
Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam - Auguste
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8423008802/but-notch-its-not-a-scam
======
TillE
_They refuse to address the known flaws._

This is the biggest issue. A lot of hype, but their technology isn't very
useful unless they've managed to solve some major, longstanding problems. It's
extremely misleading.

~~~
whatever_dude
That was my biggest gripe with it too. They just "sell" it as being the second
coming. It's great, but when you choose to ignore everything else, it comes
across as being dishonest. Maybe it's my lizard brain speaking, but I
automatically distrust everything else said just because of that stance.

------
jxcole
Dear Notch,

I don't think that people have issue with your factual analysis of the
Euclideon system. We more have an issue with your use of the word scam. Every
time I watch american television, I am inundated with ads for various medical
products that claim that they have been scientifically PROVEN to do x, y or z.
I know for a fact that science does not give proof, it only provides evidence.
This is why we call it the theory of evolution or the theory of gravity.

Now, does that make these medical products a scam? Not really. At worst that
makes it false advertising.

I think the evidence you have gathered indicates strongly that there is a flip
side to their advertisement, that there is still a lot of work they have to do
and that their claims are probably only barely true, or are subject to strong
interpretation.

But a scam? I think not. What they are doing is still pretty cool, and I am
looking forward to whatever product they release.

------
martinkallstrom
I have the highest respect for you Notch and personally know people on your
team (Carl), but you're out on a limb here.

Sparse Voxel Octrees are frickin awesome and Euclideon aren't wrong for saying
so. There are drawbacks with them, but they are one by one being picked off by
research. Animation is one example, dynamic lighting and shadows can be done
in screen space. There is a real chance that soon enough voxels are going to
be the shit for realtime rendering.

You even agree with them that rendering octrees can be thought of as a search
algo but you still hold it against them? What is up with that?

Euclideon are not saying they are more awesome than everyone, they are saying
they are up against the polygon industry. And in the video they are very
careful to not cross that boundary, for example when the claim they are
rendering at much higher geometry resolution they say "except other examples
of procedurally generated geometry".

Because that's just what this is. Of course they are repeating elements, of
course they are using common knowledge in their work. So are you and so
everybody else. Blizzard doesn't point that out in their marketing either.

Granted, Euclideon's marketing is using a different tone than your
craftsmanlike humbleness. But that doesn't make them a scam. Soon enough their
code is gonna test it's mettle ut in the wild. It will be interesting to see
what happens.

You are above ridiculing people based on what can be gleaned from a marketing
video. Give them a break until you can ridicule their actual code. Let them
have their fight against the polygon industry.

~~~
cube13
You're missing the part where they said basically the same thing here a year
ago, and haven't delivered on most of it.

~~~
martinkallstrom
I didn't know that there is a specific time limit to launching? I must have
missed something in startup school.

Determining if something is a scam is not possible until you actually have the
facts and aren't just guessing.

<oversimplification of the situation>And it's a really weird argumentation
going on as well. "This is a scam - it is totally possible to do". Normally
you say that something is a scam if you think it's not possible to do.</>

~~~
cube13
>I didn't know that there is a specific time limit to launching? I must have
missed something in startup school.

If you're going to promise specific features(in this case, dynamic lighting,
shadows, and animations), then you damn well had better deliver some part of
least one of those after a year. It doesn't matter if it's handwavey or
anything, you should show that the last year's efforts and money haven't been
wasted.

Here's the presentation from last year:
[http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/video-
new-g...](http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/video-new-graphics-
tech-promises-unlimited-graphics-power-without-extra-processing)

><oversimplification of the situation>And it's a really weird argumentation
going on as well. "This is a scam - it is totally possible to do". Normally
you say that something is a scam if you think it's not possible to do.</>

It's also a scam if you take the results of other people's research and
development(ATI has published code for a raytrace/voxel engine) and try to
push it of as something brand new and innovative.

~~~
martinkallstrom
Ok then, sorry. I sincerely didn't know that they are using published code and
claiming it to be their own.

