
Exploring Euclideon's Unlimited Detail Engine - timknauf
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2011/11/22/exploring-unlimited-detail.aspx
======
dmbaggett
The article sensationally positions this as some incredible breakthrough that
the "old guard" of gaming is trying to suppress. More likely, the code works,
but has limitations -- the same limitations that led old guard luminaries like
Carmack to defer the idea for another few years.

As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long
time; a recent example is the whimsical "3D Dot Game Hero" for PS3, in which
they use the low-res nature of the voxel world as a fun design element.

Voxel-based approaches have huge advantages ("infinite" detail, background
details that are deformable at the pixel level, simpler simulation of
particle-based phenomena like flowing water, etc.) but they'll only win once
computing power reaches an important crossover point. That point is where
rendering an organic world a voxel at a time looks better than rendering
zillions of polygons to approximate an organic world. Furthermore, much of the
effort that's gone into visually simulating real-world phenomena (read the
last 30 years of Siggraph conference proceedings) will mostly have to be
reapplied to voxel rendering. Simply put: lighting, caustics, organic elements
like human faces and hair, etc. will have to be "figured out all over again"
for the new era of voxel engines. It will therefore likely take a while for
voxel approaches to produce results that look as good, even once the crossover
point of level of detail is reached.

I don't mean to take anything away from the hard and impressive coding work
this team has done, but if they had more academic background, they'd know that
much of what they've "pioneered" has been studied in tremendous detail for two
decades. Hanan Samet's treatise on the subject tells you absolutely everything
you need to know, and more: ([http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-
Multidimensional-Structure...](http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-
Multidimensional-Structures-Kaufmann-
Computer/dp/0123694469/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322140227&sr=8-1)) and even
goes into detail about the application of these spatial data structures to
other areas like machine learning. Ultimately, Samet's book is all about the
"curse of dimensionality" and how (and how much) data structures can help
address it.

In the late 90s at Naughty Dog, I used Samet's ideas (octrees in particular)
for collision detection in the Crash Bandicoot games. In those games, the
world was visually rendered with polygons, but physically modeled -- for
collision detection purposes, at least -- with an octree. The nice thing about
octrees is that they are very simple to work with and self-calibrate their
resolution dynamically, making them very space-efficient. Intuitively, a big
region of empty air tends to be represented by a handful of huge cubes, while
the individual fronds of a fern get coated with dozens or hundreds of tiny
cubes, because there's more surface detail to account for in the latter
example.

I think the crossover point I mentioned earlier will come when GPUs become
general-purpose enough to allow massively parallel voxel rendering
implementations. That's what surprised me most about this article: they crow
that it's a CPU-only technology... why? GPUs excel at tasks involving vast
amounts of relatively simple parallel computation.

Prior to the crossover point, we'll see a bunch of cool games that use voxel
rendering primarily for gameplay reasons. These games will look chunky
compared to their polygonal peers, but will offer unique experiences.
Minecraft is a good example. (I'm assuming it's voxel-based, but don't really
know.)

~~~
Terretta
In the Comanche series, "voxels" were a selling point on the box.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku-
ICQvQJGI&sns=em](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku-ICQvQJGI&sns=em)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_series>

No story I've seen on this engine seems to mention that series.

~~~
lloeki
The problem with NovaLogic's VoxelSpace engine (used in Delta Force, Comanche
and Armored Fist series) is that it's using a height map, and to speed up
rendering, "locks" the Z axis to simplify a bunch of formulas to render voxels
comprising the terrain much faster. Comanche 1 and 2 used sprites so that
wasn't as noticeable, but Comanche 3 introduced polygon-based models, where
the third axis speedup produces uneven deformation when looking up or down
(you can see it in the video). You can see the same problem in OutCast. The
choice of an engine with such limitations for a tank an helicopter and a
ground soldier game is interesting, and you can notice how most of the
gameplay in those games involves long range action along the horizontal plane.
Notice how NovaLogic jet fighters games do not use VoxelSpace but a polygon-
based terrain engine.

