Outerra forum
Outerra Engine => Technology => Topic started by: WarlockSyno on August 01, 2011, 03:51:28 pm
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Opinions?
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4[/video]
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i cant believe what i see there :o
ill wait for some comments of the tech nerds on these forums cause this is way over my head!
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Yeah, I remember when they announced this technology a year ago.
I too am interested to read what the tech experts would have to say to this.
So instead of polygons they use atoms and basically an unlimited amount of them and still achieve reasonable framerates?
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Yeah I remember this from a year ago as well, but unless this will make graphically awesome games run well on my Pentium 4, I don't give a shit. :rolleyes: ... until I can upgrade my computer. :P
Also I would like to see a presentation with objects with better quality textures.
But I would honestly lol if somebody who knows a lot about this stuff says "BS!" :lol:
Not to mention this guy's got the best troll voice on the planet...
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Finnnnnnally, an update!
It looks amazing indeed :)
I'm curious to see how they'll handle physics and animation though.
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It's based on sparse voxel octrees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_voxel_octree), a technique that is quite efficient in terms of computation requirements per screen resolution, and needs lower amount of data and storage than classic voxel engines.
Disadvantage is that some things that are fairly easy to do with polygons are considerably harder to do with SVO for the same level of quality or naturalness. Zooming in without getting blocky appearance, and mainly the problem of animation and deformation. But also lighting, shadows and other things.
Albeit all those issues can be solved or addressed to some extent, it needs a lot of development to be invested into it, and still it's questionable if it will ever be able to compete. Its inflexibility is a huge problem.
That, and those guys pushing it by way of claiming there's a kind of conspiracy in the industry against this universal remedy for all problems, doesn't add to the credibility.
On the other hand, I feel that that voice has the potential to disqualify any tech :D
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Saw their demo a year ago. Was going to bring it up here but knew it was an entirely different direction. Still cool tech!
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There's been a post about it by Notch (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam), who used a bit harsher words :)
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There's been a post about it by Notch (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam), who used a bit harsher words :)
post about it by Notch
Notch
Worst coder ever commenting on something. I would ignore his cash flow and note how many times HIS coding has set back the game of minecraft. Only now that his $$$ is so great that he can hire proper coders can minecraft ACTUALLY improve.
Plus I think he is bias to any game system not made of giant one meter cubes with a piss poor view distance and bad optimization.
I will trust your review of the tech over his.
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with the comments from cameni and notch in mind, im now a lot more sceptic...
but when notch complained about bad animations with that voxel thing, i was instantly reminded to outcast (game) wich had fantastic voxel landscapes + polygon models for all the creatures and characters. with that combination they should be able to get over most of the downsides, right?
lets wait another year and see the next milestone of that engine, maybe, with alot of skill, knowledge and work they will realy bring us a new generation of 3d gaming?!
so hurry up cameni & angrypig and give us outerra now :D :) :P
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I will trust your review of the tech over his.
Can't really comment on Notch, but with both reviews basically the same it doesn't matter, does it? ;)
but when notch complained about bad animations with that voxel thing, i was instantly reminded to outcast (game) wich had fantastic voxel landscapes + polygon models for all the creatures and characters. with that combination they should be able to get over most of the downsides, right?
Well the problem is that this is not a voxel engine. It's effectively a highly optimized static scene compression technique, with a fast algorithm for scene traversal.
It reminds me of one statement about one high level programming language: It makes easy things easier, and hard things impossible.
Their marketing strategy kinda works - gamers are enthusiastic, it spreads everywhere. Developers are mostly disgusted by the populist approach that tells just a third of the facts, by chance just the positive ones, and not mentioning the road blocks at all.
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I get the gist about filling out the octree and that remeshing (if I should use that word) the octree for a different scene due to animation has been traditionally difficult. What I can see from the video is that nothing is moving which lends me to think that they haven't solved that aspect of it.
So if the rendering technique is excellent but has a huge downside then I think, as notch has said, its cool but unless that downside can be overcome then its just a tech demo.
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Here an interview with Bruce Dell.
He shows a real time demo from 22:19 on:
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6Fdc[/video]
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Nicely done. The only interviewer they accept has no clue how those things are made.
They dodged the "How much disk space would it use when all content was unique, instead of repetitive?"
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Nicely done. The only interviewer they accept has no clue how those things are made.
They dodged the "How much disk space would it use when all content was unique, instead of repetitive?"
Not everything has to be unique. Most games have the same items in every level. Usually with a different scale, color, or texture.
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A dev kit might be out soon, according to Game Informer.
