Real or Fake - Unlimited Detail Rendering

[Kusy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4&feature=player_embedded#at=107

:fap fap fap fap fap fap:

[Admiral Refuge]

I hit 5:45 and said "Holy crap!"

[shadowdeath]

This was amazIng till i found out it was fake. :(

[Kusy]

@shadowdeath:

> This was amazIng till i found out it was fake. :(

Again, it is not a fake, the technology exists and existed for quite a while. It's just impossible to handle by anything you could fit into your house.

[Admiral Refuge]

@shadowdeath:

> This was amazIng till i found out it was fake. :(

Yeah, same here.

Warning - while you were typing a new reply has been posted. You may wish to review your post.
…I still say Stephan could probably pull it off, screw "hardware limitations."

[dlom]

@shadowdeath:

> This was amazIng till i found out it was fake. :(

[http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam](http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam)
Source, for any interested people

[Kusy]

scam ≠ fake

[Admiral Refuge]

@Kusy:

> scam ≠ fake

That's "!=" to you.

[SawQuart]

Tell the hardware companies to pick their shit up.

[dlom]

@Kusy:

> scam ≠ fake

*shrug*

[Guest]

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[SawQuart]

Fake. Notch proved it wrong.

[Guest]

Notch gave a reasonable argument, but you shouldn't base your opinion on the fact that "Notch says so".

[Jaiden]

Holy shit. I'm having a hard time believing it, but that's pretty god damn sweet regardless.

[SawQuart]

Notch's arguments were pretty solid though. How would it be possible to shade all of those atoms?

[Robin]

@Spork:

> Notch gave a reasonable argument, but you shouldn't base your opinion on the fact that "Notch says so".

You should base your opinion on the fact that it's physically impossible to store the amount of data needed to give solid data to every atom.

Polygons were used for a reason and until our computing and storage power develops substantially we won't be able to replace that.

[Jaiden]

They're not atoms, he put it into those terms for people to understand. It's using a large amount of vertices, so essentially there are still polygons(?), they're just so incredibly small that they become insignificant.
The "atoms" aren't little 3D dots forming a shape, if that's what the implication is.

[azure]

@Robin:

> You should base your opinion on the fact that it's physically impossible to store the amount of data needed to give solid data to every atom.
>
> Polygons were used for a reason and until our computing and storage power develops substantially we won't be able to replace that.

This is what I took away from Notch's blog post

[Guest]

It's more like a cloud.

[azure]

@Spork:

> It's more like a cloud.

Even "the cloud" needs some where to store data?

[Jaiden]

Yes it's a lot of data so it's unlikely, but I don't believe the shading is based on every single vertex, it's probably applied to a group of them. 3D isn't really my strong point, so I don't really know. All I can tell you is they're not "atoms".

[Rithy58]

I don't think it's possible yet when you think about the storage needed for the data.
However, I don't think it'll always stay impossible.
I was never into the realistic graphic anyway so polygon were just fine for me :P

Sincerely,
Rithy

[Admiral Refuge]

I merged these two topics.

[Godlord]

They are called volume elements or voxels, not vertices or atoms (stupid marketing people).

To store them efficiently, there are some optimisation techniques. I'm going to use a cube of 1,000×1,000×1,000 voxels as an example, which comes down to 1,000,000,000 voxels. The first way of optimisation is to get rid of all the voxels that are never going to be visible, this comes down to only storing the voxels of the surface of an object. For the cube this would reduce the amount of voxels to 1,000×1,000×6, which is 6,000,000 voxels. Another optimisation can be made whilst displaying, that optimisation would be to cast rays through the object, so you only have to render the front voxels (because you can't actually see anything hidden behind those), applying this technique on the cube would reduce it further to about 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 voxels depending on your camera, and assuming we aren't using some odd projection.

For detailed objects you can reduce the amount of detail to optimise the performance. The detail is only needed when you zoom onto something (e.g. when waving at someone from a distance, you barely recognise his or her face, therefore it isn't worthwhile to render the details).

Your video buffer is the size of your resolution in pixels, you can't display more voxels than you have pixels. Therefore it wouldn't be sane to render more than 2,073,600 voxels on a monitor with a resolution of 1,920×1,080.

There are probably some other techniques as well. So yes, it's definitely doable, if you know how to optimise your engine.

@Jungle:

> Fake. Notch proved it wrong.

I've read his blog entry, and I consider him to be a bigger idiot than I did before. There are reasons why Notch uses Java. Although, I have to admit that this guy is really good at misinforming people as well.

Yours faithfully
  Stephan.

[Jaiden]

@S.J.R.:

Thanks for clearing it up, I mean that honestly. I had a feeling I was wrong, but I was pretty far off haha.

It's good to know it's possible then. It will really revolutionize the game industry.