~~~
cube13
I didn't mean to imply that they are copying the open source code directly.
Without a copy of their code, it's wrong to make that assumption. I'm saying
that their entire rendering process, as described in the video, sounds
suspiciously like what other people have released in whitepapers and source.

It probably is a completely original implementation, but I do not believe that
any of the algorithms being used are original. That is where I think Notch is
coming from when he calls it a "scam". It's piggybacking on other people's
work, while claiming that it's their own.

------
Arjuna
John Carmack's Tweet on the topic:

 _"Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several
years from now. Production issues will be challenging."_

[https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422...](https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422720)

------
robfitz
Calling their tech "infinite detail" instead of "voxels" feels no different
than calling the iphone screen a "retina display" instead of listing its
resolution details. Good marketing is not inherently evil.

Here, though, they're suffering a huge PR backlash, which I suspect is because
they're out-marketing the work of passionate amateurs and academic researchers
instead of e.g. big phone companies.

It admittedly does feel dirty not to give due credit in this scenario, but I
can also empathise with their desire for a descriptive term which can resonate
with the general public.

On an unrelated note, I'm often impressed by how large a portion of the game
development community manages to stay aware of the bleeding edge in their
field. I haven't seen any other arena where that's quite so much the case.

~~~
delinka
"Infinite" has a specific meaning. Had Jobs said "infinite pixels" he'd have
suffered the same backlash. "Infinite detail" is deceptive because we know
there's a practical limit. "Retina display" has no similar connotation. They
chose that phrase so they could then give you a definition. "Infinite" already
has a definition.

~~~
derefr
Wouldn't a _fractal_ voxel octree generation algorithm technically be
"infinite", though? You could zoom into objects as far as you pleased, and
never run out of detail—which seems to satisfy any practical usage of the term
"infinite detail" I can think of.

~~~
delinka
This gets into subjective perceptions of the detail in question.
Mathematically, you are correct that fractals have infinite detail. Visually,
however, it's noticeable when you've run out of interesting fractal detail and
that the technique has failed to produce more detail (that the brain will
acknowledge as such.)

Had they said "fractal detail" not only would they have received less grief
for it, but they would have provided us with an explanation for part of their
system. That last part seems to not be something they're inclined to do.

~~~
jsmcgd
The detail needn't be fractal to be infinite though. It could be procedural
e.g. a rough surface could be given infinite detail by using a pseudo random
algorithm.

------
ZoFreX
> I’d just like to say that I would absolutely LOVE to be proven wrong. Being
> wrong is awesome, that’s how you learn.

This is the best possible attitude to have. I think calling it a "scam" is
perhaps going a bit too far, I believe they can actually render what they are
showing us... but I agree that this isn't really that exciting, and definitely
isn't practical for the applications they talk about.

------
seanalltogether
I think the biggest problem that people aren't talking about is that LOD for
geometry simply isn't as important as texture quality when getting close to a
surface. I'm pretty sure the reason they have so many duplicate objects in the
original presentation is because they simply ran out of memory to store all
the texture data for the scene, because you need really high rez textures to
be able to zoom in so close to each object.