Today voxel-based renderers must allow correctly projected 6-DOF orientation
of the viewport, and not just render terrain but arbitrary objects, and
integrate together with various lightning and shader effects to stand any
chance outside the neo-retro or abstract category.

------
babebridou
What I don't like with "Unlimited Details" is that Dell refuses to say what
the engine can't do yet. We know it's a work in progress. We (the internet)
are excited about it because it's an experiment that's on scale with what we
could expect from that branch of 3D graphics technology. Trillions of atoms,
whatever. Show us what's still in progress because the internet is skeptical
about this, this and this.

Hacking reflexion by duplicating the scene is a good way to start, because no
one can say whether it's a good or a bad solution to a non-trivial problem -
it gets the job done for now - but can you have multiple coexisting versions
of the world? like a vertical mirror, a horizontal body of water and an
underwater section?

To Dell: just stop handwaving the questions already, we get it that you
ignored the state of the art and built your own thing, just tell us what it
can't do yet, show us your current progress and you'll be met with much less
skepticism, and even help, even if you keep your trade secrets, at least show
us your specs! You won't be struck down by lightning if you talk - no one ever
died from reinventing/copying the wheel and making it so good that the wheel
can fly.

~~~
Torn
> Dell refuses to say what the engine can't do yet.

I'll go out on a limb here, and suggest it can't do real-time animation,
texturing, lighting, shadows, collisions, etc. All the maps / screenshots
shown seem to be static, procedurally generated and not artist-created.

Dell keeps throwing around this 'Unlimited Detail' marketing phrase which is
very offputting. Until it's seen in action in an _actual game_ it can be
nothing but snake oil.

~~~
babebridou
I agree with you 100% - my comment was mostly wishful thinking, a description
of how Dell could make me change my mind.

This kind of marketing is one I can't quite understand. I mean, what is he
after? Buzz? Funding? What's his endgame? Why & how is he paying people to
work on it? Is his marketing strategy to troll the profession & the audience,
and he really has something big up his sleeve?

Why is he using the Vaporware approach?

~~~
twoodfin
Generate enough press to keep funding going, particularly from the Australian
government? They already got one such grant, I believe. Are more possible if
they can put together enough clippings?

------
wladimir
See also the gigavoxel research by an ex-colleague of mine:
<http://maverick.inria.fr/Members/Cyril.Crassin/> . This looks very similar,
and is probably an extension of it...

------
Derbasti
As soon as I see animated objects moving about in a dynamically lit world, I
will start to believe that Euclideon is on to something.

Maybe there could be some middle ground like in the old voxel days, where you
would have a static (unlimited detail) background world and some traditional,
polygon-based actors in the foreground. Looking at any modern game, just about
everything on the screen is constantly moving, so color me sceptical even on
that idea.

Also, I would like to know how they do lighting. It looks like they might use
precomputed highlights and shadows. Needless to say that this would not be of
much use for dynamic lighting.

~~~
dmbaggett
This may not be as big an issue as you think. We had the same issue in in the
Crash Bandicoot games: the background was rendered a completely different way
than the foreground (animating) elements. We made it work by approximating
where the foreground elements should "sort in" to the background polygon
layers. Where the heuristics were wrong, we tuned it manually, by pushing a
foreground element forward or backward in the scene until it looked right.

Remember: you can hack stuff in games until it looks right. It doesn't
actually have to work perfectly from a theoretical standpoint; it just has to
work practically without too much additional tuning labor.

~~~
Derbasti
That still does not solve the issue that current games have a lot of moving
assets and really not that much static geometry. Trees, shrubs and grass move
in the wind, water flows, walls crumble when hit by bullets, that kind of
thing. Everything is animated.

~~~
dmbaggett
It seems to me that voxel worlds could make this problem easier, not harder:
you can deform the world algorithmically, voxel by voxel, rather than using
polygonal approximations. Imagine an acid blob eating an outdoor environment
in a fantasy game: in a voxel world, this is like a fancy seed fill. In a
polygonal world, this is much harder to simulate.

