My brother and I have been keeping an eye out for Euclidean (The worlds' most realistic graphics Engine), and they just released another video recently:
Supposedly, they have 2 games coming out in 2015 that use this engine.
The other day I saw a Let's Play video for the P.T. teaser that uses the Fox Engine. Those graphics are awesome as well.
It seems that with the Fox Engine you have more control.
Anyone excited about this? I know I am.
Euclideon's stuff is pretty amazing, but there are some fundamental things that make it inferior for most real-time games. For example, it can't do dynamic lighting, because each of the "dots" that make up their world has a color value attached to it that already has lighting to it and I'm pretty sure each dot doesn't have a normal on it (which is essential for any decent lighting). I could be wrong about it not having a normal though, just my predictions.
Having said that, I am still quite excited to see what they come up with, but I'm not expecting it to totally outdo every product on the market. Low expectations; high hopes.
Once upon a time this would have excited me, but not anymore. The biggest issue I can see facing this thing is data creation. For the featured video they scanned real environments to obtain the data set, but creating environments that do not exist physically represents an altogether different set of problems. Second biggest issue is animation; seriously, watch the video again. It's a completely static scene. Voxels like that are excellent at static, pre-lit scenes, but animating things is a different story. They are surmountable problems, to be sure, but the end result (an extremely photo-realistic scene) ultimately isn't that exciting for me anymore.
BTW there was already a thread about this recently. I'll repost my rant from there...
The "Unlimited Idiocy" people uploaded a new video, with the same condescending & misleading voice-over from their CEO, so it's time for the idiotic hype train to arrive again.
I'll C&P my response to that article from FB:
They've decided to target the GIS industry, where their tech actually makes sense, after over a decade of failure as a games middleware company. Not looking forward to all the red-herring cries of *HYPE* and "FAKE!" that flood the Internets whenever these snake-oil salesmen poke into the gaming world... Those are red herrings because yes their tech is legit, but no it's not actually that useful for most people. If it was, they wouldn't have failed to sell it to gamedevs for all these years.
If your art generation pipeline is based around laser scanning, your geometry is completely static, you're not already making use of your CPU for gameplay code or whatever, you don't care about using the GPU for rendering (maybe you moved your gameplay code there already?) pre-baked lighting and shading is adequate, you have terabytes of storage available, and sub-30Hz "interactive" frame-rates are ok with you... then yeah, hype4dayz...
Their renderer isn't even new. Here's a photo of them spruiking their wares via VCR at a GDC over a decade ago:
Could it be that the explanation for their decades of failure is simply that there's some very serious flaws in their product that they decide to simply ignore, and instead just make their insultingly misleading videos to whip up hype?
The worlds' most realistic graphics Engine
Surely you're kidding?
All of the lighting and shading is baked into their textures.
Not only does this mean that the light/shadows are baked/static, it also means that the positions of the specular highlights are completely baked/static.
Sorry, but 1999 wants those painted specular highlights back.
Just look at the white reflection stripe on this photo for an example of how horrible this looks in motion. That highlight should move.
Simply photo-texturing is the uncanny valley of environment modelling. If you tried to pass off photo-textures in a game art position, you'd pretty quickly be let go, because it does not result in cutting edge graphics.
Aside from the fact that there's a lot of geometric detail, the graphics are frankly quite horrible.
Luckily the MPEG compression blurs all of their horrible aliasing issues!
Even their real-world scanning, as amazing as it is, has lots of issues, such as thin objects being lost -- e.g. missing support for this cross, or the artefacts behind some of the statues where the walls have been incorrectly filled in due to missing data (shadows from the scanner's point of view).
Everything in the distance in that nature scan looks terrible.
They also seem to be scanning colour in at 8 bit precision, which results in a very amateur photography look, with no room for post adjustment of dynamic range, exposure, etc...
The Fox Engine is impressive though. This techonlogy is ideal, but there are still a bunch of questions that need to be answered. I don't have my hopes up that high either. But 2015 is close, and they promised a product (and now they have to live up to it).
Fox has shipped two games already.
Also check out what UE4 is capable of: http://www.pcgamer.com/unreal-engine-4-architectural-visualisation-videos-are-staggeringly-realistic/
Fox and UE4 (and every other modern engine) look amazingly real because of the quality of their shading - the rules behind how light interacts with materials.
Euclideon on the other hand are completely ignoring this problem and just pre-painting their shading like it's 1999. Prepare to be disappointed when you finally get to play one of their own internally developed games.
Time will show :)
Still, I believe we will be seeing some amazing graphics in the upcoming years.
The major problem is actualy the hardware. Make such high graphics games run on "normal" machines.
Surely you're kidding?
That was their claim haha.
I was referring to the Unlimited Detail thing when I said that there are questions that still need to be answered, and that I don't have my hopes up. These guys promise 2 games also.
I know Fox was used for P.T. and Metal Gear.
Your observance of the issues is good though.