Since they say they can convert objects from polygons to atom, does that make it more likely that it could come to the Outerra engine?
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/11/22/exploring-unlimited-detail.aspx (http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/11/22/exploring-unlimited-detail.aspx)
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Euclideon-Unlimited-Engine-Destroys-Unreal-CryEngine-With-Voxel-Atoms-37291.html (http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Euclideon-Unlimited-Engine-Destroys-Unreal-CryEngine-With-Voxel-Atoms-37291.html)
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Have high hopes for this technology, look forward to future updates. My main concerns are Animation, Deformation abilities, shadowing (which I think they solved), and Storage Space required (which in todays bluray+ world I doubt will be a issue, especially when considering procedural systems can be applied to reduce datasets.).
Allot of people don't like these guys, his voice doesn't help him out. And yes I feel we are sort of trapped in a infinite polygon universe were its all rigged to sell you a %30 better video card each 3-6months X infinity. If this tech ever picks up they won't be selling cards every 3-6 months!!! More like every 1-3yrs, hint hint..
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http://www.atomontage.com/ (http://www.atomontage.com/)
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Euclideon & Unlimited Detail - Bruce Dell Interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVB1ayT6Fdc#ws)
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Have high hopes for this technology, look forward to future updates. My main concerns are Animation, Deformation abilities, shadowing (which I think they solved), and Storage Space required (which in todays bluray+ world I doubt will be a issue, especially when considering procedural systems can be applied to reduce datasets.).
Allot of people don't like these guys, his voice doesn't help him out. And yes I feel we are sort of trapped in a infinite polygon universe were its all rigged to sell you a %30 better video card each 3-6months X infinity. If this tech ever picks up they won't be selling cards every 3-6 months!!! More like every 1-3yrs, hint hint..
Seems a possible chem. base in the engine would be possible :P ... like theyr way of approaching the simulations ...
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Already today the UD tech can be used for static objects and backdrops in conjunction with polygons. Lets say if it was going to take a long time to make the system dynamic while keep performance. Just ask yourself how many games have static non-changing objects in them? All do, imagine the amount of performance freed up if they used UD for that while dynamic stuff can be used with polygon system on top.
I think the UD team have it sussed however, just saying even if you don't believe its that great or its been done before, then at least you see you could render unlimited detail in backdrops and static objects without massive performance hit. The current Voxel type systems everyone is saying what this is has a MAJOR performance budget limit, 'MAJOR' .
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it doesn't use pollys when it draws the scene only uses them when they want to convert a object to atom data. models aren't stored as pollys either. so, no they aren't using both at the same time. atomontage does but has limited number of polly models/scene size.
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That's not what I said sorry.
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For reference, a g+ article about OT and Euclideon. In comments it turned to Euclideon vs. the world ::)
https://plus.google.com/109028905526370179147/posts/HokEWPiGxz8
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You mean Will vs You? :P
That's not fair... You've got a helmet. ;)
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But he's got unlimited beliefs! :D
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Haha, nice & congratz for you! ;)
Personally, I believe that this technology in next years could be useful in some cases (such as small, very detailed scenes), but I don't expect that it will be something 'revolutionary' for all computer graphics world. Time will tell.
That's not fair... You've got a helmet. ;)
You killed me with this. xD ;D
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I watched the whole tech demo and was very skeptical due to the fact that he never explained how it actually worked. After some hours of research, I am still rather skeptical of this man and his company. I much prefer the way that you two do it; I think the more open the development team is, the more trust and support they garner. I didn't like his cookie example, because sometimes I just want to look in the oven to make sure the cookies aren't burning. It was a poor analogy.
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Well he does not want to show you how it works. Can you guess exactly why that might be for a yet to release revolutionary technology? If he showed everyone exactly how it works then he would be out of business, mark my words.
Because you must remember a few things, 1) this is a graphics rendering technology, you could put outerra engine in it (with heavy modifications but ultimately its just a rendertech). So consider it a API like D3D and OpenGL. 2) These guys have received funding from AU government and have allowed people to come in and check their stuff out.
I believe they have something genuine and am surprised so many people feel threatened by it, kinda a shame as the concept he has described IS THE FUTURE. He explained that if we keep increasing polygon count it would become close to a voxel point (using word as example) making the concept of drawing lines to create objects redundant anyway, these guys are just going 'screw that lets just go the point object system and be done with it!'
However I am also concerned about the ability to animate and manipulate the point cloud data in large scale (at least until PC's are powerful enough, which we are almost there I think).