I'm not saying voxel worlds solve every such problem; just that there are
likely to be as many things that are easier w.r.t. animating elements as there
are things that will be harder.

[Edit: maybe I'm not explaining this well, but I guess what I'm saying is that
I don't see any reason why _any_ voxels in a voxel world have to be static.
The data structures don't force that; in contrast, in a voxel world with a
clever data spatial structure, every single voxel can be a dynamic,
particulate object, subject to computing power. As I argue above, though, this
is not practical until computing power improves enough. Perhaps this is your
fundamental point, in which case we're in violent agreement.]

------
nodata
Previous discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2837948>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840543>

------
rkalla
I am surprisd by the lack of interest in the search algorithm Dell proposes he
designed and is using.

Searching such a large problem space for 1 to 2 million results 25x a second
is amazingly impressive... This is what i am most curious about at the
moment... Also how he is storing the full voxel point data for any given world
that needs to be searchd in real time. Replicated data or not (i.e. similar to
GIF color data deduplication) you still have location data for every voxel
position or offsets or something that still results in a hellacious amount of
data that needs to be searched efficiently.

Havent seen details from Dell or others on either of these aspects that I feel
are cornerstones to the engine.

~~~
buff-a
Its hierarchical data, most nodes of which are empty at the highest level, or
100% solid, terminating the search. Its basically a specific optimization of
raytracing as far as I can tell.

------
tobiasu
Hmm, what's so amazing about it? It's a voxel graphic engine, of course it's
going to have great detail and no polygons (duh). That's not new. Commanche
had this in 1992...

I'm not at all an expert in this area, can someone who is explain what the
downsides of voxel graphics are? There must be some serious problems with it,
because the technology is well known.

Is there something new that makes this particular engine stand out above the
previous engines?

~~~
Fargren
I _think_ the big deal is that it's supposed to convert poligon based graphics
to voxels in real time. Which I doubt it can actually do, but if it can, it
would be kind of cool.

~~~
stefs
the polygon to voxel conversion is just so artists can use existing tools like
3dmax or maya, which work on polygon models. think of the trees in their demo,
the models have to come from somewhere. so realtime conversion is not needed.

as far as i can tell their voxel tech is just for non-moving objects like the
landscape, buildings, etc. animated and moving actors are still rendered as
polygons and blended into the scene (according to the article, this already
works to a certain degree, but they weren't able to give a live demo, just a
video).

------
darklajid
Is something like "GPUs used to be fighting one another for more power,
memory, and so forth, but now they have their languages like _Kuda_" (Page 6)
just a random typo or a reason to believe that someone didn't do his homework
before typing this down?

I'd love to see this released, but the article was far too positive and the
tone read too much like marketing to me. Some careful, not too aggressive
words at the introduction and blessing after blessing afterwards, sprinkled
with the seemingly unbiased author's impression and description of a very nice
and professional guy. Mhhhh...

Edit: Just saw that user 'Causification' already said something similar,
albeit with a good amount of more emotion. Still, I'm going to keep this here
as a personal impression of someone that has no clue about graphic engines in
general, i.e. my layman's reaction after reading the article.

~~~
robinhouston
Those of us who don’t keep showdead turned on can’t see what Causification has
said, because he/she is hellbanned. I was quite confused by your comment, till
I guessed what had happened and turned on showdead to check.

------
femto
What do people make of the patent history? Eight lapsed applications and one
withdrawn over a 15 year period. Is that unusual?

[http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/quickSearch.do...](http://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/quickSearch.do?queryString=bruce+dell&resultsPerPage=)

------
sjm
I'd really like to know how much memory is being used per unique model. Until
we see more than a couple different models being re-used everywhere, I'm going
to stay skeptical. Also his reasoning for the lack of variety of '3 weeks
before Gamescom' sounds a bit BS to me, as this video has been around for much
longer than Euclideon's last media-spree:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvptZCJGyI>. You would think they would have
created at least one demo with a larger variety of objects by this point.

