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[Game] News from small Australian company

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#21
Murphy said:
Tesselation is going to make this obsolete anyway, once it takes off. "Unlimited leaves" as compared to the 2d ones they had the fortune to find in Bulletstorm (pricks... UT2004, for example, had great 3d looking vines too, but those weren't picked as examples. Not 2d ones from an old game either, but 2d ones from Bulletstorm, probably one of the most beautiful games around. Just so they could point out how the forefront of polygon based games still looks ****ty... Same with their Crysis trees at 3:00. Shady, to say the least) won't be a problem anymore with tesselation.
But that's animated, with physics, shiny surfaces and whatnot.
All stuff that's really hard to do with their atom clouds.

Convenient that they forgot to mention this tech alltogether and stuck to pointing out blocky low-poly, low-res objects in otherwise amazing looking games.

Also, no one cares about their production pipeline for their stupid cactus. Great, you pieced it together, what's that got to do with anything?
Fictional vs. nonfictional? Great, write a paper, but how is this related to your tech? Because you can make real stones from fictional atoms? Give me a break. You're not that revolutionary...
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The principle of tessellation can work just fine with an atom based system. It'll be even more detailed than polygons can ever be. To be honest, I find your dismissal of new technology to be a little stupid. I think you're falling into the "us or them" mentality that the current state of the industry has created. New technology can only benefit the industry. This technology, if you actually took the time to understand its scope, is much more revolutionary than anything that came out in the last decade.
 
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#23
Because I'm being lied to and I don't like it.
The manipulative, smug voice, the invalid comparisons to polygon based games, the neglect of new (polygon-based) technology and pretending that polygons are still like they were in 2001 (with matching "comparisons" to Crysis to boot...) just to make their pseudo-voxel tech with "infinite detail" look more appealing.
Only to get lost in irrelevant tales of an artist figuring out you can puzzle together an uber-cactus if you can't find one to laser-scan...
It's just so unprofessional and you would think a company capable to converting a technology, previously deemed unsuitable for gaming engines, to work not only great but with "infinite detail" gaming environments to the point that polygon-based games as such (citing examples such as Crysis 2 and Bulletstorm!) are going to be obsolete would show a little more professionalism.

The truth of the matter is that atoms aren't easier to calculate than vertices. The main advantage of "atoms" is seamless LOD that allows, at least theoretically, for what they refer to as "infinite detail" at a more or less fixed renderer performance. Where dotht this infinite detail come from though?
It has to be stored somewhere, even if we ignore the rendering, for the time being, which is fine for a medical application that needs a painstakingly detailed, laser-scanned model. Not as nice for a game that needs huge environments full of stuff. Solution: it can be procedurally generated, at least to a very large degree.

So the big news in this new tech is a) seamless and theoretically perfect LOD and b) procedural creation of the game world.

This is NOT a huge revolutionary step towards "infinite detail" though. At least not in the "as opposed to polygon-based games" kind of way they're trying to sell it as, as, for example tesselation, is going to bring exactly that to polygon-based systems!

They don't explain their system though, they just say "atoms", point out blocky trees in Crysis and show you a better looking tree and people fall for it because, hey, everyone knows more polygons = worse performance, but "atoms" have a clean slate and are kind of a blackbox.

The thing is, and this is where it all falls down, take a look at the Samaritan tech demo of UE3! If you have that at your fingertips, why waste your time with the 2011 blurry voxel revival party?

I don't even want to come across as overly negative, tbh. First game that uses this atoms stuff I'll download the demo and take a look. It's going to be interesting, if nothing else. I also downloaded the 64 KB shooter kKrieger when it was released back in the day and was amazed by its ingenuity! I'll also definitely buy Infinity, even IF the gameplay might turn out to be a boring mess. Because it's an amazing project.

But let's put a little damper on this "finally, infinite detail in our games"-euphoria.

The principle of tessellation can work just fine with an atom based system. It'll be even more detailed than polygons can ever be.
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What principle do you mean? Points can't be tesselated.
 
