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[Game] News from small Australian company

Apos

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Dec 3, 2007
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‪Little Australian games company invents technology 100,000 times better‬‏ - YouTube

I'm Bruce Robert Dell, the CEO of Euclideon. In 2010 our technology appeared in most of the world's media. We had found a way to give computer graphics unlimited power. Computer graphics today are basically made of little flat shapes called polygons, and a lot of big companies spend a lot of money trying to have more of these little flat shapes so their graphics will look better and everything won't look quite so angular.


There is a better way to do computer graphics, which is used in medicine and the sciences. The better way to do computer graphics is to make everything out of tiny little atoms instead of flat panels. The problem is that this particular system uses up a lot of processing power. The more objects you have on the screen, the slower your computer will run. Having four or five detailed objects will run just fine, but you certainly can't do a level of a game.

We got a lot of attention because we made the claim that we could run unlimited "little 3D atoms" in real time. To understand this claim you need to understand the state of the industry. There are lots of large companies that are pouring billions of dollars into trying to increase their polygon count. At present, they seem to be able to increase it by about 25% a year. If any of these large companies were to suddenly come out with 10 times more polygons than their competitors, it would be enormous news. But we didn't increase the geometry count by 10 times, or 100 times, or 1000 times. We increased it so far that we could abandon polygons altogether and move to little atoms, and run them in unlimited quantities. If what we've said is true, then it is the largest breakthrough since 3D graphics began.

Two months after announcing this we declined all further interviews and then completely disappeared. Most people said the technology was too unbelievable and was probably never real to begin with.


1 Year Later

It's been one year since our disappearance, and a lot of people are asking what's happened to us. Well, we're not finished yet, but we'll give you an update as to our present level of advancement. We've made a little island. The island is 1 kilometre squared. This island is made from 21,062,352,435,000 polygons.

In the graphics industry, everyone is used to using polygons, so we'd thought we'd build a polygon converter. By converting polygons into Unlimited Detail point cloud data, you can then run them in unlimited quantities. We've converted them at a rate of 64 atoms per cubic millimeter. If you're not sure how small a cubic millimetre is, that's a rate of 1,000,000 atoms per cubic inch. If you're still not sure how small that is; these are grains of dirt. In fact, there are 15 million converted polygons in every square meter of dirt, which means that in one cubic meter of dirt we have more polygons than you will find in any game that doesn't use procedural generation.

Graphics are definitely getting a lot better. If you compare Crysis 1 to Crysis 2 you can see nearly double the polygon count. But things still don't look realistic. That's not the fault of the artist. In fact, we're eager to see what happens when we give our technology to artists in the game industry. We played with it ourselves of course, and we came up with this... But remember, we're far from the world's best artists, so it will be very interesting to see where our technology ends up going when there's more synchronization with other players in the industry.



Our polygon converter converts things straight from 3DS Max, Maya and other 3D programs, so it's pretty much business as usual for the artist. He just has total freedom now, and has no such thing as a polygon budget. Polygon counts are pretty low today in games. If we look at things like palm trees, and then compare them to, say, a palm tree made with Unlimited Detail (our technology), you can see that the polygon budget was pretty restrictive. So by removing that burden from artist's lives I'm sure we'll make a few friends.

As for our supporters who play games, your graphics are about to get better. Better by a factor of about 100,000 times. 100,000 is a pretty big number, but perhaps we're exaggerating? So we'll let you be the judge of that.

The ground in games today consists of a very nice photo on the ground and some blades of grass sticking up from it. This is our ground in Unlimited Detail and, obviously, even the grains of dirt, as mentioned before, are real geometry. So if you look around; the leaves, the twigs, the blades of grass... All those little groundy type things are now all real.

Your game environments will also be real. When I say real I mean made of little atoms just like our real world. Your game environments until now have been filled with a bunch of tricks to try and deal with the low polygon budget. Things like sprites that are always facing you, or objects in the distance which are really just flat pieces of cardboard, or a cactus that is very, very detailed on one side, but, not wanting to waste polygons, the other side looks like an octopus tentacle. Sometimes objects far away just disappear into the fog and other times they just pop up as the swap between different models. I'm sure in the future our children will look back with amusement at these things in the same way we look back on blocky, three colour graphics.

Getting back to our island demo; I hope you will forgive the repetitious graphics. Please remember; we're a technology company, we're not a games company.

Have a look at a few individual items; if you look here at this rock, I hope you will permit me to say that it looks rather real. That's because it is, it's actually been scanned in from the real world. Scanning technology that brings things in from the real world has existed for quite some time. The problem was that what it produced was so high in geometry that you could never use it in games.

In the future, graphics will be divided into two categories; fiction and non-fiction. What we mean is, if I want to make Super Mario, or a dragon or a unicorn, I can't go out to the forest, tranquilize and laser scan them - they're not there. So I need an artist to do that. The artwork that doesn't exist we call fiction. That means it's made by an artist. This tree is fiction; it's been made by an artist, it's not laser scanned in. The rock, on the other hand, is non-fiction, and the cactus is a hybrid of the two. To make this cactus... we didn't have any cacti that looked like this in our little part of Australia. The cacti that we had weren't quite as interesting. So we took the pieces of them, we twirled them around to make circles and then we added some dry leaves on top, which we changed the colour of later. If we were a little bit more creative we would have taken the wings of a swan and put them on a tiger, but we didn't think of that at the time.

This island demonstration shows our present level of technology, but that level is far from complete. For example, at present our island has only two shades of shadows. Just after we made this demonstration we progressed to having multiple shades of shadow, so in our next demonstration you're going to find the lighting's going to look a lot better. We're also running at 20 frames per second in software, but we have versions that are running much faster than that, which aren't quite complete yet.