Notice that most demos which zoom in on the model don't use textures
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI>, because they don't have textures
with high enough resolution.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
The implication in the video is the are no texture maps. The geometry (I agree
with those who've said voxels) contain the texture information in three
dimensions. That's why zooming on the palm tree actually looks good, unlike
traditional polygon/texture map rendering.

~~~
seanalltogether
That's good to know, am I still correct in assuming this still comes down to a
memory tradeoff, whether you want large textures+polygons, or voxel data to
represent a high detail model?

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Absolutely. Information needs to be stored somewhere, whether in the voxels or
the polygons/textures. I do wonder if these guys are doing something like
levels of detail to allow the close-up detail without destroying performance
at the macro level.

------
iwwr
It's weird because from the tone of the presentation it sounded like a parody.
Then it felt like a running gag everyone seemed to be in on. So they were
actually serious?

------
ChuckMcM
Voxels have a bad reputation in the graphics community. Back when I was
absorbed in this and writing my 3D 'engine' I got to see this debate in its
infancy.

There is an intermediate form, non-uniform rational b-splines or NURBs, which
the first nVidia card rendered directly. That made it possible for the NV1
graphics card to render a perfect sphere with just 6 NURBs vs triangle based
engines which required dozens if not hundreds of triangles to approach the
visual quality of that sphere.

Of course 3Dfx (and Matrox, and NEC with their PowerVR architecture) made
triangle engines, they needed fewer gates and had far easier texturing
pipelines. Once the NV1 was retired I haven't seen hardware NURB support re-
emerge (although it would make for a wonderful thing given a multi-billion
transistor GPU).

Voxels make the argument that once you get below the oversamping fraction of a
pixel, be it 1, 4, or 16, you don't need a complex structure. And while
geometry culling using a z-buffer and clipping rectangle is well trod, voxel
culling has some subtleties that make it more challenging.

Voxels have, to date, over promised and under delivered.

Notch's analysis is pretty much spot on, with one minor exception, the math.
Just like polygon engines don't bother creating layers of polygons to
represent solids, a voxel 'rock' or other solid doesn't need to represent the
'inside' with voxels, it only needs to represent the surface of the solid to a
degree where you can't see between the voxels. As long as voxel resolution is
comfortably above the pixel resolution of the 2D project plane (aka the
screen). So lots of data to represent surfaces, but they can be 1 'atom' thick
so less than the petabytes he supposed.

Rendering then is the process of taking a rectangular solid which is 1x1 pixel
at the screen surface and then expands based on the field of view out from the
eye, and once you've gone deep enough into the geometry such that the cross
section parallell to the screen has no gaps, you can compute and render that
pixel and move on. And, as the Euclideon people point out, since you're not
really doing polygons at all, changing the 'complexity' (in terms of surfaces)
on the scene doesn't change either the render time or the effective voxel
count.

Yes, its pretty abusive of memory bandwidth, since at range the number of
voxels that have to be looked at to fill a single pixel can be large. Imagine
a 747 airplane flying across the sky at a visual 35,000', if its only 2 x 3
pixels by the time it renders, its still made up of potentially billions of
voxels which form the surface you can see.

~~~
dpark
> a voxel 'rock' or other solid doesn't need to represent the 'inside' with
> voxels

This seems to contradict Notch's (and Wikipedia's) description of a voxel.
They indicate that a 3D space described by voxels has a voxel for each unit in
space. The is analogous to having 1 pixel per unit of display space. If this
is correct, then a rock would indeed have the inside filled with voxels.

I might be misunderstanding, though.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I don't think you are misunderstanding so much as conflating two things, the
co-ordinate space / construction of the world and construction of objects
within that world.

It's correct to say that every 'point' in a voxel based world can be
represented by a voxel in that point. It's incorrect to say that every point
in a world has voxel data associated with it. Perhaps this is the place where
Euclideon and Notch diverge as well.

Using a quantized world representation view (where co-ordinates in the world
are quantized to voxel boundaries) then as a voxel moves through the world
space it moves from point to point in that space. So a 'cloud' of voxels has
an origin and an orientation in worldspace, that allows the translation of a
local voxel space (the object) into world voxel space. Since you can't do sub-
voxel positioning it behooves you to have an oversampling rate between voxel
space and display pixels as well.

