Endless Paradigm

Found this video.  Have no idea how they're achieving this, but might serve as an interesting watch anyway.

Well they are using voxels instead of polygons for rendering and I've been reading around and quite a few people think that the only way it can be working so smoothly on a reasonable computer is through pre-rendering.. which has been thought of before but would take a tremendous amount of storage to accomplish.

Anyway, more info: http://kotaku.com/5827192/euclideon-crea...not-a-hoax

point cloud graphics

Looks awesome!

i just came

Certainly makes games look more realistic.

Watched the clip again,. (without the sound!!,. very annoying,..) and def looks real-time,. but mebbe its rendered to look real-time,..

if this is real it will def change gaming experience for sure,. ;p,.. x100.000 better looking,. O_o

My main criticism is the amount of information they put in the video.  They explain that polygons are used currently, and their new technology does things differently, but they don't seem to try to explain how.  They also seemed to be intent on making claims such as the speed of rendering, but don't give much indication as to how.
Arguably, this could because of the target audience, or perhaps they want to keep their idea under the hood until they release something.

EDIT: read the article - makes sense I guess.  But yeah, will need to see how they do animation.
Though even if they don't get it, perhaps one could mix it with traditional graphics to get more detailed landscapes (which usually don't animate).

More info

Quote:Perhaps you’ve seen the videos about some groundbreaking “unlimited detail” rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Well, it is a scam.

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and wee end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.

There’s the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y

Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw

And there’s more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.

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

Well,.. doesn't look like a complete scam to me,.. @ Critics!!