Polygons Might Be Gone Forever!

[xXShaddowTXx]

YouTube Video ~ Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011

Yep, just a link.

[scrawl]

Polygons Might Be Gone Forever!

no.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

[1Samildanach]

Polygons Might Be Gone Forever!

no.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

Notch is hardly a master of all things code.

Having read multiple discussions about this in the past, it is not far fetched. There are well established methods for dealing with data in the way they seem to be (I think one person mentioned sonar systems he'd worked with... decades ago).

There certainly are challenges to overcome, and they may be taking a while, but they're working on something that has never been done before (building a completely unconventional game engine based on these techniques). Sure, it is possible that they actually are scamming, but it is entirely plausible that they are doing what they say they're doing.

[imec]

I remember the B3D forums (I think?) talking to this guy. He would only give extremely vague details when people asked him questions. He eventually became apprehensive when users started to suspect that the feature set of the engine had been overstated. I also vaguely remember him denying SVO's and that he refused to reveal his ultra secret rendering technique. Anyways, the engine probably isn't going anywhere good anytime soon.

[psi29a]

It is old news and not much has come out of it. They have even go so far is to change their terms from voxels to "point cloud' and other marketing speak to obscure that they are using a voxel based engine. He is full of guff, blowing through both government (Australia) and VC money.

This technology is not new, they even used it a bit in Duke3d back in the 90s.

Not that such a thing is bad, example: http://www.starforge.com/

The really interesting point (which is discussed on starforge) is that it scales infenitely because it reads all voxel data from an octree so there is no "wait until we node the next cell/sector/level".

Here is a much better demonstration of the technology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxBSYit4 ... ce=message

[WeirdSexy]

Someone makes a post about this every now and then on pretty much any video game forum you could think of.
There's no good way to animate objects like that.

I think an interesting solution (and I don't have enough technical knowledge to know what the challenges would be with this) would be to have a hybrid voxel/polygon engine where traditional polygons are used for animated objects like vegetation and characters and the voxel engine is used for static objects like rocks, architecture, and terrain.

...Actually, this might be a good forum to ask something like that. Does anyone here know if this would be feasible?

[psi29a]

...Actually, this might be a good forum to ask something like that. Does anyone here know if this would be feasible?

Yes, look at the video I posted above. Poly models, Voxel world. It is a it like Starcraft/WoW/Minecraft rolled into one.

[gus]

...Actually, this might be a good forum to ask something like that. Does anyone here know if this would be feasible?

Yup. I believe Ogre has some Voxel SceneManager, so we could even put it in openmw

[WeirdSexy]

...Actually, this might be a good forum to ask something like that. Does anyone here know if this would be feasible?

Yes, look at the video I posted above. Poly models, Voxel world. It is a it like Starcraft/WoW/Minecraft rolled into one.

Yes, I saw that. I should have watched the video and commented on it before I posted. Very interesting btw, I hadn't heard of Star Forge before. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

The terrain in that video is still very blocky, meaning you can tell the surface is composed of flat triangles. But, I think that may be a product of the procedural generation/sculpting system they are using. In an environment like a single player RPG where the terrain is static and artist-designed and hand built, I think the ability for terrain to be smooth (well, or realistically jagged for rocky terrain, you get my meaning) would be a huge step for the quality of landscape. I mean, could you imagine how much better Morrowind would look if its terrain was like that instead of a collection of large flat triangles?

[Necrod]

...Actually, this might be a good forum to ask something like that. Does anyone here know if this would be feasible?

Yes, look at the video I posted above. Poly models, Voxel world. It is a it like Starcraft/WoW/Minecraft rolled into one.

Yes, I saw that. I should have watched the video and commented on it before I posted. Very interesting btw, I hadn't heard of Star Forge before. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

The terrain in that video is still very blocky, meaning you can tell the surface is composed of flat triangles. But, I think that may be a product of the procedural generation/sculpting system they are using. In an environment like a single player RPG where the terrain is static and artist-designed and hand built, I think the ability for terrain to be smooth (well, or realistically jagged for rocky terrain, you get my meaning) would be a huge step for the quality of landscape. I mean, could you imagine how much better Morrowind would look if its terrain was like that instead of a collection of large flat triangles?

Also if rocks were actually rocky, not just sphere-like flat-surface things... I can't wait for actual normal and specular maps