News Euclideon promises unlimited graphical detail

I've just been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Call of Pripyat again. Awesome graphics? Check! Deep, involving gameplay? Check! Available on consoles? Erm... no!

I think you have a point...

 

He did point out that voxels take up an inordinate amount of space. They really do. However, take Minecraft as an example - that is basically your average voxel world. I suspect a lot of "destructible environments" are already doing things with voxels to accomplish those goals. Having everything be a voxel at such incredible levels of detail is going to unnecessarily chug CPU/GPU. Basic physics haven't even been applied to their example world.

The other complaint here is that nothing moves. I'd like to see performance of each voxel moving around the world myself. I'll bet performance drops pretty quickly to unacceptable levels.

 

I'm gonna repost what I wrote in the hardware thread.

Notch was absolutely correct when he mentioned storage space requirements making this sort of thing for a real game impossible. Another showstopping problem with using point clouds/voxels in a game engine is animation. Notice that Euclideon has zero animation of any sort present in any of their demos; this is because animating point clouds is impossibly complex due to the need to calculate movement for every single point. With current polygon technologies, animation deforms a skeleton which is linked to vertices of the model and the rest of the model's movement is interpolated, which is a fairly fast operation. Consider that a model with 5,000 triangles could have at most 15,000 vertices; thus, animating that model would require calculating the movement of at most 15,000 objects.

Euclideon's technology would require doing that math for every single one of the millions, billions, or trillions of data points which have to move. Remember that then you would have to store each keyframe of animation data, easily increasing the storage space needed for an animated Infinite Detail model by another order of magnitude for each 10 keyframes required. The other alternative is to create groups of points, and then move whole groups at a time instead of individual points. Think one group for the head, one for the torso, upper arm, lower arm, etc. Too bad this style of animation looks terrible.

Dynamic lighting is another issue for this engine. In the demos, lighting is precalculated and then the light value of each point is stored along with its other data. Calculating lighting in real-time for every single point in a large scene (like a game world) is another processing challenge which is impossible to overcome. Again, it would require doing lighting operations on trillions of individual objects. Euclideon would have us playing a game world with zero dynamic lighting: no cast shadows, no flashlights, no explosions... and no immersion.

Their novel search algorithm may make it possible to efficiently generate scenes out of huge sparse voxel octree datasets and display them, but you can't call their engine a game engine. With infinite storage, we could store as much data as needed for highly detailed models and animations, and with infinite processing power we could calculate real-time lighting for their incredibly high detail voxel models, but we don't have infinite space or infinite power.

Please, don't waste your time on this stuff.

 

Didn't plan to waste my time. The fact that there is no animation makes this a bit implausible. But if we can mesh this and make some solid environments, it's still useful.

 

There could be solutions to all those issues tho. Compression for example could go a long way towards making the space problem less of an issue. And if truly real looking games needed to be big, then so be it. I have about a terrabyte more space than I need at the moment anyway.

Maybe it is all BS, although I can't see what they would stand to get out of doing that. They want to sell an engine by the looks of it, and a bunch of faked videos isn't going to work.

 

AVX2 might fix their hardware support issue, as it includes gather and FMA instructions -just like the GPU- while retaining the flexibility benefits of the CPU.

 

someone ask john carmack what he thinks

 

Agree. It seems people are quick to call something a scam even without knowing how it works. They assume it's either fake or that the coders are idiots who don't know what they're doing. If people can't understand how something can work they dismiss it as improbable or fake. Quite illogical but that is how the masses are (largely dumb).

I on the other hand am super intelligent. I can't help it. Been this way from a young age. It's a burden actually and I have to act retarded in order to fit in with the rest of society.

I think the video is impressive. If the engine has more or less unlimited rendering then animation/deformation of objects shouldn't be too hard to imagine.

 

Thats doesnt look all that impressive perhaps when a game is made with it and i can buy it i might be impressed.

 

This brings up an interesting point. Two things.

