new grafic-technique

A8 should support this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4

better video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Sw3dnu8q8

1. graphic cards does not support this techonolgy.
2. this technology is pretty new, i am not even sure if it's public yet.
3. it's not even directx.
4. currently has no place on the market.

In fact nobody even proved that this technology even exists. All we got to see was some amateurish videos with some blabla, repeating the word unlimited unlimited times and trying to make polygon graphics look bad.

@Quadraxas i have informed myself about unlimited detail.
I typed it in in Google here is a quote of the page

Fig 1.1 showed a tree base from one of today’s games with 3 flat sides, Fig 1.3 shows a tree base made on Unlimited Detail with 300,000 flat sides, the polygon tree needs special high powered graphics cards and multi-core computers to run it. The Unlimited Detail tree will run on anything from a PC to a mobile phone and no special graphics cards are needed. (See Fig 1.4)

and here is a link
http://unlimiteddetailtechnology.com/description.html


WFG Progger

but no playable demo....
so it's maibe a fake....

i think they dont want to release a demo because this engine is only for the developers like Microsoft,Ubisoft etc. who give much money for this engine
but maybe u are right.
It could be fake but i do not think so
WFG Progger

the idea behind this engine is very good
render only the points you can see and not all and delete what you can't see

All fine and good but think for a second.

The video card is only going to render the points that you can see.....
But the PC's memory and the application has to be handling ALL POSSIBLE points,
from ALL POSSIBLE angles at all times...

Also, think how much more cpu-hungry this will make any "poly to poly" collision tests...

And why does the demo have so few "different" models? "We havent made many yet."
Lame excuse methinks. Who would release a next-gen game demo with low poly models?
Thats what thay are doing. It just looks like model-instancing to me...

Thats called clipping/culling and is implented in every polygon engine for ages.

I havent seen even one picture with some kind of texture or a usefull in-game material.

They should post some demos to really show how it could run on our PC !!!!!!!!
Not only words !

Some points :
-how are applied textures precisely ?
-can you have shaders on top of this technology ? lot more power needed tnhan simpel polygons
-how can work 3D Collision system ?????
- Can you have animated models : i doubt a lot !!!!!!!!!
- Can you have Lightmaps ?
AND
- What tools modelers can produce models for such scenes ?
what tool to use to build a scenes, texture it, have lightmaps ???????

The day they will make a real demo game for all people with characters , lightmaps, shaders, particles, collisions :
OK that day we'll tale a look more serious at it

I think John Carmak have also said , he believes that some sort of voxel system could be the next technology !
But again what tools will support it , how will work texturing ? etc ... etc ...

Let's wait for a demo if it happens one day !

On this Youtube link :
youtube unlimited detail
A user comment is :

hm Unlimited Detail, even if they're only rendering the points that are needed, they still need to store all the detail somewhere.
unlimited detail needs unlimited memory
And i don't think they invented unlimited file compression.
A Polygon model with ca 1 mio. triangles needs 105 MB of disk space (saved as an .obj-file, I'm a 3D-Artist myself)
I don't know how this thing works, but i'm sure if it was as good as they say, they would've found a taker

I think it has undertand the main problems , and yes if it was a great technique like said , it would have been taken by a company already !
So when they say it can run on any PC even a SmartPhone (when you know the little memory on it sometimes : hummm hummm... !

If i would have to bet on a technique for next year , i would
bet on Direct X 11 Tesselation system, when associated with shaders you have alos lot of polygons in your scene also !
(and LOD tesselation also , maximum only when camera is near) !

Hardware tesselation

It is already used on Alien Vs Predator on PC also !
No years to wait for it, can be used in last 3D Cards !

Although I am also skeptical about this technology (first time I saw it I thought it was a prank), we should always keep our minds open to new ideas.

-how are applied textures precisely ?
Not sure, but they could be baked into the point data. Procedural textures may also become a possibility.

-can you have shaders on top of this technology ? lot more power needed tnhan simpel polygons
There is no reason why you could not have custom shading effects, this runs in software so anything you can program you can combine with this. The question is the performance, this is where they need to support direct compute.

-how can work 3D Collision system ?????
I think you could do it anyway you want just like with polygon engines. A lot of collision systems use bounding boxes for moving objects. As far as colliding with the world you could make a polygon representation of it if they find no other way.