Some months from now our Software Development Kit will be complete and it will be ready to be handed over to the games developers. Until then we're all working as hard as we can and we hope to produce a product that our fans and supporters will find acceptable.

Thank you very much for taking the time to watch this presentation.​



looks interesting!
 
Hmm yes I remember this stuff from a year ago. It obviously sounds too good to be true, but honestly, a part of me believes them. I just wanna know how the hell they pull it off, if it is real. I almost have to believe it's real now, since they are actually planning to release an SDK as announced in this video. In the past, they came out of nowhere, announced all this crazy stuff, then disappeared -- supporting the rumors that they were full of crap. Now I really don't think that's the case!
 
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Comparison with Crysis and Crysis 2 at 3:00 could not have been ****tier. Makes them look shady, imo. Not to mention the smug voice and the complete lack of any kind of "proof" of this running in real-time. No dude holding a controller or anything, like with the first UE3 demonstrations.

But if they can deliver, more power to them.
 
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well they've nailed down some of the original problems ( namely adding conversion from poly models & adding scanning ). Now a fps game can get all 3d models for weapons in a day, or in the case of red orchestra, get one of those HD tanks in a few hours to a day's worth of scanning & moving stuff around inside.

I did see a video last year where they had some animations, I think they showed a skeleton similar to the type you would use for a poly model you wanted to animate.

The technology made sense to me a year ago, glad to see these guys are back, & I cant wait to see what this turns into...

yeah murphy some kind of a live demo would be nice, probably something we'll see soon...
 
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I'm still not sure how rendering an innumerable amount of tiny atoms in real-time is faster than with polygons. Sure you get awesome detail with the former but how exactly is that faster than polygons?

If it isn't, then there's no point in using it. If it's only a little slower than polygons then sure the technology will catch up, but I really want to see them doing some demonstrations where the "real-time" bit isn't questionable.
 
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I couldn't help thinking of a Monty Python skit while that guy was talking.

Most of this is above my head except the reality of poly counts. I can see the implementation of physics and exploding objects into their atom components being difficult to do. Asking a processor to handle a few million bouncing particles may not be hard...doing it in a game environment will probably require significant compromises. As I look at this, I'm reminded of how some of the voxel games work. Isn't this sort of like voxels but on a grand scale?

Still, if they can actually wed this to new game engines that run efficiently, graphics just got another shot in the arm to take them into the next decade. Because looking at new games today, you can definitely see the wall beyond which they can't cram anymore polygons in or pull anymore tricks.
 
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This is interesting but...

If everything was made up of "atoms" why were the "grains of dirt" big chunks of crap multiplied tons of times? Why didn't they demonstrate sand with each grain as an "atom". There's also way too much hyperbole in this video. He says they can do "unlimited quantities" but then he says it's "100,000" times better? Huh? The fiction/non-fiction talk was pretty lame too. Plus, his voice....

I'll be more interested when I see animations are possible and I can see a game using the technology in real time.
 
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The idea I guess is that even if an object is made of a million dots, you may only need render 10 points when far, or most of them when close (and there are also less objects in the screen).

Also you have to consider that there is no specialized hardware to handle "atoms" instead polygons.
Guess that the industry will just keep ignoring them or buy em to get the "exclusive".
 
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I'm still not sure how rendering an innumerable amount of tiny atoms in real-time is faster than with polygons.

I'm don't know either and I use both on a daily basis as a CAD modeler. Not animation mind you so I'm no expert there, I build models for RL products. Increasing polys or points in a point cloud have the same effect on any comp I've worked on, more RAM, GPU and CPU intensive. I'd feel more excited if I had any sense that what we were seeing was real time rendering, it just looked like flybys to me.....
 
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wrong forssen

It works similar to voxels but uses a search engine to find which atom to render. Hence it renders you screen res & no more.


Amerikaner, sure the talk was lame but boil it down to the substance. What this means in the context of say a future RO is that the weapons wouldent be modeled you would scan them. player models wouldnt be tediously made, you would get one of your local SS wannabe's with their perfect uniforms, say "stand still for a few mins" and have the base model. Same goes for those purdy tanks that took 3 mo to make...

They did also mention that they are a tech company not a game designer / artists so nitpickin their sand is pointless....
 
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wrong forssen

It works similar to voxels but uses a search engine to find which atom to render. Hence it renders you screen res & no more.


Amerikaner, sure the talk was lame but boil it down to the substance. What this means in the context of say a future RO is that the weapons wouldent be modeled you would scan them. player models wouldnt be tediously made, you would get one of your local SS wannabe's with their perfect uniforms, say "stand still for a few mins" and have the base model. Same goes for those purdy tanks that took 3 mo to make...

They did also mention that they are a tech company not a game designer / artists so nitpickin their sand is pointless....

Almost right then.

You could convert a point cloud into a polygon model. I don't really see how it's a pushing point for using models made out of a point cloud directly in games.
 
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@forssen: I think the pushing point is the level of detail attainable. Lets be realistic here and note that most gamers consider gfx to be their major selling point...


@ slavek: if this pans out the gpu wars would basically accept a cease fire.
GPU's would probably be used for physics calcs & the like so you would still need a powerfull rig. But gfx wise the 3d models would peak in detail, there would still be lighting & other effects to process...
 
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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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Interesting to say the least. Computers are only getting better and more powerful, so the question whether or not their tech is viable or not is pointless, its more of a matter of when. Curious to see future videos.

How would it be pointless? If computer power increases, that means the amount of atoms useable increases as well. Using a polygon system you can never ever keep up with a graphics system that for all practical sense has no polygonal limits.

Think about it, the atom is the smallest level of detail possible. A flat pane system can never compete with it.
 
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