There was a previous post about euclideon technology. As many know there were different opinions in the gaming industry. The guy from minecraft says it wouldn't budge(when his graphics suck) and the John Carmack said that it is possible in the feature. The link below is a 30 min interview with the CEO of Euclideon where he shows a live demo of the app and answers many of the questions people have.

http://www.vimeo.com/27522131

Discussed in another thread. You should be skeptical of everything he claims, because he has been making these claims for a long time and never backed them up with actual usable technology. He still hasn't. It's all hand-waving.

His technology is so far known to be unsuitable for programmed animation. It depends on precomputing the entire scene and storing it in an enormous database (hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, for a scene of useful size).

Anybody could do that if the only thing you needed to do was move the camera. The problem is, it does not scale to moving the actors, and he pretends that problem does not exist, rather than offer a solution for it.

If you were to precompute the scene in polys, rather than voxels the way he does, it would probably require even less compute power. But that wouldn't make him look like an innovator.

So obviously you didn't watch the video? Why do you even post then. The era of the internet and immediate answers with no reflection produces amazing results!

People always know how to criticize but never listen first. That's not criticism, it's simply fear of change portrayed.

Seen it before. It's still hand-waving. All he's doing is angling for grant money.

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The more threads I see of you, the more I grow to despise that avatar face.

First thing the interviewer says when entering the building, "... Bruce Dell, a vegetarian who sponsors and orphanage in India." Tell me those words weren't written down for him.

Then he brings the interviewer in and shows him a game, asking him "how many polygons" he sees. Ignoring the fact that he himself probably doesn't exactly know, how the hell is an interviewer going to be able to know how many polygons are on the ground?

Then he says that every pixel becomes an "atom" and claims he's "not being wasteful". Again, we'll ignore the fact he barely talks about how this works and simply look at the principal that somehow converting pixels to voxels isn't wasteful...

Heheh... He says they can do animation, they've done animation, and they have capacity to do so. So why not show it, exactly? You would silence a lot of people if you showed one tree or hunk of grass blowing in the wind. Show us with the current demo which you say is so incredible to silence out fears, not something from seven years ago. You had the capacity then, yes, but have you hit a tech ceiling? And don't even say "Did you listen? It's like cookies from an oven!". No it's not. They want people to invest in this stuff.

"We've used up our quote of awesome things this month so we're not going to talk about memory compaction". Given that he took a moment to answer that question too has me thinking that the "memory compaction" is still confided to a super computer. No actual PCs can run this.

"... I had to reinvent everything". Cease. It is my best knowledge as well as the knowledge of many other intellectual fellows that this man is excreting the mass which exits a bull's dank hole through his lying lips.

Regardless of the fact that they have money (two million isn't a whole lot) it doesn't mean they're not seeking funding. I mean I can see the passion behind all this, but they are still a company. Notch works for a company too, and he understands the workings of one. Whether they want the funding for their own gain, to speed up the project, to invest towards a particular part of the project, or whatever they still need money. You wouldn't be giving this stuff away for completely free use.

"Yes it's a voxel, but it's voxels in unlimited quantities". .... So what? And no, it's not unlimited, stop saying that. It may be a slogan but you're saying it like it's fact. You're not giving us a clear indication as to why these are "not" voxels.

He goes on to "disprove" Notch by saying that his tech is nothing like the examples he cited. Yes, you are not Voxelstien because you haven't implemented any gameplay yet. I could make something vastly different than the island demonstration using your tech, but does that mean it's nothing like the Euclideon demonstration? No, because the tech is the same.

He hilariously points out how that other engine is all about the dynamic stuff, but wait, didn't he claim his engine could do things dynamically as well? At the very least it should have animations, correct? You're continuing to prove how inferior your engine is in terms of creating something relating to games instead of just pretty scenery that runs on a super computer.

And the final video all the interviewer does is comment how much blockier it is, but he's not getting to the crux of the issue. This is about whether their technology is original, and it's not.

The word of Notch against Carmack thing is absolutely full of holes. Notch is not saying everyone is doing this sort of thing, he's saying Euclideon is not the first. Carmack is saying that on this generation of consumer available hardware that it is not possible to run games. As I said before, Euclideon has done nothing to show that the technology can be used to create a game, only pretty and repetitive environments.

He shows a real time demonstration... By not giving an actual FPS counter, not showing how much power is being allocated to where, and showing once again that they have such little diversity in these images. They've about two statues, three trees, ten rocks, and everything else is basically the same. Funny how they skip that part Notch talked about.

I may as well end it here because this is a really long video to be doing play by play, but the basic ideas are thus:

-Of course the technology is real. We wouldn't be seeing it if it weren't. The problem is that they are hiding a lot of the technical issues in their words, images, and things that they claim but don't show.

-This technology has shown no capability of running any sort of dynamic environment, and thus gaming is a stretch beyond a far cry what they can achieve currently.

-Polygons don't matter. It's shaders that make things look so good today. More focus is going in to shaders because of the fact that you can have a square have a million polygons but it won't make it look better.