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I do not feel "threatened" by it, I am just calling the man out on being intentionally vague and rather misleading. Those are two attributes which I do not like in developers, for rather obvious reasons. If they do manage to overcome the large obstacles associated with voxels, I would not be offended, but count me slightly skeptical for the time being.
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However I am also concerned about the ability to animate and manipulate the point cloud data in large scale (at least until PC's are powerful enough, which we are almost there I think).
if you poke around on the website you will see some proof of concept video from an earlier version which shows animation. It's crude looking but fairly smooth.
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has anyone checked if they issued some patent(s) on their tech?
If I'd be them and had found something so revolutionary, either algorithmic or other super smart method or process,
and had been granted 2.2 Millions $US from my Gov,
1rst thing I'd do would be to protect my innovation ASAP...
cause of course such a claim is not only impacting gaming, but medical imagery stuff and other scientific apps.
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I'm pretty sure they would have, however the technology is based off point cloud system so I think they only patented their search engine system for it.
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sure they cannot patent voxels or point cloud, however Yes they have at least one patent, I've found it but I don't want to do more now...
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We probably won't be hearing much more till another year anyway. See what they have to offer then. I will actually be living in the same city as them so maybe I will drop by to check it out sometime.
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Just to give some precision about what I was saying above : I looked more seriously and NO, at this time they have no active patent.
I see that they tried several times to issue one but the status is now or elapsed or withdrawn. All that sounds a bit weird.
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Its their project, not mine, I really don't care. As always I will wait and see if anything progresses in a year. If I never hear from them again then sure it be nice to know what happened (like owner took the 1million and ran LOL).
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I do agree with you, it is their project and I think that if they got helped with money from their country Govt. there is surely something serious behind.
Maybe they did not patent because, or it is not "patent-able" or it is a strategy to hide the most what they have found, as long as it is not mature.
Wait and see...
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Its probably a wip, I will drop by their office sometime and ask the man himself what the deal is and let you know.
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First i really don't like the hype around the UT because there is always a catch, especially if someone doesn't release any papers or something about the technology. And please don't argue with such stupid things like patents there are lots of game studios that produce papers with revolutionary algorithms every year without patents.
I believe that a voxel engine can be done on current HW, but there will be limitations and problems like high memory demands, problems with deforming objects etc. Without clever streaming it's not possible to create scenes comparable to current games, because it just won't fit into memory. It can be partially solved with a procedural generator but as you all know such generators can't be used for everything, and there is no such thing like a magical compression that can solve the problem, compression always comes with quality issues.
In my opinion the future is in hybrid engines where the specific technology is used for specific task. Voxels have a few nice properties like implicit occlusion, transparency, LODs, these properties can be very useful is some cases.
Also i don't think the triangles are obsolete, currently they are the most efficient and the fastest way how to render a 3D scene, and polygon rendering is still evolving. A good example is SM5 with hardware tessellation controlled by shaders. SM5 cards are able to render scenes that have film quality, and UT is very far from it and they won't reach such quality until they switch to GPU.
There are other projects that are farther than UT and aren't afraid to talk about limitations and problems with specific technology because we all know there is no such thing like a magic god formula that will solve all problems of the 3D rendering...
Very nice project from our neighborhood Atomontage
Atomontage Engine - The Future Is Volumetric, Atom-Based - Unofficial vblog #1 (part 3/3;1st half) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CCZIBDt1uM#)
GigaVoxels
GigaVoxels : Depth-of-field using objects space integration (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYxdgfJktAI#)
Sparse Voxel Octree
Sparse Voxel Octree (SVO) Demo by Jon Olick (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI#)
CentiLeo GPU Render
CentiLeo GPU Render - Tech Demo - Interactivity of large 3D scenes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxx9dyPO0js#)
VoxLOD: Boeing 777 (337M triangles)
VoxLOD: Boeing 777 (337M triangles) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IwtKLtYc9M#)
And finally my favorite project, which is also openly discussing problems with super high detailed scenes. There are problems not only with memory (this issue can be partially avoided with streaming) but also with authoring tools, 3D scanners are not the solution and they are often used for polygon models too, Artists have to work with such objects making corrections modifications placement into scene etc. And if your scene has 100 billion polygons/voxels it is big problem...
Mega Meshes - Modelling, rendering and lighting a world made of 100 billion polygons
Mega Meshes - Modelling, rendering and lighting a world made of 100 billion polygons (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M04SMNkTx9E#ws)
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Well the UD tech demos I would think use up very very little memory. You must remember game titles use same textures and objects over and over and over so I believe the whole memory and storage issue is a null. The real problem I predict is complex or large deformation, however like I said there are many things the engine can be used for so a hybrid may be the way it goes until faster PC's come out that can render entire planets with such systems.
