Video Games With Unlimited Detail Graphics?

By Monday August 8, 2011





33 Comments
  1. Animby says:
    8/8/2011 at 4:33 pm

    This will improve Angry Birds, how?

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  2. So what says:
    8/8/2011 at 4:53 pm

    I call both vaporware and fake. Why? cause the narrator sounds like a douche and the graphics were not that impressive.

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  3. Mikey Ate It says:
    8/8/2011 at 7:22 pm

    Funny! It sounds like a Monty Python sketch. It’s a goof.

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  4. Skeptic says:
    8/8/2011 at 7:24 pm

    Okay, my previous joke aside, this technology is for real. I just asked my 22 y/o gamer son about it. The technique uses voxels (Volumetric Picture Element), and many game engine programmers are already working on more advanced engines. The link in post #17 above illustrates the very same technology. Calling voxels “atoms” didn’t help this presentation for believability, but nonetheless it’s genuine and not so ‘new’.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel
    (excerpt from Wkp)
    • C4 Engine is a game engine that uses voxels for in game terrain and has a voxel editor for its built in level editor. C4 Engine uses a LOD system with its voxel terrain that was developed by the game engine’s creator. All games using the current or newer versions of the engine have the ability to use voxels.
    • Atomontage is a hybride (voxel & polygons) game engine project.
    • Upcoming Miner Wars 2081 uses their own Voxel Rage engine to let the user deform the terrain of asteroids allowing tunnels to be formed.
    • Many NovaLogic games have used voxel-based rendering technology, including the Delta Force, Armored Fist and Comanche series.
    • Westwood Studios’ Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 use voxels to render most vehicles.
    • Westwood Studios’ Blade Runner video game used voxels to render characters and artifacts.
    • Outcast, a game made by Belgian developer Appeal, sports outdoor landscapes that are rendered by a voxel engine.[2]
    • The videogame Amok for the Sega Saturn makes use of voxels in its scenarios.
    • The computer game Vangers uses voxels for its two-level terrain system.[3]
    • The computer game “Thunder Brigade” was based entirely on a voxel renderer, according to BlueMoon Interactive making videocards redundant and offering increasing detail instead of decreasing detail with proximity.
    • Master of Orion III uses voxel graphics to render space battles and solar systems. Battles displaying 1000 ships at a time were rendered slowly on computers without hardware graphic acceleration.
    • Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri uses voxel models to render units.
    • Build engine first person shooter games Shadow Warrior and Blood use voxels instead of sprites as an option for many of the items pickups and scenery. Duke Nukem 3D has an optional voxel model pack created by fans, which contains the high resolution pack models converted to voxels.
    • Crysis uses a combination of heightmaps and voxels for its terrain system.
    • Worms 4: Mayhem uses a “poxel” (polygon and voxel) engine to simulate land deformation similar to the older 2D Worms games.
    • The multi-player role playing game Hexplore uses a voxel engine allowing the player to rotate the isometric rendered playfield.
    • Voxelstein 3D also uses voxels for fully destructible environments.[4]
    • The upcoming computer game Voxatron, produced by Lexaloffle, will be composed and generated fully using voxels.[5][6]
    • Ace of Spades uses Ken Silverman’s Voxlap engine.

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  5. nilum says:
    8/8/2011 at 10:10 pm

    This tech is nothing new and the commentator admits that this same tech is used in the medical field.

    While the detail created using voxels is amazing, the animation with this tech is incredibly difficult. Complicated animation can be much more CPU-intensive than polygonal animation. The primary problem is on-the-fly deformation of voxel-based objects.

    There is a reason nothing is animated in the video.

    I have some hope that we might have a mix of both polygonal meshes for animated assets and voxel-based objects for static assets. That’s probably as far as this tech will go in the near future and I believe that is the goal of this company, to create voxel-based environments.

    Also the number of objects drawn on screen at once is not very impressive. This is just a use of instancing which we use for polygonal meshes as well. If any of you have access to a editor like Unreal Ed, try making a map with the same mesh repeated numerous times. Then try it with many different meshes, you will see a huge difference in performance.

    They did that in this demo. Numerous voxel assets were instances several times to create a very bland and repetitive looking environment (despite the detail in each asset). Had they tried to make their demo look varied it would have hurt performance.

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  6. Dexton7 says:
    8/8/2011 at 11:47 pm

    Just port over a poly game vs. an atom game. Have them do battle and see who is the victor. Eyecandy counts

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  7. pedro says:
    8/9/2011 at 4:15 am

    #21 You’ll be able to see they’re not really angry. They are laughing at the sucker who bought that game.

    #25 Errrr, yes and no.

    Voxels are used in MRI as you are exciting tissue volume with a certain pixel size & thickness (thus voxel) given by an RF pulse with certain bandwidth & a magnetic gradient to match that bandwidth. But the images are 2 dimensional when you get them from the ADC and they are worked with polygons as any other volume stack of images. You still use marching cubes (or any other compression technique) to to reduce the numbers of polygons. Even if you use 3D or 4D acquisition which uses 3D FFT, the end result is a 2D pixel matrix image. You only have the slice thickness & distance factor as a guide for how far away (interpolation) is between slices shall you want to do an MPR or MIP (both ray tracing techniques), SSD or VRT.

    No other imaging technique deals with voxels other than MRI and is for excitation/acquisition only, not image handling.

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  8. Skeptic says:
    8/10/2011 at 9:28 am

    Sorry about my last post. I thought by now someone would have corrected me. The elements used in the Euclideon video featured are actually different than voxels. The somehow use only 3-D points in space relative to each other in a ‘cloud’ rather than on a polar axis. Similar to voxels but far less cpu intensive.

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  9. rick says:
    8/10/2011 at 9:14 pm

    You would think this is easy with upcoming processors having 8, 12 or 16 cores now per socket.

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  10. Elvis63 says:
    8/14/2011 at 6:56 pm

    I am sure the 2 giants ATI and nVidia will come out with something amazing soon. Either one of them

    Reply
  11. its2mc says:
    10/20/2011 at 6:51 am

    I think its awesome that such an approach has been used by this company. Tho I dont like how they are so secretive.. I bet if they had joined hands with Sony by now we would have a working game using Unlimited Graphics.. I have my own thoughts on how to make it even cooler.. One thing they say is that they can convert polygon graphics to voxel based graphics.. using this and a search algorithm.. they can have games developed soley on polygons and then the GPU converts and displays the necessary graphical details according to the users perspective. in this way a game like Tomb Raider one.. even though the physics may not be 100% accurate can be made to look lifelike.. I think they need to increase their staff and look at more ideas..

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