Quake3World

Here's new footage of my second favorite possibly-scam//hopefully-revelation thing -- the euclideon voxel engine [actual fav. is the rossi/cold-fusion story. This would REALLY be ace!]

[youtube]DbMpqqCCrFQ[/youtube]

Feel free to reproduce tech remarks you picked up in other comment threads around the interwebs. I'll go first:

sandom q3w tech smartass wrote:Animation.. Blabla.. Voxel cloud.. Blabla.. calculations.. Blabla.. Carmack said..

They also have a second, non-hd and thus less impressive video with a douche voiceover:

[youtube]5AvCxa9Y9NU[/youtube]

nice would like to see the game graphics though as these environments were a bit static. also, this tech needs peripheral vision to really take off so oculus rift maybe?

+1 on the douche voiceover btw

Yeah, impressive but weirdly offputting for lack of fluidity apparent on the nature scenes. Problem with improved visual quality is the lack of physics / interactivity of equal level. Kind of creates an uncanny valley effect when things don't react quite as you would expect them to. If for (simple) example, one of those leaf branches get in the way of the player trying to squeeze into an otherwise trivial area, do to it's lack of realistic physical properties, the entire experience crumbles.

I'm a sucker for visuals, but not in the expense of the overall experience. I'd gladly trade off half of those triangles and special shaders for a little more emphasis on better interaction.

Don't get me wrong.. I get it's infinently easier bumping up the graphics compared to having good world interaction, but it's now getting to a point where the subject can no longer be ignored. If we are to move forward, some of the big developers need to have the balls and foresight of tacking a genuine shot at tackling this issue. But it's not just an issue. In order for it to be done properly, the entire mentality of what it means to play such a game for instance, requires taking so many things into consideration..

Do all games all of a sudden need to be realistic? no, that will get boring and cumbersome. But the ones that are trying to use this level of detail, beter be ready to follow that decision all the way through. Some clever management of what will eventually be important to gameplay, and what's not should be possible.

@Tsakali: I totally agree with you.

First of all: I don't think this tech is a scam: Companies are using it; the australian government funded it.

Second: Up to this point it seems really static. And even though they claim to have animation I don't expect their solution to be very interactive - or as you said: physical. From what they said the data is compressed and then streamed directly from the drive; Having good physics would require recompressing parts of the world. But then again: Maybe they have some geniuses in their team and managed to solve the main problem - fast transformations of voxel clouds. Storing the world data in a database with a concurrency model like datomic/clojure might allow for simultaneous rewriting/streaming of the world. But I don't think so. I expect skeletal animation in a non-physical world.

yeah most likely, it's clear that their are just boasting the graphical aspect of it. World interaction is not something they would overlook in their demonstrations, if they had something worthwhile to say. But this should be amazing for those special applications, such as virtual tours, where a 'look but don't touch' mentality is fitting

The Australian government funded it?

Oh, these guys again. They're pretty arrogant in how they hype their technologies. And hype it is, because it's all inflated bullshit.

These videos jsut show photosourced textures applied to relatively low detail 3D geometry. There's probably little to no world interaction. Lighting is static because we're pretty much looking at a 3D photograph. It doesn't exactly look very realistic either due to the lighting being static. In the real world, the way you see (light interact with) objects is different depending on the angle you're looking at the object. Here in this SolidScan, no such thing, because everything is static. In fact, I would bet my nuts that if you have the 3D scanning data it'd be no real problem to import that into Unreal Engine 4 and have the engine calculate lighting in real time. There's absolutely nothing in that video that amazes me. The coolest part here is the actual 3D scanners, and that's something they've simply bought from another company who makes those things.

Last but not least, with this scanning technology you can createvirtual copies of real world locations. That's all good and dandy, and there is definitely a use for that, but games isn't one of them. You see, the point of a game is to escape from reality, not copy it.

Eraser wrote:You see, the point of a game is to escape from reality, not copy it.

You display a pretty limited conception of what games are.

Eraser wrote:... low detail 3D geometry.

I think you are mistaken here; take a second look at the scenes in the church and the geometric detail shown - take a precise look at what the ornaments atop the seats in the cathedral occlude and what not.

That being said, I agree with your and Tsakalis objection: From the rendering technique to the very content creation, proponents of this technology will have to solve a great deal of problems before it can suitably be used for interactive games. But then again; Restricting the possibilities of expression in one direction can lead to creative leaps in another and I'd give them the benefit of the doubt until they actually release a game that fails in the discusssed compartments.

Didn't you get the memo? Eraser was nominated arbiter of all the things.

U4EA wrote:Didn't you get the memo? Eraser was nominated arbiter of all the things.

I, for one, welcome myself as our new forum overlord.

oh that reminds me to prune the mod list.

Pext wrote:I think you are mistaken here; take a second look at the scenes in the church and the geometric detail shown - take a precise look at what the ornaments atop the seats in the cathedral occlude and what not.

It's no level of detail that hasn't been shown before in xbox360/PS3 generation games, and they combine that level of detail with real time lighting and all sorts of surface rendering techniques like bump mapping or specular mapping and whatnot to make surfaces appear much more realistic than these flat photograph textures we see here.

All I'm trying to say is that while I get why they're doing it, I feel that simply promoting this by it's supposed graphical fidelity is the wrong way to go about it. There are probably dozens of applications one can come up with where this technology is definitely useful, but (graphical realism in) video games isn't one of them IMO.

realism in games could be advanced a great deal if they could just nail natural light. instead, they copy the lighting from movies, which is also total shit and obviously artificial even when it's not meant to be

in fact, just stop copying movies entirely ffs

A digital copy of the real world

THEY ARE TRYING TO MAKE THE MATRIX!!!! The computers used to run this will be using power we generate through heat.

We are doomed. RUN FOR YOUR LIVES.

maybe they already are

dun dun DUNNN