Anyone heard of Euclideon and their 3d engine.

Is this real, it seems to be legit, using atoms rather than polygons for games seems like an idea that makes sense, the tech demo below looks good to be fair, what do you guys think?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=related

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclideon

I don't remember if it was here or not, but I recall someone posting about it a while back and it turns out it's really nowhere near as practical or realistic as it sounds. Iirc something about how it's impossible to have enough memory to render it for any real use right now or anytime in the near future.

I think if it was something that was realistically feasible we'd be hearing about it a lot more and it would be put to use to some extent already.

I'll give them credit though, they do a good job of selling it in the video.

I've seen it before. Something they don't mention is how much space it takes. I remember reading somewhere that the one island takes up terabytes of space. Now imagine a gameworld the size of Azeroth using that. That's way more space than anyone will have for a while.

Well here's a really simple breakdown of why it's utter bs lol

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.

Click to expand...

I remember first hearing about this a couple of years ago. I thought they said they would run these games via cloud computing thus making it possible, but as Motorcharge explained I now see how it sounds like bullshit for anytime soon.

Even if we could run what they are currently showing in that video, no game designers would use it because even though everything looks betters as far as shape the level of details are not up to what current games have and there is no way they would go backwards on that so we would have to wait until we could run it and have up to date levels of detail.

Motorcharge said:

Well here's a really simple breakdown of why it's utter bs lol

Click to expand...

That sounds like what I read. I remember seeing it last year so I didn't remember the exact number.

Seen it early this year or late last year. Hopefully something eventually comes out of whatever they're doing.

Right now I'm sitting on the side of, looks like they came up with an idea for something to scam the Aussie government out of $2 Mil. However, that could change, the problem is that they came out and announced this technology, then promptly disappeared for quite a while, and now have disappeared again except to post on their own website which gives very little information - their news section has two items! As for their YouTube account, they haven't logged in since I think August of last year? Until something more concrete comes out, I will remain skeptical, but hopeful that this is potentially a revolutionary technology. Possibly a technology ahead of it's time by 10 or 20 years...

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam

That is notch's (minecraft creator) response the day after that video was posted.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8423008802/but-notch-its-not-a-scam

That is his response to the responses of his response.

I'm not considering Notch to have the word that ends all dispute, it just adds another perspective to the pot.

I just stumbled upon this. And I for one, fully support it. This is the direction we should be going. And we may not get there this year, or next year but I dont think its as far off as people think it is..... I mean, remember when games went from 2D to 3D? Maybe it wasnt as dramatic as this but it was a huge step forward in game development and required significantly more processing power. Just like this will. And at the rate technology is accelerating, I see no reason why we wont have the hardware available in the next few years to be able to run such a thing.

I think that since no one has really taken this approach seriously in the past, that no one really knows how this technology can be implemented yet into games effectively. So if enough time and resources is put into this, we may be able to find a way to optimize it enough to be used in games tomorrow.

But anyway, this has interested me so much that I want to learn as much as I possibly can on the subject. As it has already been 10 years since we last saw a nice leap forward in game graphics and if you ask me its time.


EDIT: Got me interested so much I am downloading the CryEngine 3 SDK right now to play around with it. I havent done any 3D work since I last used the sandbox for CryEngine 1 back in 2004 so its gonna be hard for me to get back into this.