-Yes, it looks great, but the fact of the matter is that they shouldn't be showing things that are not available towards what you're actually going for. They should be looking for investors, but games are a long shot. Go to the film industry first, because they are looking for ways to create CGI that looks great and requires only one bout of animation. Games require a whole lot more of everything.

-Artists are not going to take the time to make every single grain of dirt in a video game. They just won't. The original criticism but towards skyboxes and backdrops is hilariously stupid, because having that "flat piece of cardboard" is something that 3D artists don't have to work on. Bruce Dell, you should understand how long it takes to make a piece of software. You are not making anything easier with this process regardless of scanning in. Game development takes, frankly, a fucking long time all ready.

Thank you for taking the trouble to tell the truth about this liar. Excellent post.

Doesn't look anything special to me.

Also from the videos there comparing "apples" to "pears" so its is meaningless.

Just a bit surprised here... what ever the author of the video may say about his voxel rendering engine, I suspect no one here is in any capacity other than being a end user who is commenting on the tech.

(cough...cough)

All the views here are just repeated like a parrot from whats been mentioned in the other forums.

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@einarabelc5, this is what I mentioned in the other thread..similar to this. A hardcore gamer without much knowledge with the hardware/software systems he is using, won't be of much help in the development cycle.

Its hilarious to see people scrambling their minds to scribble non-original ideas over here, its entertainment..almost like reading a bad newspaper or watching a bad news channel..haha.

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There are quite a few games which use Voxels already, Crysis (did many know that!) uses Voxel for its terrain in conjunction with raster image stored for surface elevation values.

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The old Novalogic games like Delta Force (yeah), Comanche series used Voxel rendering for terrains. I remember playing Comanche 3, DOS game...using Voxels* and even Outcast OpenGL (software mode) using voxels for terrain.

The games which used Voxels until now for any part of the rendering or backend systems, ran extremely fast during their release. If this was replaced by pure* polygon rendering I am sure the games would be unplayable on the systems then* to showcase similar or same quality on the screen.

Similarly the demo by Euclideon tech shows that they can even be done to produce closer to todays polygon rendering quality (without any major artwork), which they have done so by making using of voxels to render extremely high density models.

All I see is people just typing away to glory undermining the effort...on the contrary has anyone seen the old polygon rendering demos and how they look. They will complain that its just either a sphere or a box or some terrain plain with x light sources or x shadow maps or x shadow volumes or a light source revolving around a teapot which has reflections or shader mapping etc..etc.. (no one complained then!)

More over those most of those demo's barely showed any form of real content, against which people are spamming like cockroaches when a recent Voxel rendering demo is shown!..

Incrementally the demo was all done on CPU.

If it is ported to utilize currently generations of GPU's, the performance will not only be fast..and it will even off the charts ...why!... :) hahaha this* I won't explain. Spoon feeding uninformed sharks is the last thing I will do..haha..

All I say is, wait and watch when Euclideon completes its version of Voxel rendering technique.. (heheheh I am really tempted to shot forth why it will be at blown out speeds on a GPU, but again... BWHAHAHAHAHA I am party sadistic).

False. The demo was precomputed. The technology demonstrated was not capable of computing that demo in real time, nor was it used to do so.

The fact that voxel rendering is a suitable method for certain purposes, such as medical imaging and terrain construction, does not make it generally suitable for programmed animation, nor did the demonstration show in any way that it was suitable for that purpose.

It is still a fraud.

Precomputed is a vague term.

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The texture files, which are used to map on geometrical planes are also in a fashion precomputed or stored data!. Is it not!, so are the.. sprites used in effects in all the modern games!.

Unless the texture image is generated from either purely fractal, or pseudo random, or definite algorithm (procedurally or not) to adhere to similarly looking results (which would be real computing), then the gigabytes of texture images used in all the games/rendering are still stored data (or precomputed data in the form of an image) .

I would bow down in honor, if anyone can create a virtual muzzle flash in a shooting game using real computing power and add it to 100+ other muzzle flashes appearing all over a map. And no..I don't want the same x set of muzzle flash sets to be used randomly on other x set of muzzle flashes, because that data is already precomputed either few minutes or few seconds ago!.

Not vague at all. Of course terrain and backgrounds can be precomputed. They're static. Even pseudo-animation like trees and grass can be precomputed. It's real, programmatic animation that can't be. And it's the fact that what minimal animation shown was not generated in real time but precomputed that makes the technology worthless.

You don't know the trajectory of actors and other interactive objects in the game until the player interacts with them. You have to be able to render a realistic object that does whatever the animation and physics engines tell it to, not what a coder creating a static demonstration with an illusion of a minimal quantity of motion tells it to. And you have to do it fast enough that users don't complain of lag or frame skips or sim sickness, and for so many different objects that users don't complain that the world is sparse.

As for things like muzzle flashes, particle effects animation already does that, and you can have as many different muzzle flashes in real time as you have GPU power to compute.

Just to note..C&C RA2(when I played, during its released) used voxels for units/vehicles in the game, they had quite a bit of representation of motion. After that, nobody quite used voxels for similar behavior (either they didn't know about the technique, or due to less hand's on knowledge on the subject, or were not willing to risk progressing their development funds towards it...I guess its mostly that they didn't know about the technique in good faith).