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AngryPig, my intention was not to put you or anyone else under pressure or under questioning regarding this very hypothetical techno from this UD guys.
I would say that my goal was instead of trying to reassure you in investigating a bit about them and look for eventual "patent" they would have filed.
We and I know very well that you are very aware of all the advancements in your CGI domain...
without doubt about your awareness, seeing the impressive work you are doing.
But talking about patents, I do not know a lot about the gaming industry, but if you say that many revolutionary discoveries are freely put, let's say "on the market", by the studios who made these discoveries, well I must say that I am missing something. Because it is not the case in other industries...
As long as I know, most of the "opened" research work is being conducted, at least in my part of Europe, by people employed by Public (not Private) Organisms, Research Institutes, Universities Labs, Schools and so on : if they issue freely their results, it is also because it is their way to justify the public money they spend.
And they are also required to do so, like Scientists who must publish to continue to receive money (from us, tax-payers) to fuel their work...
Now I shut my mouth, at least in this thread.
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Someone released the Angry in angry pig.
{That is his longest post to date btw}
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There is no way to store 2M point cloud into very little memory. This is the trickery used in their presentation, non-developers think they have something magic. No they don't, but it is hard to explain to someone who don't have the programming background.
SVO is one of the most efficient way how to deal with voxels memory problem and it still needs more memory than polys and textures together. (read the paper about it and do some math yourself). And what is more important the polygon model with the same memory footprint has much higher detail than voxeled one and the polygon model can be easily tessellated in real-time with very little performance penalty.
SVO from Nvidia: http://www.tml.tkk.fi/~samuli/publications/laine2010tr1_paper.pdf (http://www.tml.tkk.fi/~samuli/publications/laine2010tr1_paper.pdf)
Hmm in our game there are very few repeating textures, there are ~1000 unique textures for terrain. Yes there are some textures for objects/trees which can be repeated but instancing is useful and efficient feature but in case of UT it is necessarily due to memory and performance reasons. Another nice example is the Rage with virtual texturing (no repeating textures).
There are other limitations in their presentation that are obvious to all 3D developers. I just tried to show you other projects like Atomontage which is much further then UT and doesn't have to hide/hyping anything or Mega Meshes that showing problems of very high detailed scenes and memory issues...
What they really invented is mega instancing, they should make Repeatcraft where the whole world will be made from same rotated rocks elephants and other nice atomized objects from their repertoire.
Please don't believe in magic...it works in fairy-tales only...
AngryPig, my intention was not to put you or anyone else under pressure or under questioning regarding this very hypothetical techno from this UD guys.
No problem if the discussion stays constructive...
But talking about patents, I do not know a lot about the gaming industry, but if you say that many revolutionary discoveries are freely put, let's say "on the market", by the studios who made these discoveries, well I must say that I am missing something. Because it is not the case in other industries...
SW patents are evil destroying the industry and slowing down the progress (the protection time should be much shorter in this time and this is not the only problem...), we are happy there is at least a small part of the industry where the patents are omitted. It is mainly because if we found interesting way how to do stuff someone can take it improve it and use it and we can do the same and the result is that we can use more than we invent which save time for everyone. Another important thing is new algorithms are part of marketing in game industry... (mega texture is very good example)
Now I shut my mouth, at least in this thread.
Please don't, just keep the discussion constructive...
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Yep. In the industry, most companies will have their own proprietary engine or toolsets which are considered 'secret', and most definitely are not allowed to be shown around to the public or staff from other companies. Those companies or people that are capable of coming up with some great new tech, shader or AI algorithm will usually keep it for internal development, or license it out for other companies to use for a (usually quite large) fee. Some examples of this are UDK, SpeedTree, PhysX or Havok etc. Middleware. However, the source code (the real nuts and bolts of the program) will usually remain 100% secret property of the original developer.
HOWEVER, there are numerous websites and conferences around the world where these kinds of technical discussions are held and ideas are often shared fairly freely. For example, John Carmack (despite his huge ego) has given numerous talks at events like GDC where he discusses the technical details and some of the inner workings of their new engine tech. Similarly, at these conferences, you can usually get vast amounts of detail about how various companies handle art assets and their pipeline, what metrics they find useful, development post-mortems etc etc. This information is undoubtedly extremely valuable. Awesomely, these discussions are becoming more and more open with the booming indie games industry, and the availability of cheap SDKs (Software Development Kits) and standard scripting languages. Modding communities and user created content are also a great driver for software advancement, and it should be obvious that allowing modding dramatically increases the shelf life of many titles.
