"Unlimited Detail" non-polygonal game engine preview

[Farmer]

Sweet Christ.

If this is real, the possibilities are incredible.
Discuss.

[P.P.A.]

What's wrong with 8x8 tiles?

[Crowbar]

It's bullshit, Notch confirms it. And they're just carefully not mentioning its limitations, such as the fact that it can't be animated and you need to be using lots of repeated data, and this technology isn't even new.

[Ritz]

It's not that clear cut. The technology is very real ("It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology", Notch says)- they're clearly sidestepping any mention of the drawbacks, but that was sort of obvious even before this Notch guy thought to point it out. The engine still looks a hell of a lot more impressive than any of the examples he cited, and it's not like you need a map 2km in size with every grain of dirt delineated to put the technology to good use, you know? Even if they've only upped the graphical fidelity by a factor of 10 and not 100,000, that's still a pretty fucking big deal!

My faith isn't wavering any, personally. All this shows is that they're desperate for funding and I think they ought to get it. I imagine it'd be simple enough to run polygon tech in parallel to compensate for the lack of animation. What I really want to know is how they plan on handling shaders, which is going to be a necessity if they honestly hope to compete with any current (or last) gen rendering engine.

[Crisis]

This seems pretty cool. I can't get through the Notch link, so I'll just assume there are plenty of drawbacks (obviously there must be), but still, the demo looks good and if they can find a way to make it workable with even some of the features they claim, then that can only be a good thing for the industry. I can't be the only one who's sick of the plasticine models rendered in the Unreal Engine.

As a side note, all this talk of "unlimited atoms" makes the idea of a simulated universe seem eerily plausible.

[Isuka]

I imagine it'd be simple enough to run polygon tech in parallel to compensate for the lack of animation.

This. Like in those games that used both polygonal character/ object models on a pre-rendered background, or even on a FMV one, like Killer Instinct and Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure. After all, most games don't really feature heavily animated environments, no big loss there. This would go a long way in preventing stupid clipping since the environment would feature actually solid objects instead of just empty shells, that alone makes it for me.

I also remember reading about some form of real-time 3D vector rendering on a game mag not too long ago, I think it was ray tracing. It sounded great since that way we wouldn't have to deal with set-in-stone native resolutions that look all blurry and shitty in LCD-type displays.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

Video game characters reacting to terrain realistically seems kind of iffy when a lot of 'em couldn't function in reality.

Though the thought of characters getting their cumbersome swords stuck in doorways sounds endlessly amusing/frustrating.

[Ritz]

This would go a long way in preventing stupid clipping since the environment would feature actually solid objects instead of just empty shells, that alone makes it for me.

That's just what I was thinking at first. I'd love to see some sort of breakthrough that'd allow for complex concave collision meshes on absolutely everything, but all that's really being discussed here are the engine's rendering capabilities. Unless that's the other "piece of technology that isn't graphics, but does something game related that's also pretty clever" that they teased, it probably won't be any more sophisticated than what we have now. Testing for collision against every atom in the scene would be coo coo bananas.

Ray tracing was mentioned briefly at the end of the first Unlimited Detail video. It's so slow that they gave it two down arrows!