The future of gaming graphics?

[caseagainstfaith]

So far from what I see in this youtube video, I really like what I see. I think gaming graphics would take another big step towards realism with this kind of technology backing it up. What do you all think?

[Vidi The Mostly Hatless]

Notch (Creator of Minecraft) disagrees: notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

[caseagainstfaith]

Aug 2, 2011 13:54:11 GMT -5 Vidi The Mostly Hatless said:

Notch (Creator of Minecraft) disagrees: notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

Maybe I'm wrong, but what I take away from this is that it still is a viable system in theory and could still be the future of gaming graphics if we can develop a algorithm that can keep up with the voxel cloud base of data. So basically its kind of like the Sega Dreamcast, it has some workable ideas but it is still too far ahead of its' time to work right now.

[arrowdeath]

Aug 2, 2011 13:54:11 GMT -5 Vidi The Mostly Hatless said:

Notch (Creator of Minecraft) disagrees: notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

Was about to say, infinite polygons is all nice and good until you start having to process and store them.

[Mantorok]

Aug 2, 2011 15:35:51 GMT -5 caseagainstfaith said:

Maybe I'm wrong, but what I take away from this is that it still is a viable system in theory and could still be the future of gaming graphics if we can develop a algorithm that can keep up with the voxel cloud base of data.

The problem is this is a bit like saying "I've invented a car that produces zero emissions, I just haven't figured out what's going to fuel the engine." They've claimed this is the future of graphics technology for games, but we already know what the big problem areas will be: animation, physics, and real-time lighting. They've tackled none of those.

Aug 2, 2011 15:35:51 GMT -5 caseagainstfaith said:

So basically its kind of like the Sega Dreamcast, it has some workable ideas but it is still too far ahead of its' time to work right now.

This has got to be the weirdest analogy ever. Mostly because the real problem was the Dreamcast couldn't compete with the PS2.

[Deimos]

That guys voice shits me.

That is my input

[Dragon Zachski]

Three problems.

1. MAJOR TEDIUM. Can you imagine having to place every single grain of dirt for a gaming environment? Ugh! I wouldn't want to do that!

2. Physics. Even assuming that you manage to get each cloud of voxels all physical and stuff, what's to stop said character from just sinking into the dirt? Computer physics are only a mere imitation of real life physics, I imagine computing compressed voxels, surface tension, and all sorts of things for millions of voxels at a time would be a problem.

3. Uncanny Valley. I can still tell that I am looking at a computer generated image. Imagine a human generated by voxels - It'd be so uncanny valley that people would be offput by the game.

[Distind]

It sounds like the kind of thing that may be useful once people don't remember what a core is in terms of a CPU.

Personally I'd rather have decent game play than jizz myself over graphics.

[malicious_bloke]

Aug 3, 2011 5:44:10 GMT -5 Distind said:

Personally I'd rather have decent game play than jizz myself over graphics.

^

[Mantorok]

Aug 3, 2011 5:37:13 GMT -5 Dragon Zachski said:

MAJOR TEDIUM. Can you imagine having to place every single grain of dirt for a gaming environment? Ugh! I wouldn't want to do that!

Not really an issue. If they create a decent toolset you'd just be using brushes for terrain like they do with polygons.
Here's an example:

[Yla]

Aug 3, 2011 5:37:13 GMT -5 Dragon Zachski said:

3. Uncanny Valley. I can still tell that I am looking at a computer generated image. Imagine a human generated by voxels - It'd be so uncanny valley that people would be offput by the game.

That's not a problem of their engine. That's a problem of graphics in general, and a voxel engine wouldn't worsen it.

I'm sceptical because of their repeated insistence that their engine is 'unlimited'. There is no such thing.

Also, why are they using a detail metric with millimeters? The scale is completely arbitrary. You can switch out two numbers, the program would work the same, and you can proclaim to have this number of details per nanometer.. or lightyear.

[RavynousHunter]

Aug 3, 2011 13:44:30 GMT -5 Yla said:

I'm sceptical because of their repeated insistence that their engine is 'unlimited'. There is no such thing.

THIS, very this. I cringed every time they used the word "unlimited." They're trying to hype their shit, but they're going to end up like Peter Molyneux and Fable, a very bad hype-to-actual-fucking-content level.

[Amaranth]

Aug 3, 2011 5:44:10 GMT -5 Distind said:

Personally I'd rather have decent game play than jizz myself over graphics.

Game...Play?

These words...They make no sense to me!

[TWoozl]

I work in game dev. I've been watching technologies like this tout themselves as the "next great thing", but they all frequently have one thing in common: One or more aspects of them utterly falls flat compared to current features. Game design is *NOT* an industry where you can simply remove a common feature and expect people to forgive you for it. There's a whole host of problems that come with voxel tech that are trivially solved with current engines, and there isn't an easy way to solve it while stepping wholly into voxel turf, despite the oversell's insistence here.

This is not new technology; Ken Silverman's BUILD engine (The engine that powered Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior and other 3D Realms games), used voxel technology because at the time it was easier to implement than polygons for their purpose. Some games used it for terrain as early as 1997. They all had something in common: No shading and no physics. Voxel physics are nightmarish to even contemplate, especially dynamics. The old solution was to slap a polygonal convex or concave hull beneath it, and ignore the little artistic issues that arose (Delta Force was *notorious* for grenades and other small objects being simply eaten by the terrain).

How exactly do you apply something like shaders, to a voxel setup? Or even basic kinematics? The short answer is, you don't. You have to bind the voxel setup to a skeletal or polygonal hull, or rely wholly on screenspace shaders (And even then, voxels introduce several orders more points of data to track for shading), and by that point you might as well just use geometry in the first place. Voxel systems have been bandied around as the next great thing for well over a decade in some fashion or another, but it's always been singleminded, short-sighted concepts that ignore the big picture: We devs don't give a damn for technologies that we have to kludge ceaselessly to make them function without sacrificing features we already have.

[Dragon Zachski]

Now...

I can see using voxels to touch up or add to designs, design distant backgrounds, stuff like that. Something that isn't supposed to be subjected to physics.