point models repeated over and over.
No company that really developed this type of technology would have a spokes person who sounds like a camp Vegeta off DragonBallZ. So its fake
I don't believe any of this will actually make it into games you can play at home on your PC. 2 Reasons: 1. Games are designed to run on graphically challenged consoles these days, and no matter how powerful PCs become, they will just be predominantly ports of console games from now on . If you actually believe what they're saying and this technology is real, you will still need pretty powerful hardware to achieve it (20fps in software my ass!). 2. It's bullsh1t. There's no way this is legit. Vaporware... move on people.. nothing to see here.
Actually, that was my first thought when I saw the video. I thought some people made a new HD skin for minecraft (I hadn't heard of them from 2010) . I thought they said their software was supposed to be able to convert polygons to unlimited detail or did I hear that wrong/misunderstand? Even if it only renders the points that you need to see/can see like I postulated, every single point needs to have some data attached to it. As lp rob1 pointed out, even if every datapoint was only 1 byte large you'd need >1TB of memory to hold the environment data. Another note: These guys aren't just getting random fan funding... According to this Euclideon is backed by over $2 million Australian dollars of government money.
Sry to say this but theres a maths error where you said "6,090,000,000,000,000 bytes" Tis 609,000,000,000,000; you added one too many 0s and gave us a heart attack. But still; 609,000 Terabytes; 609 Petabytes even... Who here has about 203,000 Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green Hard Drives? I hearby congraduate you.
