Omnimaga

General Discussion => Technology and Development => Other => Topic started by: Snake X on August 03, 2011, 09:51:50 am

Title: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Snake X on August 03, 2011, 09:51:50 am


The end all of all graphics and graphical computation. Welcome to the most advanced computer graphics the world has ever known.

Spoiler For my thoughts:
I think its fake edit: real.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Michael_Lee on August 03, 2011, 10:27:23 am
*shrug*

It could definitely be fake -- they're keeping everything 'secret', so we have no idea how it works.

Their website says that they should be releasing a demo in a few months, so I guess we'll see if they're really serious?
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: TIfanx1999 on August 03, 2011, 10:30:27 am
I'm generally skeptical about things, so I'll go with we'll have to see. It does look nice though. +1 for the intersting vid.

*Edit*: I'm also going to agree with what Ephan said below.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Munchor on August 03, 2011, 10:30:39 am
It can a be a fake, the word "unlimited" might be wrong, but it may be very very high.

I watched the video on 1080p on my TV and it's phenomenal, that I have to admit.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: BlakPilar on August 03, 2011, 10:33:22 am
I think it's possible.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Happybobjr on August 03, 2011, 10:38:23 am
it looks like they have high graphic things just repeated everywhere.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: yunhua98 on August 03, 2011, 10:39:51 am
The breakthrough is a little impossibly big, and their basically just using ever smaller Polygons, but they would really be screwed if this was fake, so I voted Yes.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Munchor on August 03, 2011, 11:01:45 am
Quote from: yunhua98 on August 03, 2011, 10:39:51 am
The breakthrough is a little impossibly big, and their basically just using ever smaller Polygons, but they would really be screwed if this was fake, so I voted Yes.

Oh I just saw the poll, and for the same reasons I voted yes.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Runer112 on August 03, 2011, 11:37:24 am
The technology is very real, and this company isn't the only one experimenting with it. The only reason the videos this company is releasing make it seem unreal is because they never state the downsides of their rendering engine. To name a few:



This is a very interesting technology and I cannot question that it produces astounding graphics. But in its current state, it has a few large problems that haven't been solved, so I don't think it's ready for use in real products yet. My hat goes off to the first company to make an immserive landscape like that of Oblivion (my favorite game ever if you haven't guessed yet) using voxels that contains less than 25GB or so of data.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: yunhua98 on August 03, 2011, 11:39:45 am
well, that clears things up.  ;)
I'll stick with polygon games for now then.  :P

Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Lionel Debroux on August 03, 2011, 11:45:54 am
I noticed a discussion on that topic in http://pouet.net/topic.php?which=7295 .
None of the famous demo makers I recognized in the posters' names (gloom, Navis, Gargaj, rasmus, maytz and smash, but there are certainly more) is convinced about the applicability of the "Unlimited Detail" technology to realistic usage with e.g. dynamic terrain, lighting (as opposed to the kind of highly repetitive and completely static data without lighting shown by the "Unlimited Detail" video), i.e. usage in modern video games.
This is not to say that the "Unlimited Detail" technology is fake - just that it has limited applicability (repetitive, static data).

EDIT: yeah, completely agree with Runer's post, which was written during the time I read on Pouet.net and posted my post.
EDIT2: added another famous demo maker.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: AngelFish on August 03, 2011, 11:46:46 am
Quote from: Snake X on August 03, 2011, 09:51:50 am

The end all of all graphics and graphical computation. Welcome to the most advanced computer graphics the world has ever known.

Runer is right. It's possible, but there are some pretty big downsides. It's nowhere near the ultimate graphics technology and I doubt it will even displace current methods in a lot of applications.

For one thing, you're dealing with so many discrete points, you can never hope to apply things globally. Sorry, but computers aren't fast enough now or in the foreseeable future to apply rules to trillions of points multiple times a second. Secondly, the "unlimited detail" method doesn't allow animations. It's too slow for that. Thirdly, there is a ton of repetition in that model. If each point were discrete, the resulting map would literally take petabytes of data. For comparison, a low to medium resolution polygon mesh over that same area takes somewhere between 120 MB and 1 GB.

So, it's probably real, but remarkably useless.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Snake X on August 03, 2011, 12:05:14 pm
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8423008802/but-notch-its-not-a-scam

This is what Notch has to say about the technology.. he thinks its a scam ;_;
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: ben_g on August 03, 2011, 02:29:14 pm
this can be real, but it's almost impossible to make a game which can fit on any portable storage device with a realistic world in such high detail. You'll need very powerful compression techniques to put what's seen in the video on a DVD. It's possible, but until we can easly store large amounts of data on a computer, it's very unpractical.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Happybobjr on August 03, 2011, 04:26:25 pm
you can't get real life quality, as the computers are in real life.
To me it is like building a computer in Minecraft, and having it as fast as the one it is running on.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: AngelFish on August 03, 2011, 04:27:26 pm
That's not the point. The point is to get better quality than is currently available in games.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: fb39ca4 on August 03, 2011, 05:16:28 pm
They used Just Cause 2 in the video :D Best. Game. Ever.

