Yea, there's absolutely nothing about this tech, taken from what the guy has said about it in his videos, that interests me from a game development standpoint. Right, making games look trillions of times better will make games better. Uh huh. Scuse me while I go play through Deus Ex for like the 9th time....

I think it would open up a ton of possibilities for artists to express themselves without having to deal with polygon budgets. That would help a lot. Not to say that gameplay isn't more important, but technical art budgets being expanded to such a degree would have a huge impact.

I think it would open up a ton of possibilities for artists to express themselves without having to deal with polygon budgets. That would help a lot. Not to say that gameplay isn't more important, but technical art budgets being expanded to such a degree would have a huge impact.

Not really; you'd replace 'poly budget' with 'voxel budget' instead.. and right now it has all the problems Hodgman listed.

Yea, there's absolutely nothing about this tech, taken from what the guy has said about it in his videos, that interests me from a game development standpoint. Right, making games look trillions of times better will make games better. Uh huh. Scuse me while I go play through Deus Ex for like the 9th time....

"Look better" is barely about poly counts anymore. The current challenge would be the uncanny valley.

But too much graphical detail annoys me in a similar manner. The pebbles on the road example are nice. But then the very first thing my brain will want to do is to kick them or draw a line in the sand. Or if I shoot in the ground, I expect individual pebbles to fly around. And then interact with a nearby cardboard box, punching hundreds of holes in it. And here is where the system breaks down. But for plastic don't-touch scenes, sure, why not. It does look nice.

And just like invisible walls are annoying, this static nature of such high detail will be a detractor. Level designers managed to work around it mostly, but for open spaces we're still confined to islands surrounded by endless sea.

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They seem to be using heavy instancing. I wonder if fractal algorithms could be put to use. Or if a generalized tree structure with arbitrary non-orthogonal subspace divisions would work.

[quote name='way2lazy2care' timestamp='1312401465' post='4844192']
I think it would open up a ton of possibilities for artists to express themselves without having to deal with polygon budgets. That would help a lot. Not to say that gameplay isn't more important, but technical art budgets being expanded to such a degree would have a huge impact.

Not really; you'd replace 'poly budget' with 'voxel budget' instead.. and right now it has all the problems Hodgman listed.
[/quote]

The point is the promise of how much they are increasing the budget. It's not a small incremental change, it's a 100 fold change. I know for certain that the palm tree example is something that bothers me. Even little things like using bump maps and normal maps on things like the molding in doors/rooms bugs me.

Obviously if somebody found a way to increase polygon budgets to the same degree I would be just as impressed. Like Luckless said, it's about making it easy to make games look good. Haven't you ever wondered what your artists could come up with if they weren't so limited?

Welcome to tessellation. Who cares about this tech when tessellation owns.

You do realize that's because of dedicated hardware support right? Tesselation takes inputs to generate more triangles. So many in fact that they're about the size of a pixel. On top of this you have multiple maps like specular, normal, displacement, etc. With all this data there are people that are realizing there are other ways to encode and render the objects which is probably faster. Showing these techniques running on a GPU of all things puts the GPU triangle renderers to shame honestly.

It's a good thing GPUs are becoming so general purpose nowadays that techniques like this can run on them. A dedicated hardware implemented raycaster (meaning custom hardware) would simply crush a triangle renderer. With SVO or nested grid ray traversal you simply step through encountering voxels one at a time making single object transparency calculations are trivial. (Multiple intersected objects requires techniques akin to DX11 linked list OIT though). Triangles are rasterized in a rather slow way that pretty much requires a GPU dedicated hardware. Also if you know how real-time radiosity can be done using light propogation volumes you immediately begin to realize that dedicated hardware based raycasters are much better technology.

I wrote a small javascript based voxel renderer for fun a while back. Doing the same with triangles would have killed my CPU. (Before anyone asks, I've tried implementing a 3D system in JS. After like 1K flat shaded triangles it starts to slow down fast). The point is stop comparing something you see running through dedicated hardware to something that performs almost the same on a general purpose CPU.

Anyway I support them. I've read most of the papers on SVO rendering, so whatever they're doing with point-cloud data seems to be working (and working fast).