New Graphics Engine.

[Lava]

Just watch..... if this is really true....

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=player_embedded[/ame]

Just amazing. Makes me want to study being a graphics artist instead of a programmer.

 

[Mobeus]

So THIS is why Valve has been postponing HalfLife ep3.

 

[Captain Nighthawk]

So THIS is why Valve has been postponing HalfLife ep3.

Pshhht

 

[ghettosmurf]

Man I had a hard time taking that video seriously! The guy seriously sounds like he's making a mockumentary. If it's legit though, then it's extremely impressive.

For developing games around it, I wonder how long it will take to get there. What with A.I. routines, physics, artist-level texture requirements, and other processor-intensive work to account for.

 

[reflex99]

it only works for static objects right now, so unless you want to play "where's waldo: zomg shiny edition" all day, it is pretty useless for games right now.

They say they have animations figured out, but didn't have it functional in time for that video, so it does look promising.

 

[ChocolateVillain]

What I posted earlier.

I do believe that the days of flat panel 3d imaging are numbered. But how long till this type of graphics can be implemented I do not know. My question would be "Are they making a new engine? Or just changing the way objects are rendered in game?"

To me they seem to hint towards a new engine because of the way they are being tight lipped about things (Which I think is the smart money move wise). But if so I think they are far from doing any kind of physics based action with there renders. All the objects they created were of just still objects and fixed shadows. Would like to see some animation from them.

 

[IDigitalDeadI]

seems impressive, but regardless of hardware, everyone would lag until their cpu's melted.

 

[Lava]

seems impressive, but regardless of hardware, everyone would lag until their cpu's melted.

Yes that's with the old system. What they are saying is they have found out a way to do this without killing PC's. How do you think they are rending all of that. They don't have much better hardware then whats on the market.

 

[Boo-Yeah!!]

If only minecraft lookd like that... I might actually consider trying it....

 

[ghettosmurf]

A couple demos of this were added to GameTrailers yesterday, and a commenter there elaborated quite a bit on this tech and I thought I'd share:

This is a well known scam to raise funds for a technology that isn't new or groundbreaking, has major flaws preventing it from using in gaming.

This technology is called Sparse Voxel Octree.

There are plenty of videos on youtube that show far more advanced implementations and providing actual source code. So as there are open source SVO engines.

The main con of this technology is animation. It is almost impossible to animate using SVO, because you have to do enormous amount of calculations. That's the reason everything is static in this demo.

Games are using voxels. There are old games like Delta Force and new ones like Crysis and Minecraft, where voxels are used to generate terrain.

He goes on to link to these other videos demonstrating similar tech but with a bit more gaming relevancy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y[/ame]
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI[/ame]
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mBsdC4u8uI[/ame]

 

[Sexy Beast]

A couple demos of this were added to GameTrailers yesterday, and a commenter there elaborated quite a bit on this tech and I thought I'd share:



He goes on to link to these other videos demonstrating similar tech but with a bit more gaming relevancy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mBsdC4u8uI

Yeah, apparently Notch ripped the video apart on his blog:

Perhaps you’ve seen the videos about some groundbreaking “unlimited detail” rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Well, it is a scam.

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.

There’s the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y

Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw

And there’s more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.

Source: http://notch.tumblr.com/

 

[Death]

Yea it looks nice, but as said before it seems like a scam. Plus wouldn't it just be easier to make polygons smaller...like what they've been doing for awhile now?

 

[labowsky]

the only reason we an animate polygons so well is cause we have been doing it for years! we havnt been using voxels (that i know of) to animate for as long as polygons so of course we don't know how to animate it very well. we just need to work more with it.

 

[Cakeman]

Notch has made two posts on his blog related to this, read the 2nd post down, then the newest one. Interesting stuff.

 

[KKJZ]

dude my friend showed me this and i just about died

 

[reflex99]

notch is just mad that he can't make a proper patch

 

[Rogue Sniper]

Even if its not fully finished and such, having just the landscape/world/geometry of a game in voxels/atoms/whatever would just increase the realism of the game so much that having polygon animations for models that aren't static would still be well worth it.

My problem with most games is that the land is made from polygons and you can tell and they make them smaller and smaller but yet never smooth so if all this for is the world geometry I say go for it, I want land that rolls smoothly and not little faces that go up and down...