If this takes off, then there will be a reason for DRAM growth again :D
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/dram-memory-growth-forecast,13167.html (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/dram-memory-growth-forecast,13167.html)

So they're back again. I have to say, the quality was quite impressive, but I'm still unsure if they will be able to do dynamic animation, as everything is on a grid of voxels, this makes stuff like ragdoll physics quite hard. Atomontage (http://www.atomontage.com/?id=home) also looks promising, they have solved this problem by using voxels for the stationary environment, and polygons for moving objects. They even have voxel based physics implemented. I wonder how hard the lighting will be with voxels. I'm kind of worried, however, that video games that use this technology will have lots of repetitive content, due to the massive storage space requirements.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: Scipi on August 03, 2011, 05:52:08 pm
I liked the , "and these are grains of dirt" part. :P

They never mentioned how they dealt with the memory usage and processing power required to render the level at all, much less in real time.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: z80man on August 03, 2011, 06:50:45 pm
It is doable but not right now with our current technology. Although cpu speeds are increasing exponentially each year, the speed of memory is progressing at a much slower rate. Knowing the memory demands of software like this the bottleneck would be in cache misses and even more likely missing the ram itself and having to load data from the hard disk which is eons slower than the cpu. I'm betting that this technology will be in use with the film industry within the next 10 years and that have the game industry in an additional 5 to 10 years. And when it comes to difficulties such as animation, techniques are available but they don't have the perfect detail seen in the rendering engine.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: ben_g on August 03, 2011, 07:08:40 pm
Memory is indeed a problem: for example: after 2:20 in the video: "Elephant contains 530 906 polygons": A model usually contains almost the same amount of vertices than ploygons, and each vertix contains an int (to store the id of the vertex) and 3 floats(to save it's position). Ints and floats are each 4 bytes, so to store each point, you need 4*4=16 bytes.
With polygons, they almost always mean triangles, and for each triangle, you need to store it's id and the points it's made of. So each triangle is stored as 16 bytes. this means that the elephant is approximately (530 906 * 4)*2 = 4 247 248 bytes = 4147kb = 4mb. So only one model of the scene is already 4 megabytes, and this is witout the texture. for that, you'll need another megabyte, so witouth the texture image itself, it's a bit over 5 mb large. And this isn't the only model in the scene.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: fb39ca4 on August 03, 2011, 08:08:52 pm
The model itself doesn't use polygons, it uses voxels. Let's assume that the elephant statue is contained in a 750mm (75cm) cube. The guy said there were 64 voxels per cubic millimeter, so that makes 75 * 75 * 75 * 64, or 27,000,000 voxels. If the voxel has a 32 bit color value associated with it, that is 102MB right there. On a disk, that number can be greatly reduced by not storing information about the voxels inside the model, which nobody sees, but in memory it pretty much has to be in a 3D array so the renderer can quickly access the voxel at the arbitrary point x,y,z. (Unless the breakthrough he is talking about is in searching for voxels in another way) Actually, now that I think about it, an octree could be used so empty/unseen space need not be stored. But there is still massive amounts of data to be stored for a whole level, so I have a feeling a lot of stuff will be repetitive.

Also, did anyone notice how that guy left out games that use tesselation? So far, it has been a great solution to the polygon budget issue.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: ZippyDee on August 03, 2011, 08:11:17 pm
Quote from: t0xic_kitt3n on August 03, 2011, 08:08:52 pm
The model itself doesn't use polygons, it uses voxels. Let's assume that the elephant statue is contained in a 750mm (75cm) cube. The guy said there were 64 voxels per cubic millimeter, so that makes 75 * 75 * 75 * 64, or 27,000,000 voxels. If the voxel has a 32 bit color value associated with it, that is 102MB right there. On a disk, that number can be greatly reduced by not storing information about the voxels inside the model, which nobody sees, but in memory it pretty much has to be in a 3D array so the renderer can quickly access the voxel at the arbitrary point x,y,z. (Unless the breakthrough he is talking about is in searching for voxels in another way) Actually, now that I think about it, an octree could be used so empty/unseen space need not be stored.

Also, did anyone notice how that guy left out games that use tesselation? So far, it has been a great solution to the polygon budget issue.

The whole idea is that it uses octrees...
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: fb39ca4 on August 03, 2011, 10:35:32 pm
I figured that out, and now I find it quite amusing how he compared his engine to internet search engines in the first video.
Title: Re: Unlimited Detail!
Post by: DJ Omnimaga on August 03, 2011, 11:16:32 pm
This is interesting, but I really feel memory might be a serious problem for some games, so games using this might end up having repetitive levels.