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#26
read the rps, his size calcs seem off though. Watching the vid shows one or two models in atom form ( as he rotates around it ). it seems like the system stretches the 'skin' over gaps in the atoms so 64 per cubic cm doesnt seem 'optimistic'.

Either way it seems like animations is probably a problem, & as others stated infinite detail = infinite hdd space...

Still gonna keep my eyes on this to see where it goes, I tend to be an optimist..
 
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#30
johncage said:
New technology can only benefit the industry. This technology, if you actually took the time to understand its scope, is much more revolutionary than anything that came out in the last decade.
Click to expand...

It isen't, and it won't be.

The biggest problem with game development at this moment is not one of graphics, not directly, but it is one of time.

The simple fact is, making games has become very expensive, it takes a lot of manpower a lot of houers to deliver what we today see as "current gen" graphics, infact it has become to expensive, and the games are suffering for it if you ask me, they are getting shorter and shorter every year, and usually more buggy and unfinished aswell.

The most significant and badly needed tech that could happen right now, is anything that would make it faster and/or cheaper to develop the content, it is better tools for 2D and 3D creation, better tools for animation and mapping, better engines that are easier to work with and code for, but which can still deliver the graphical fidelity the consumer demands, just faster, and at prices Dev's both big and small can afford.


This tech does not promis to do any of that, perhabs quite the opposite, laser scanners aren't cheap, and they can only scan what exists and is small enough to be scanned (and small studios allready have enough problems paying for things that consumers now considder standard), and "infinate detail" carries with it expectations of infinately detailed worlds, more content creation in other words..

No, if you ask me, the whole damn industry is racing twords breaking it's own back, creating ever growing hype for fidellity they increasingly struggle to deliver.
Show me huge advences in the tools needed to make games, that's when i'll get excited.
 
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#31
Hence why Carmack says:

"Production issues will be challenging."

Which is why I can see some indie devs doing far more with this engine than someone who wants to bring photorealistic textures and modeling into a 3d FPS game. It takes a good year or two with an established engine to develop a pipeline for content creation.
 
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#32
What would an indie-dev want with an atom-based engine?
The main advantage is being able to use laser-scans, but good, high-resolution laser-scans cost you an arm and a leg.

Even IF some dev wanted to use laser-scanned models (and that's a really big IF) they would probably be better off with a different approach. E.g. polygon-based models with reduced geometrical detail, compared to the original scan, compensating the reduced detail with good textures, normal maps and now tesselation) because storing the amount of detail of a high-resolution laser-scan for a whole gaming environment takes up way too much storage space (ignoring how it's going to be rendered! It's not as simple as just rendering what can be seen. A search algorithm has to determine which atom can be seen, and that's where things get complicated with "infinite detail" again).
What you see in the video is only possible because of the repetition ("excuse the repetition, but we're not a team of artists", yeah right, because that's the reason:rolleyes:).

There is a reason why atom-based models are used in a scientific context (not just medicine, btw. We use laser-scanned atom cloud models in Archeology as well) but not in gaming.

Yes, but Notch is an idiot.
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No, he isn't. And if he was this would still be uncalled for. I'm all for calling people names, but only after you sufficiently attacked their view first.:p

@Grobut: That's an excellent point. I remember discussions about how individual maps can only be made by teams that previously made whole games, because the level of detail was just so high now. That was when Unreal Engine 3 had just come out! We're not quite there yet (unless you go back far enough to pick your example team that previously made a whole game, lol) but we're heading in that direction.
Lately alternative art styles have gotten more recognition though (the bare Mirror's Edge, the cell-shaded Borderlands, the quasi-realistic comic style of Team Fortress, the bevelled-edges comic style of Darksiders, Torchlight, the 2d revival with games such as Streetfighter, obviously Minecraft...) so it's arguably not just about cramming details into every square inch, but we're already seeing a bit of a counter movement.
But still, you're absolutely right.
 