1) if someone is going to engage in a debate about graphics, they had better make sure their vision is 20/20, with correction. I knew a gamer who finally went to the eye doctor and came back to his computer and said "Its like a graphics upgrade", fortunately this was in RL so I punched him in the arm, hard.

2) If you do not have at least a 24 inch monitor, please stay out of the graphics threads, you simply can not see it on tiny 22 inch monitors. Quite frankly gaming on less than a 26 incher is inadequate.

3) If you want to understand why some of us have 2 graphics cards with 2 gpus each, go buy 3 26 inch monitors and join the rest of us in eyefinity glory, you will never go back to single monitor lameness

4) 1920x1200 is the minimum resolution for playing a game these days.

Yours in visual acuity Plasma,
Star*Dagger

 

Sounds like willy waving, Star*Dagger.

Voiceover sounded like an Australian Lloyd Grossman

 

I just want ground to look like ground...

Thats 4 points, looks like you were too busy to count from your 'I haz uberrr gamer setup'...

 

I was playing Arma 2 tonight and realised that the ground and rocks in particular, look pretty much as good as this video I still think this would be way better though, if it's real. p.s. Lol at star daggers post.

 

But he has 2 graphics cards, so it's really only 2 points each.

 

I've been musing over this for a long time, games that get close to looking like real life in some instances can really take your breath away but if they look too much like real life I don't think they will hold the majesty that they currently do, but that's my opinion and I don't t hink they are anywhere near that "real life" stage yet.

Going back to the engine itself, yes the ground looks amazing, yes the trees and the vines look great but every polygon created world they showcased look better to me and I was getting really annoyed with every example of how their technology was better was grass and stone, the same grass and stone.

Yes Polygons are limited but only by the technology and I suspect this technology will be as limited by texture bandwidth as current prefered technology, there is nothing in their showcase that indicates they have solved that little problem!!

I'd much rather a diverse, A.I. ridden, well-lit gameworld than some pretty rocks and trees (although did anyone else get annoyed with the square edged riverbanks and steps into higher terrain, that looks worse than any badly tesselated terrain to me, but that's me

 

Remember Delta-force 1 and 2, Were they not done in voxels? I thought the issue with that was you couldn't run them in hardware? So surely you'd need a bespoke graphics card to draw them in hardware realtime???

 

I've been musing over this for a long time, games that get close to looking like real life in some instances can really take your breath away but if they look too much like real life I don't think they will hold the majesty that they currently do, but that's my opinion and I don't t hink they are anywhere near that "real life" stage yet.

Going back to the engine itself, yes the ground looks amazing, yes the trees and the vines look great but every polygon created world they showcased look better to me and I was getting really annoyed with every example of how their technology was better was grass and stone, the same grass and stone.

Yes Polygons are limited but only by the technology and I suspect this technology will be as limited by texture bandwidth as current prefered technology, there is nothing in their showcase that indicates they have solved that little problem!!

I'd much rather a diverse, A.I. ridden, well-lit gameworld than some pretty rocks and trees (although did anyone else get annoyed with the square edged riverbanks and steps into higher terrain, that looks worse than any badly tesselated terrain to me, but that's me

 

Interesting, so it seems that many of you have a fear of games looking "too real". How odd. Perhaps DICE are totally misguided in their attempts to create more visual realism in their battlefield series? Perhaps they should make the game with isometric perspective and sprite animation?

I can think of nothing better than walking around an alien world modelled down to the smallest detail. I'm reminded of the incredible worlds of the Myst series (especially myst V).

I dont want to see trees that look like angled tubes with textures stuck on. I want as much visual realism as possible in my game worlds. I want to see bugs and insects crawling over a blade of grass. How on earth can increased visual realism detract from a game FFS. It can make it more immersive and engaging.

I don't know but some of you are just plain weird.

 

Exactly. And some bits if that Frostbite 2 trailer looked real...

 

Just making sure you guys (and gals) are paying attention!

Carry on.