
Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam - Dysiode
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam
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bugsy
The use of the word "scam" is really inaccurate based on the rest of the post.
He agrees that the demo is real, and calls it a scam since others are working
on similar things and they are trying to get funding. Neither others working
on the same thing nor trying to get funding make something a scam. It would be
a scam if they weren't really rendering what they say they are in real time,
but Notch doesn't claim that.

~~~
eridius
He calls it a scam because they're making hyperbolic claims, very carefully
ignoring any mention of any of the drawbacks to this technology, and
pretending that it's all brand new technology when it's actually been done
before. And they're doing this to make money via investors.

It would be _fake_ if they weren't rendering it in real time. He didn't call
it fake. He called it a scam.

~~~
bane
The ridiculous used car salesman type pitch in the demo videos certainly
doesn't help. They're made with the same sort of breathless breath-through
narrative you hear in free energy and perpetual motion machine demos.

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pgroves
I am blown away by the number of people on HN and elsewhere who are posting
about "how they must be doing it" and then calling it unimpressive or a
technical dead end.

Reading the blog post, I now know how Notch would approach building such a
thing, and that he thinks his approach wouldn't really work. I still have no
idea how Euclidean's implementation actually works and neither does anyone
else who I've seen comment on their demo video.

~~~
extension
If Euclideon wants us to believe they've invented something unique and ground
breaking then the onus is on them to at least show us something that can't
already be done with existing technology, if not explain how it works.

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thirsteh
The reddit thread
[http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/j6sr1/a_simple_and_e...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/j6sr1/a_simple_and_efficient_explanation_of_the/)
has a bunch of good comments that outline why Notch isn't really in a position
to post stuff like this.

~~~
interrupt
Anyone who's watched that demo has noticed exactly what he said, that their
demo is basically a 2D tilemap of a few repeated 3D objects, most likely to
make the memory requirements of storing voxels at that level of detail
feasible.

~~~
superfx
If I recall in the demo, they kept on referring to procedural generation, and
so perhaps they have a few tricks up their sleeve for generating content
(trees being an obvious example) that would be varied yet take up little
memory.

~~~
cheald
Procedurally generated assets take very little _storage_. They still take just
as much memory to actually put into the scene graph and render.

~~~
skyfex
Not with ray casting of sparse voxel octrees, which is probably what they're
doing. Depending on how the procedural generation work, you only need to
generate that which you render.

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Geee
I think the unlimited detail refers to rendering speed, not memory
requirements. The data has to be redundant to fit in memory. He also claims it
runs on a laptop without GPU. So it can't be just octree or any other regular
acceleration structure. So if it isn't scam, it's something new.

From the author (old post on Beyond3D): "firstly the system isn’t ray tracing
at all or anything like ray tracing. Ray tracing uses up lots of nasty
multiplication and divide operators and so isn’t very fast or friendly.
Unlimited Detail is a sorting algorithm that retrieves only the 3d atoms (I
wont say voxels any more it seems that word doesn’t have the prestige in the
games industry that it enjoys in medicine and the sciences) that are needed,
exactly one for each pixel on the screen, it displays them using a very
different procedure from individual 3d to 2d conversion, instead we use a mass
3d to 2d conversion that shares the common elements of the 2d positions of all
the dots combined. And so we get lots of geometry and lots of speed, speed
isn’t fantastic yet compared to hardware, but its very good for a software
application that’s not written for dual core. We get about 24-30 fps 1024*768
for that demo of the pyramids of monsters. The media is hyping up the death of
polygons but really that’s just not practical, this will probably be released
as “backgrounds only” for the next few years, until we have made a lot more
tools to work with."

~~~
esrauch
I'm fairly certain that "sorting to find the one atom for each pixel on the
screen" is exactly the definition of raytracing.

~~~
sambeau
I agree with what I think your unstated point is (namely this is basically
raytracing). I think the detail here is that this is essentially a
sorting/data-organisational solution rather than a geometrically calculated
solution. Ray tracing generally takes into account more than one atom (often
at complex geometric angles to the directly visible surface) to create a
pixel. This claims not to (but to look really good I would have thought it
will eventually have to).

So yes. This is a kind of raytracing but I think that the implementation is
radically different to the commonly used raytracing implementaions.

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mambodog
The guy behind Atomontage has stated that he's got his engine averaging less
than one _bit_ per voxel (he estimates 753 bits or less per 1000 voxels)[1] by
applying a variety of compression mechanisms[2], so at least that part of
Notch's assessment can be disregarded out of hand.

EDIT: Taking a step back, remember that with an octree, contiguous areas
require less tree depth to fully describe them, so open empty space (sky) and
consistently filled space (uniform material underground) require much less
data. This of course creates practical limitations in addition to the claimed
maximums of what the engine can achieve (so art budgets aren't going anywhere
anytime soon) but I think calling it a "scam" is a bit much.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sfWYUgxGBE>

[2] <http://www.atomontage.com/?id=tech_overv>

~~~
Xk
Fine. Assume it's one bit per voxel.