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#33
What would an indie-dev want with an atom-based engine?
The main advantage is being able to use laser-scans, but good, high-resolution laser-scans cost you an arm and a leg.
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It just depends. Everyone sees this as FPS shooter engine, but Unreal and all the others have done top down, isometric and everything else. What applications an indie dev could up with it for a game format, I can only imagine. But the thing you cite as the biggest problem with doing it isn't something I see indie devs trying to do: laser scan RL objects and populate a game with them. That's AAA ******y.

I mean, a game where you play as an ant crawling over a map built to human specifications alone would be an interesting prospect with this engine, because it could model terrain down to a much smaller level that most games have to pull tricks to achieve.

Edit:

The W version of Yank is censored? Huh.
 
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#34
You're not wrong about the tech beeing able to do some interesting things Nenjin (assuming it works as well as advertized, atleast), but who's going to pay for all thease expensive scans? And who's going to have enough mappers and 3D guys employed to make, tweak and place this volume of detail into a map? Who's going to have the marketing budget to break even after it's all paid off?

It's not going to be indies, i can tell you that much, hell, i'm not even sure a behemoth like Activision would try, to much risk involved for to little net gain..


The upper limit of graphics is nolonger about the technology, the tech allready exists to make even prettier games than what we're currently playing, it's out there, we saw years ago that games can look as pretty as Crysis, but few games do even to this day, it's just not beeing used to it's full potential.

No, the problem we're facing right now is one of cost effectiveness, the sheer volume of time and manpower it takes to bring us thouse graphics, it's starting to be a real problem now, and you can see thouse problems in the games allready, the lack of pre-production, the lack of quality control, the removal of features we took for granted, and how short on content they are becomming, thease are a direct result of development taking to much time and costing to much even now.

Graphical tech is not the problem, the tools are, unless we can make game development more cost effective, make it easier and faster, then we're about to hit a cieling of what graphics can do, not because of tech limitations, but because there simply aren't enough houers in a day to make it all, and still make a profit at the end of the Dev cycle.

This tech won't change that, quite the opposite.
 
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#37
lols search algs are ineffective? do you have any computer science knowledge to back up that ridiculous claim?


Just as an example, in a list of 1 trillion items, if it is unsorted your search time is N basically meaning you have to look at all items to find it. If sorted you can use a binary search with a time complexity of Log base 2 N. which is 29.87.
 
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#38
Colt .45 killer said:
lols search algs are ineffective? do you have any computer science knowledge to back up that ridiculous claim?


Just as an example, in a list of 1 trillion items, if it is unsorted your search time is N basically meaning you have to look at all items to find it. If sorted you can use a binary search with a time complexity of Log base 2 N. which is 29.87.
Click to expand...

I have only very basic programming knowledge from university. I do not know how deep level stuff like making kernels works, but can build my own visual recognition system or inverse kinematic application for example (and I did). I am still a newbie. I only know my teachers telling us that searches and sorting algs are deep down always ineffective and take time, so we should avoid them. That is what I was told. No need to be hostile.

edit: Thanks, now I have a renewed interest in reading all my lecture scripts. I mean that honestly. You are right, I guess one could make a relatively fast sorting system. Yet, unlimited implies always unlimited data. One still needs to store that... I would really like to see a basic mathematical model for his claims, but it is "secret" and works like google anyway. For that reason, I still think it is an obvious scam.
 
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#39
Personally, I think it looks fantastic. I understand the skepticism because the claims are quite lofty, but man, if they can do what they say they can... a new world of detail is coming down the pipe. As a gamer, I can't really help but feel a tinge of excitement.

What I really liked about the interview was what he said about artists moving back into physical art (clay, carvings etc.) in order to scan and then import the assets into the project. Really cool.

Scam? Who knows.. I just don't see the gain from going this far with a scam. Especially when he said they arent seeking any more funding. What would be the payoff to have gone through all this trouble only to then say 'ahhh we got you suckers, haha it doesnt exist!' :rolleyes:
 
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