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[nenjin]

[Notch] alleges that “They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. Don’t get excited. Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.”

I'd say that's a reasonably fair assessment. Although everyone seems to be paying as much attention to the narrator as the engine.

That said I now want a t-shirt with a poorly printed logo that says "I'm excited for Voxels!"

[PsyberianHusky]

Well, atleast this is giving some hype to the AtomontageEngine, I like the potential that has,
and I support it cause I have no opinion of my own and DataRelms told me to!

[Sordid]

Everyone seems to be paying as much attention to the narrator as the engine.

Spoiler: That's because... (click to show/hide)

[Soulwynd]

Notch rips this thing a new one, explaining how exactly it's impossible.

Except Notch is not a competent programmer. So whatever Notch rips, doesn't really gives it any less merit. Everything he has claimed in the past to be impossible to be done with minecraft is being done by modders. The only credit I give Notch is for sticking to his project.

Did you actually read what Notch wrote? It's generally a pretty accurate assessment in this case. The main gist of it is it isn't nearly as impressive as they make it out to be.

Yup I did and nope it isn't. Notch assumes, wrongly I might add, that you need to know every single atom in order for things to render or even work when in reality, most voxel engines only care about surface atom, so his working memory assessment are verily wrong. Secondly, subdatasets let you take a big area and say plainly, it's composed of this. So you use waaay less than a single byte pet atom to fill up an area. When you have subdatasets of elements present all over the place, for example, a rock, you have a single rock composed of atoms and then elements that say "There's a rock in this position, with this rotation, and this deformation." therefore you only have a tiny overhead of bypes in the memory per rock and you can have thousands of them with little memory cost, simply because you have a default rock.

This is also used in rendering tricks, where you render a single person once and then use it as a base to create a huge population. If you want an example of this, one of the Hitman games had a scene where you had to walk through a few hundred people, all rendered on the fly, using the very same technology in question.

Seriously, if there's one thing notch is not good at is managing memory and data. Minecraft absolutely sucks at that. Don't listen to him.


As for the rock example I gave, lets say the rock itself has around 10megabytes worth of atoms. Now lets lets say each (data) tree structure has the following elements:

3D positioning - 3 * 8byte (64bit float)
3D rotation - 2 * 8byte (64bit float)
3D deformation vectors - Array of 1 to 3 * 8byte (64bit float again)

Now, lets say that on average, each rock has 2 deformation vectors that deform on average 2 axis each. Each rock would have an overhead of 72byte on average. Now... Lets say we have 100 thousand rocks in a scene. That uses 6.86mb of ram. For 100000 rocks. If a rock gets thrown around, only 5*8bytes get changed. The only case in which the rock would take more space was if you actually changed its atoms, so you'd have to create an instance of a sub data set in which you tell which atoms got changed, which would still take less than the size of the original rock.

So yes, the trick is in searching that tree-like database fast enough to pick a given atom of the root-rock decide which color should be placed on the pixel you're drawing.

As for lightning and other screen effects, don't fool yourself much, even with our 3d games, it's all based on cheap tricks and illusions for speed and that can be applied just the same to this. For example, the rock element could have a shader just like polygon objects do and that could texture it and do all the fun things 3D engines do right now, just without using polygons.

[alway]

Oh, I'm not saying voxel engines and such aren't the future; they probably are. What I'm saying is the way in which this particular company is portraying theirs is inaccurate at best. They talk about their voxels in terms of 'per cubic millimeter' rather than per square millimeter area (as the system you described entails). They created their "island" as a way to build off the previous statement in such a way as to imply their engine is, in fact, dealing with the bajillion individual voxels.
It's essentially the same as someone coming in to show off their new fusion generator they built in their basement. They then light a fire under the boiler and the steam powers the turbine and generates electricity. I mean, sure their generator works, but it isn't doing what it is portrayed as doing, nor will it revolutionize energy generation.

[forsaken1111]

Because they are marketing the technology to people who do not understand the technology, so they have to dumb it down a bit and put it in understandable terms or make silly statements like 'infinite power!' to get people excited. They're after grant money and licenses, they don't give a shit what gamers think really so long as you talk about it and generate buzz.

[Soulwynd]

I don't care about voxels that much, just saying Notch is not the best source of information on it. Nor am I, but if you consider wikipedia good, nothing a bit of searching won't fix.