512 petabits = 2 petabytes.

So _only_ 2 petabytes of data. I'd like to see the server that processed those
2 petabytes.

Notch also points out that even still, 8m is quite a small height. Take it to
16m and now you need 4 petabytes of space.

~~~
Robin_Message
Nope, more like 2 petabytes plus 1 bit. Because almost all of that new top 8m
is the same atom (empty air), if they are using an octree to store the voxels,
then it would take 1 extra bit to store an empty top 8m. Obviously if there
are things in the top 8m, it will take more space, but only for the things
that are there.

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pgroves
Why is the product considered worthless if it can't do animation yet? The demo
clearly walked through examples of inanimate artifacts that are currently
rendered as bitmaps on big polygons that could be greatly improved, today, by
the technology in the demo. Backgrounds, cityscapes in the distance, the trunk
of a tree, etc.

The argument that it's a scam if it can't render grass blowing in the wind is
ridiculous.

~~~
Klinky
Because they are claiming an increase of detail by a factor of 100,000, while
the demo barely showed anything close to a detail increase by a factor of 1.

Trees & rocks are often animated in modern games, so animation is important.
Additionally there is no point using a heavy duty voxel engine to render
background landscapes that no one will visit in the game, especially if it's
going to take gobs of RAM & CPU time to do it.

Hardware tessellation can already greatly increase surface detail, is already
available in modern hardware & has better looking demos.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G9anRoYGko>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT_45RFFTx8>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HWZKGZcKoA>

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sambeau
The big unanswered question here is can they dynamically sort their data in
real time?

If they cannot they can never have movement through the environment -
something that they have failed to demonstrate so far.

Dynamic animation is a similar problem but can be solved using key-frame point
data (although this could severely limit the fluidity of animation and greatly
increase memory usage). You cannot do this smoothly for movement (without
using tiles or a combination of tiles and key-frames).

There are many cool games that could be made despite these limitations but
Euclideon is promising more than this: their comparisons are with modern
FPS's.

I really hope that they have solved all these issues. But if they have, why
aren't they demonstrating them?

If they haven't I hope they are being more honest with their investors than
they are with the general public.

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mrhyperpenguin
Am I the only one that agrees with Notch and does think that this "unlimited
detail" technology is a scam?

Euclideon is asking for money to develop "new" technology that in reality has
been done before and does not have any advantages over a polygon based engine.
Everything in their demos can be done (if not better) using a polygon based
engine and modern GPUs.

Seriously, just watching one of the videos by Euclideon makes me feel like I'm
watching late night tv advertisments. If their tech is as "ground breaking" as
they claim, surely they wouldn't need to do as much convincing as they
currently do in their videos.

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yters
First they say it's crazy. Then they say it's impossible. Then they say it's
obvious.

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snoochybooch
If Notch wants to be picky about ethics, let's talk about spending money
hiring for the development of a new game (Scrolls) before finishing a game
players have essentially advanced him money to complete (Minecraft). Or about
sitting on critical security holes for months. Euclideon may not deliver on
its promises (it probably won't), but for all Notch knows they do have a novel
technique and labeling it a "scam" is just irresponsible.

~~~
kbutler
"Please note that when you buy the game, you're paying for the game as it is
right now! You will also get the full version of Minecraft when it is
released. Read the copyright information for more information on your
purchase."

<http://www.minecraft.net/prepurchase.jsp>

It sounds like you misunderstood what you were spending your money on.

~~~
snoochybooch
It looks like Mojang don't actually provide you with a download for the game
as it is when you pay for it. So they are in violation of their own Terms of
Service. Of course, the ToS is just a clumsy attempt to absolve them of
liability, and does not reflect the impression they have actively cultivated
on the Internet. If you are going to apply a legalistic standard to Notch you
should also apply that standard to Euclideon, in which case Notch is not
justified in calling it a "scam".

~~~
ugh
Here you go: <http://www.minecraft.net/download.jsp>

Download away!

Man, entitled gamers are the worst.

~~~
snoochybooch
Nope. If I buy the game, and then download it a week or two later I do not
necessarily get the correct version. Furthermore, any reasonable person
expects that if you are truly only purchasing some specific version then you
would be able to download it into the future. You can't have it both ways.

~~~
ugh
You clearly don’t know what you are talking about. If you want the version of
the game when you buy it, it is clearly your own responsibility to download
the game. There is no violation of the TOS, to claim otherwise is absurd to
the highest degree.

~~~
icey
The guy you're responding to clearly created a new account here just to troll.