- Can you have animated models : i doubt a lot !!!!!!!!!
Yes they did make an animation.
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=105528666147262&topic=28

- Can you have Lightmaps ?
According to Bruce Dell:
"SHADOWS:
Unlimited Detail will have both real-time shadows and pre-calculated
lighting as well as a variety of advanced lighting options"

AND
- What tools modelers can produce models for such scenes ?
what tool to use to build a scenes, texture it, have lightmaps ???????
Bruce Dell again:
"IMPORT OF DATA:
Data can be imported from a variety of sources. We expect to directly
support some popular scanning and modelling applications and file
formats for both point cloud and polygon style data. The SDK will
provide a simple way to import data from any source."

And memory:
"MEMORY STORAGE
The Unlimited Detail rendering technology does not require significant
system memory to run. The geometry may be compressed, instanced and
streamed to allow the best mix of runtime and disk based storage as
well as support unique geometry."

This is all what they said. I'm not sure if the technology will be as perfect as they say it is, but it seems like they are finding ways of solving the problems they encountered.

Total bullshit. You can't swap geometry from a hdd ingame - not in this mass. That would give a significant delay. And if you have unlimited detail any scene - regardless how simple it is - needs unlimited memory. I'm with the Apostle Thomas here... ^^

b.t.w.: even the way they speak about their technology makes me suspicious. No technical terms, no tech-talk. Thats not normal when you have just created THE next generation technology. Compare it to an interview with John Carmack.

I dont like that video colors, or scenes, and the picture in the intro with the eye.. i dont know why,but i hate that eye...

I also prefer lot lot more the demo from tesselation done in UniEngine !
And for memory, i also doubt a lot : unlimited details means nothing, so i could have millions of points for a character : that millions of points coordinates will need to be saved.
Well, i can't believe it should be so ligfhtweight to run on any PC.

Like i said , i will believe the day they will post a public game demo.

I Think Unlimited Detail is a POSSIBILLITY and not something that will be used.
Developes might uses this technique(if it works) to stream Polygon data more effectively instead of using poping LODs.

Same/Equal amount of polygons(as today), but LOD streaming more Icandy^^


Lets see what we get in the future


MFG
Rackscha

what does UD have to do with streaming techniques? -.o

since you cannot put unlimited x,y,z data in memory, you have to stream from hdd

since when are hdds unlimited?

it could be kind of unlimited if it were 100% procedural/fractal based but i don't think you would have much freedom doing the artwork then.

I think this unlimited detail thing is nonsense.
But, its nice as a mind experiment:
What if an entity is a sphere? When it isn't bigger within the view than a pixel, then it needs only a single color information. Then let's say, the sphere consists of positions and sizes of spheres which forms build the model, and those have spheres and positions of further smaller spheres, and the bigger the model appears in the view, the more the engine looks into the further details of further spheres until the spheres which never will appear bigger in the view than a pixel...
Does such model need more information than a model with normal map and height map as required for the tesselation of the uniengine?

THIS is "unlimited" detail (at least as detailed as it can be with limited number of pixels and it doesn´t really render at realtime...)

I don't quite get the difference between voxels/raycasting and this technology, but the fact that it's absolutely AWESOME...

from the scene which shows the editor/viewer with that bird that is displayed as red dots I guess it's just a pretty limited amount of points and not procedural.

Hiya.

Maybe it's the old curmudgeon in me, but I see this going the same way that the Offset engine did. A guy comes up with something amazing, puts it out there so he can get some comments on it, fixes things and adds others with everyone's help, all the while claiming "it will be free or low priced for indie style guys"...then some big company feels threatened and offers a $500k for it. He caves. They buy it and use it exclusively. Everyone else in the world of 3d sighs 'what a shame'...and this technology gets sweapt under the rug because no 3rd party companies can make their asset pipeline product compatible with it. It dies.

Then again, he could be a true genius, and release it as open source or some form of GPL thingamajig...so *everyone* has access to it for free or low-cost (say, sub $1k). But that's not the curmudgeon talking...that's the eternal optimist in me.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

The initial video:

Bottom line, what they propose is
the old voxel idea, with maybe some new twists to make it
more powerful.

(plus making up a story about "they dont want that competition, so
we where not allowed to talk to the boar of directors")