A 'feature' here is that it also allows for fine grain collision detection
(harder to do in polygon space) but again its pretty expensive
computationally. (boundary surface intersection of the local voxel space with
the world voxel space).

~~~
dpark
What I'm not understanding is the object space. If a voxel's coordinates are
implied based on its position, then there would be voxel data for every
"point" in the object space. Unless we use a sparse representation of some
sort, in which case it seems that we're basically using point clouds.

------
jwatte
Interesting that the numbers in the defense are off. Good voxel schemes store
neither color nor normal per voxel. In fact, storing a normal for a voxel
_makes no sense_. Implicit storage and volume based materials have been the
standard for a long time.

For a look at a game based voxel terrain engine that's been around for a
couple of years, download and try the C4 demo game and editor from
terathon.com! (That engine is just one guy, too)

------
Geee
They have shown animation <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cF8A4bsfKH8>

~~~
BiosElement
All I see is a tiny animation on a random YouTube account with no FPS
counter...

~~~
reidmain
Unfortunately people see only what they want to see.

------
Katan
The two videos Euclideon both "smell" funny.

Both of them take time to explain that all of those who create games and those
who create video card DON'T want something revolutionary.

Are you kidding me?

The gaming market has defined itself on change. Most games companies work
really hard to throw in extra eye candy to set show up their tech against
other games (including their own previous versions). You aren't going to find
a more pragmatic industry than gaming.

If you show up to GDC and show a better way to do something, the next year you
will have 20 game companies using the same technique.

The gaming industry is not tied to polygons. Gaming was once 2d, and countless
technologies have come and gone over the years. Any technology used 20 years
ago has likely been replaced 4 or 5 times.

Video card makers compete with each other on performance and features. They
aren't tied to polygons either, in fact both nvidia and ati have been enabling
non polygon features. Can anyone say pixel shader's or GPGPU?

So back to the original Euclidean videos. Why try to make the ridiculous point
that game and hardware companies are scared of change?

Euclideon makes the point in both videos (this years and last years) so this
isn't just a foot note, but part of their main sales pitch.

It also seems counter productive for their own goals. I mean, if you honestly
believe that game companies will be unwilling to change since they "invested
billions [in polygon tech]...", it wouldn't be very smart to create a company
that sells licensees to those same companies based on the tech that they are
actively fighting against?

So here is theory one...

It's a preemptive FUD strategy meant to head off any reasonable questions
about the technology. I mean if someone offers legitment questions about
Euclideon's tech, then they must be in the polygon conspiracy camp and are
just trying to sabotage Euclideon because of all the money they've invested in
polygons, right?

We live in a world where its pretty easy to prove computer technology. Just
release a compiled tech demo. Companies do it all the time. Source code
doesn't get released as its compiled, and it would be great marketing for the
company.

No, all we get over each year is a utube video with a bunch of claims (not to
mention the videos lack animation, and i have yet to see any video game, not
involve some sort of 2d or 3d animation.) The lack of any sort of tech demo is
significant. Most tech companies (at least the real ones) release multiple
tech demos.

This all seems like smoke and mirrors. Most people who are smart enough to
invent something revolutionary are smart enough to know how much bullshit is
out there and how important it is to prove ones claims. In fact, if you've
actually done something, the best way to different yourself from the bullshits
is to prove it.

I completely agree with Notch, Euclideon's video's all appears to be pandering
to investors with no real plan to deliver. Investors aren't going to question
the tech as thoroughly. This is where the "Scam" part comes from.

It explains the lack of a real tech demo. It explains the videos' lack
animation and it explains why the videos include odd comments about the game
industry not wanting to change.

It might not of been a scam to start. It's likely that Eucldeon didn't set out
to steal money from investors. I imagine they hoped to find some novel
solutions and take the tech further. I'm guessing they ran into the same
limitations of the tech that others have found, then panicked and started
soliciting money under false pretenses.

Repeating the same fraud, one year later kind of does make this a scam.

------
EponymousCoward
Not impressed by the tech but now Notch has called them scammers and liars.
When does he get sued for libel?

~~~
wisty
If they can't do anything special, and they are telling investors they are
producing something revolutionary, that's a scam.

You can produce a search engine that uses LSA. Do a demo, and you can get
impressive results (in some cases). But don't obscure the fact that you are
using a relatively well-known technique, and ask for millions in funding on
the basis that your not-so-secret sauce will make you the next Google.