Aaaaand.... that's the end of my rant. :)
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Yes it would be interesting to have a look at the data for that elephant on UD demo. Now they claim to have some very interesting compression techniques but one would assume such a object with a million points or so would suck up a massive amount of memory compared to conventional models. However if we think about procedural techniques a bit you can see how it could be compressed considerably without loosing much/any quality.
What is the accepted max model file size (including textures) in the industry today for high detail models? 50MB?
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^^ not compression. He says in the video that the clever bit is the actually the search algorithm that figures out what to display for each pixel. So you don't necessarily need to use RAM or video card memory to load the models into, the algorithm just pulls the data it needs on the fly so a reasonably fast hard drive is probably more than enough.
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Yes and if the data set is 100GB then its going to be a problem.
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Pulling data from disc for rendering? Are you aware of disc transfer latency and speed? There's a reason drives have RAM cache on them, you know.
Clever search algorithms like that are used everywhere, OT doesn't load stuff it doesn't need to render the view. But still the most important part is the cache manager that controls and limits the amount of memory, otherwise it would skyrocket and not be able to run effectively at all.
He may have the best algorithm there is (though it's likely just a common octree search cause that's the fastest), but there's no way around the amount of data in the scene.
Unless you believe in Unlimited Compressibility of data as well.
What Euclideon uses to avoid the problem is instancing. The scene is comprised of a limited number of chunks that are being reused all over, some 10x while other smaller features are instanced 100-1000x, and the octree indexes to those chunks instead of containing them. This 10-1000x instancing is where you can achieve high apparent compression ratio. But, of course, the problem is that the stuff repeats all over. Nevertheless, he could be smart and still procedurally assemble a nice scene out of these building blocks, not unlike Minecraft.
What he didn't show yet is that he can rotate these blocks, which is quite easily doable, though it increases the non-instanced memory and thus shrinking the scene again.
But then what? You could rotate pieces of detailed point-cloud ground, but then you have to stick them together to make variable geometry.
There's a reason why their demo video features a flat world with everything aligned the same way. There are so many issues with this that need to be solved, yet he talks mostly about the search algorithm, which is probably the most trivial thing there.
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Now I shut my mouth, at least in this thread.
Please don't, just keep the discussion constructive...
Dear angrypig, again, where am I destructive?
I am not much techno-focussed (however a bit involved in CAD & reverse-engineering, so having to work with accurate scanned surfaces, I just know what are large points clouds, decimation, triangles, reconstruction, B-splines and so),
I am more business-focussed... I run and own small businesses/companies, some very " brick and mortar" compared to the subjects we are talking about here.
So, I've just seen this thread about this company, its claims, and saw Cameni's discussion on another forum, all the buzz around this Australia guys...
As I am a curious little business man, apart of the very techno aspects, any company who is having 9 employees and who do not seem to sell anything since many years,
is an interesting question to me : that's all.
Now as there are many smart and open-minded guys here on your forum, I thought that it was a good place to chat.
Coming back to the techno part, an intricate 3D statue model, scanned from the real object, with good detail and texture, then triangulated from the points,
is at minimum 20MB in Obj. + Png. , even if I am not a specialist, I am, me too, more than doubtful of what they say they are capable of.
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Dear angrypig, again, where am I destructive?
It wasn't meant to you personally, it was meant for believers who don't need to read and just believe that magic is possible. I don't want to stop discussion here but i prefer one that is constructive and with people that aren't afraid to read papers and asking questions (like you) and do not blindly follow some guy who just told them exactly what they want to hear...
In my post I also wrote that i see possibility to use voxels for some parts because as i said before they have a few nice properties that can be very useful. But there is also the other side of the coin and i prefer if the developer is not hiding a weak side of the technology. Perfect example is Brano Siles with Atomontage engine (AE) who openly says there are weaknesses and also says that he will try to solve them in future to achieve render quality for FPS views etc...
AE latest dev blog post:
http://www.atomontage.com/?id=dev_blog&pid=dec26_2011 (http://www.atomontage.com/?id=dev_blog&pid=dec26_2011)
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Don't worry, there is no problem : Yes it is sure that on this forum, there are various kind of people, from several horizons, and it is also very positive that you're attracting so many guys : it is a proof of that many like a lot what you are creating & developing. I saw your super technical approaches on other threads too ;D
Thank you for the link, I had already seen the impressive Atomontage's works, but I will read more again about them.