As some of you may have seen I interviewed Bruce Dell on behalf of [H]ard|OCP and the video was published on Wednesday. I’ve had a couple of friends ask me whether Bruce’s Unlimited Detail technology would be viable for games like SWTOR. I have no doubt that the technology would improve games like SWTOR but it’s far too late to make these ground breaking changes for that game, but they are working on technology that enables them to convert polygons into their engine, so conversions might actually be possible in the future. If this technology eventuates, it’s will make amazing changes to open world games.
In the demo, I found in excess of a hundred different items but yet people all over the net are criticizing the demo because it looks repetitive. I guess people just aren’t used to seeing that much information on the screen at once.
If you go into WoW or and look at the zone Nagrad, for instance,
you can only see a max of three different tress in one scene, if that. There is far less detail and variety in WoW than in the Unlimited Detail video, and there will be less variety in SWTOR as well.
Euclideon are in need of a good map maker for their future projects. I look forward to seeing some well constructed maps to explore. You don’t realise how important view distance is until you get to experience something like this demo in real time. I watched the RAGE trailer this week after seeing Euclideon’s demo on Monday, and the graphics in RAGE looked horrible in comparison. Having seen Euclideon’s technology first hand, now I feel like someone who got to see Blu-ray backs in the 80s, but then left stuck with VHS. Imagine standing in a world with this view:
This island was built to look like their logo and you are literally a pin-prick on the logo. each color is a major item like the purple dot is the elephant the light green is the cactus etc.
This map would be as large as all of WoW … old and expansions put together. And there’s no loading between zones. This shot is looking over an area the size of just 1 letter in the logo name.
Fantastic interview, mate. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
ReplyDeleteI think this team needs a lot of encouragement (and encouragement they're NOT getting telling by what I read on the internet).
It sounds brilliant but I'm not sure of the different between their technology and basic voxel mapping with occlusion culling (displaying only the voxels in view and not rendering the ones you can't see).
From what I'm trying very hard to understand I get this:
Voxel mapping with occlusion culling is like using polygons, because both involve the geometry being out in the world; even though you're only rendering the voxels you can see, you're still going to render every bit of every voxel you can see.
With Euclideon's tech, it seems similar except that they use a new way of compressing data to make the same process described above *very fast*. So in essence, displaying it is the same old technology, but how it stores the information and retrieves it is the gem in all this.
Is that true?
I'm a little confused.
Compression and how it retrieves the information through the search algorithm is the key. Sorry I need to watch I say due to NDA's
ReplyDeleteUnderstood, so that confirms what I thought. The displaying aspect of it isn't entirely new; rather, it's the way it's saved and retrieved that enable it to run in realtime whereas it used to take, say, 15 minutes per frame to render that many voxels.
ReplyDeleteVery nice! I hope it's not a hoax :P
Also, I showed the demos and interview to a few friends and they can't grasp how monumental of an achievement this is (if it's true).
ReplyDeleteIf it's real, and there are no hideous drawbacks being hidden from us, then this will be the biggest step forward since the shift to video games having a Z axis.
Agreed I as I got to play with it first hand I know at least this part is real. we all have to wait to see what happens next. I know a lot of new people are coming in to work on the next stage.
ReplyDeleteI don't see hundreds of different objects in the Euclideon demo.
ReplyDeleteI see the same set of palm tree leaves repeated again and again. The tree trunk is the same piece placed on top of itself 8-10 times. Seems like there's another kind of tree, too.
There's only one elephant statue, 5-6 kinds of rock and maybe 2-3 kinds of grass.
I can also see how all the repeated objects are always the same size, facing the same direction, arranged on a regular grid.
This is because they are heavily re-using the same data, but the structure in which they store it does not allow for any modification. No scaling, no rotation, no irregular placement. Doing these things would break their 'search' algorithm and the demo wouldn't run at acceptable speeds.
And they need to re-use the objects because they take up so much memory. It would take just a few minutes to change a tree in any 3D editing application so that they can have at least some variation - but there is not enough memory to store multiple copies, either.
So it's a lego world, basically, with a very limited set of bricks.
Also, WOW is an MMO that should run on age-old computers without a lot of memory and the entire game fits on a single DVD. Never meant to be cutting edge, but it has to display dozens of animated characters, items, spell effects on a cheap system so that more people can run it and pay for it every month.
Whereas this Euclideon demo probably requires a lot more processing speed and memory to run, and these few dozens of objects already fill an entire DVD. So it's an unfair comparision, try to show it against some advanced game like Rage or Battlefield 3 instead.
That's all well and good, but he said that in the upcoming demo he'll show animation and that things won't be copy-pasted. They just had to work on it some more.
ReplyDeleteDo I remain skeptical? Yes. BUT he at least addressed those things and claims to disprove them in the future.
Also, if you actually watch the interview, Dell claims that the system runs MORE efficient than polygonal rendering and allows better detail while running on equivilently less hardware than polygonal rendering methods require.
So again, if any of this is really true, it's huge.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDelete"Also, WOW is an MMO that should run on age-old computers without a lot of memory and the entire game fits on a single DVD."
You know WoW is 30GB+ right? Yes u can get an install DVD that lets you download the rest... as for the items in the map as you can see from the map image there are 24 major items but then you get all the other stuff on the ground. I think the map logo might have been a bad idea as it requires lots of the same object in the same spot. we will see what happens next. And sorry to do this but I'm turning on log in to post due to spam and trolls.