I'm also very suspicious of all this recent positive coverage of Euclideon.
There was a pretty suspect feature on Euclideon on an Australian game review
show called Good Game a couple weeks back, talking with this same guy, and not
really making much mention of the skepticism involved (or at all if I remember
correctly), and as far as I know no outspoken skeptics have been able to get
their hands on it. The clip from Good Game can be seen here:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_ndZ8ETbqU>

------
Tloewald
The fact they are financially backed by the Australian Government (which has
an approximately 0% track record as a VC) seals their doom. If they were in
the US they'd have to figure out a way to produce something commercial or at
least potentially commercial, now they can burn through $2M while fading into
irrelevance (if not there already).

------
forbes
The awesome Aussie show 'Good Game' did a story on Unlimited Detail recently:
[http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?src=/tv/...](http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?src=/tv/goodgame/video/xml/20111108_2030.xml&item=05)

------
tluyben2
After reading all the comments it seems there are people who are playing with
this kind of technology. Is there any open source code which can be studied?

------
argimenes
If this software is a hoax -- and fair enough, it sounds too good to be true
-- can someone explain how they were able to fake it in the live demo? I
understand that this is supposed to be impossible, cranks often claim the
establishment is 'suppressing' them, etc., etc., but if this snake oil
peddling, then HOW did they do it? The demo LOOKS real.

------
meric
There's supposed to be 42 trillion "voxels" in that demo.

If each "voxel" took only a single bit to store, this works out to require [42
trillion / (1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8) = 4 889.44352] gigabytes of memory.

How do you store that while you calculate the screen pixels? Modern PCs only
have 4 or 8 gigabytes of RAM!

~~~
jpadvo
This is addressed in the article: they used many replicated objects. They
stored one rock, then rendered it a gajillion times. They claim they were able
to do this by applying something like a search algorithm to the objects being
rendered.

That's the magic of it -- they are able to create worlds with insane amounts
of detail, but in an intelligent way that means they don't need an insane
amount of computational power to render it.

------
singular
Whether or not a voxel engine is the right way go, or even whether it does
what it claims to do, I think Dell should be commended for actually going out
and trying to do the thing - it's an amazing achievement to actually get
somewhere with it.

------
baby
way to write a lot about it without really talking about it... tl;dr anyone?

~~~
stefs
tl;dr: i'm sceptical, this might be snake oil,
omgthisisthegreatestthingeverandwillrevolutionizeeverything!

honestly, the article is not of the highest quality.

------
ldar15
"... he was forced to solve the riddles himself, rather than plucking the
accepted solution from a textbook ..."

The thing is, the textbooks also have all the things that didn't work or don't
work well. Even some educated graphics programmers often fail to understand
that representing 3D objects is just a data representation and transformation
problem. Sure, a hard one, but there's nothing magic about it. Representing
the data as a bag of "atoms" instead of polygons just isn't a breakthrough.
The problem is still spacial search. The problem is still a simulation of
optical physics. Graphics is just an optimization problem now. Attend an IEEE
conference and maybe 5% of papers will be new theory, the rest will be about
effective optimization techniques.

When someone comes to you and says "I have this awesome idea because I didn't
read anybody else's ideas", just walk away.

------
mkramlich
Voxel engines are "new" in the same sense that social networks are "new" from
the POV of someone who remembers using modem-based BBSes and Unix Usenet
groups back in the 80's. Meaning: mostly old, maybe new in some small subtle
corner aspect of it, or some twist. But not really new.

------
Cyph0n
Interesting article. Judging by Dell's (the CEO) calm attitude towards
"haters", I personally believe that he truly has something revolutionary to
offer.

Only time will tell though.

~~~
nestlequ1k
I think Dell makes money the same way other scammers make money, produce as
much hype as possible with half truths, and by the time people figure out what
is real, you'll have already cashed in.

I guarantee he is optimizing his entire company for fancy demos. He'll sucker
some idiot big company into buying his technology, then we'll never ever see
it in a product.

These things are predictable as clockwork.

~~~
gizmo
Most likely. They already got a $2million innovation grant from the
government. Now they're working on better shadows and fancier worlds... mere
demo stuff.

