Unlimited Detail

from Sins Forums

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-08/video-unlimited-detail-graphics-tech-surfaces-again-still-wont-let-us-play-it

 

Just curious what the opinions of you guys are in regards to this.  Rather than risking slowing down computers, 3D artists must sometimes reduce their polygon counts to help the processors so the game doesn't get bogged down.

Someone in the comments section of the referenced article suggested the difficulty of collision checking and that perhaps some sort of bounding box would be created.  What are your thoughts?

36,652 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Interesting.

The problem now is just the marketing.

Who is willing to make a game with insane detail for a specialized graphics card?

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Notch wrote a "reply" here: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam 

To sum it up, there's a big reason we're seeing the same objects repeating over and over, and there's good reasons why nothing is animated.

OP mentioned hitboxes, which will be a problem. I also think the lighting is subpar, compared to say http://www.gameblurb.net/wp-content/gallery/030311-unreal/unreal_tech_09.jpg 

 I wonder if some sort of hybrid engine would be possible. Because you'd really want voxels for static or little-moving environment, but you'd want polygons for characters and such.

Edit: Just making an argument here, but tesselation effectively already offers unlimited detail, in polygons. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQQpCd_vvGU But no game has really used it to its limits yet. Why? My guess would be costs of producing those 3d models. And if you want to see something truly impressive, see how this alien changes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c_PVtMIz-A&feature=relmfu 

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

In regards to what notch wrote, the link provided in the OP has a response to that in the comments section.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

For the lazy,

"This technology is not a voxel engine... that is why Notch is wrong. He is assuming that this technology is needing to calculate points for every point in the system for every frame... when in reality this engine searches and calculates for only points that can be seen and displayed on a monitor which is your resolution. The billions of points that are not being displayed are NOT USING PROCESSING POWER. Go back to Notch's Blog and drink some more of his koolaid." - caliorangekb

It seems to me that any animated point would need to use processing power. Again, no animation for a reason. And it doesn't really adress the memory concerns of adding thousands of unique objects. In fact, it's like they missed what he was talking about completely.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

I agree there in a way.  RAM is going to get abused with this system, but CPU's and GPU's won't I think is the idea...  RAM is easier to come by in some cases than a better graphics card or processor (not to mention the fact that infinite detail looks better).

I'm not saying we should abandon poly's, but the idea of swapping them out for clouds sometimes for similar objects would increase detail without doing much of anything to processing while requiring less memory than pure clouds.

Reply #6 from Demigod Forums Top

Quoting Volt_Cruelerz, reply 5
I agree there in a way. RAM is going to get abused with this system, but CPU's and GPU's won't I think is the idea... RAM is easier to come by in some cases than a better graphics card or processor (not to mention the fact that infinite detail looks better).

yeah, if that's the case, then I'm a big fan.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

While very pretty, all I saw here was a nice slideshow.  In-game footage is all that matters.  While it's nice to see people thinking in different directions, this has ultimately zero worth.  I'll wait until they've got something real.