Well, the engine only cares about surface voxels when rendering, unless you want transparency of course, but the objects are indeed volumetric. Even when we're dealing with volumetric data, unless you're dealing with something like a physics simulation, medical data, or something similar, you don't need to specify every single atom inside an object. Atoms also don't need to have the same size as Notch implied.

Visually speaking, yeah, it seems like a bajillion voxels, but the last time I saw that lil demo reel was months ago and I'm not sure why it's getting all this popularity now. If you pay attention, you will notice all elements are just instances. So he probably has a few base objects which are repeated to compose the scene.

Of course, the way he tries to sell his stuff while sounding like a douche doesn't make it any better.

[PsyberianHusky]

voxels need their own thread.

[Tharwen]

This is actually just a really efficient version of Minecraft's rendering engine...

Except it does not use blocks.

It does. It just has lots of them, rendered more smoothly.

[Eagleon]

Well, the engine only cares about surface voxels when rendering, unless you want transparency of course, but the objects are indeed volumetric. Even when we're dealing with volumetric data, unless you're dealing with something like a physics simulation, medical data, or something similar, you don't need to specify every single atom inside an object. Atoms also don't need to have the same size as Notch implied.

You know, this gives me an idea, which knowing my lateness to the game has already been done and thought of. If the ray encounters an atom that is large enough to be encountered by a second (or in other words, the pixel is smaller than the atom given its relative distance to the viewer), couldn't you just subdivide the atom again to provide more detail? Essentially a 3D fractal. Lots of natural materials have (or can be approximated by) some easily mathematically defined patterns that could be used like this. More, you could discard these subdivisions periodically when they fall out of view. Not sure what the overhead would be for messing with this data structure that way. I get the feeling that's the major barrier for any of this stuff.

[Heron TSG]

Does anyone else think that 'Euclideon' is a stupid name for a graphics engine that abandons polygons?

[PsyberianHusky]

Does anyone else think that 'Euclideon' is a stupid name for a graphics engine that abandons polygons?

A lil...
Basically for me to stop snickering at this company, they need to put out a game.
The best tech demo, is marketable.

[Duuvian]

Wow, this is awesome. Going through the canopies of trees and the grains of dirt on the land makes things very awesome. If people are watching these guys would be a good idea to put some money into. Basically they are laying out the next generation of games for you.

EDIT: Also I didn't listen to the sound when I watched the videos. !

EDIT2: Heck, even if you are only a fan/hobbyist/player of games, you should probably show people this.

EDIT3: So, with this you could make your own world? Like If I took a statue or something important to me I could put it into a game? And then have my dwarfs for instance mine out civilization in the statue of liberty or something? Because if I'm understanding this right, it's not polygons but basically what equates to atoms now.

EDIT4: This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. If I had money I'd put it into these guys straight-away and try to benevolently whip them into doing the best job they can do by making the returns performance based.

[FunctionZero]

EDIT4: This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. If I had money I'd put it into these guys straight-away and then get out the whip to make sure they work it.
Because if I'm understanding this right, it's not polygons but basically what equates to atoms now.

Not really atoms as in size, no. Basically one-dimensional points.

[Duuvian]

EDIT4: This is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. If I had money I'd put it into these guys straight-away and then get out the whip to make sure they work it.
Because if I'm understanding this right, it's not polygons but basically what equates to atoms now.

Not really atoms as in size, no. Basically one-dimensional points.

Yeah, exactly. The function of atoms, aka, step one or something is what I meant.

By that I mean that with this system there would not be the clunkyness that having to have straight lines causes rather than a dot.

In other words, before we had straight lines where they formed a matrix of interconnected lines that formed a 3d image. The space between the lines could be painted and how good your graphics are is determined by how small you could make the space, like a mosaic effect.

Now they can simply eliminate the lines and put a bunch of colored dots (atoms) and use that instead of a network of lines with paint splashed on the parts in between that would be 'solid'. Now it would be more like a TV screen where a bunch of paint dots arrange themselves if I understand correctly.

Except it would be 3d.

Before they couldn't do this as billions of dots consume more cpu resources than millions of lines, but apparently we are reaching the point where it's possible to begin the next generation of graphics.