As some of you are probably aware, a year ago a company announced they had developed a way of creating unlimited power for computer graphics. If it turns out to be real this would be a massive step forward in both gaming and design i.e. architectural. Notch spoke out against it as something probably not to be trusted - and this naturally sparked dislike against the video by his many peons, but it's still an interesting development nonetheless. Once they actually show 3D animation and properly playable terrains with some decent modellers working on it, I think it'll have potential. Anyway a year later they posted this teaser, his voice is annoying but it's still pretty impressive. [youtube]00gAbgBu8R4[/youtube]
For those that don't get the whole "Point cloud" data thing, it's to do with basically seeing only what you should see at the time mixed with a search engine (game requests data should be there, data pops up). However you require mass amounts of storage for this, especially to make it efficient. It's plausible technology (and other companies have been working on this sort of thing for years) however until we get the ability to supercharged SSDs (SSD's are fast, but they could be faster yet) there's no way really we can use this tech. Plus they said that took them a year to do and then they suddenly added shaders. It seems a little fishy at times on how they appear to be doing things. One last thing I suppose is that if their tech really was that awesome, why hasn't another company bought them out and then funded them to produce better results and faster? Edit: Here's an interview which goes into it in more depth. [youtubehd]JVB1ayT6Fdc[/youtubehd]
And they can easily say they don't have more models in game at the moment so it all looks replicated.
Yeah but to have more than like 3 models would take up terrabytes of data http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam aaand http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8423008802/but-notch-its-not-a-scam
I have a feeling they just want to be bought out for quite a lot tbh, if they were actually interested in standing on their own they would have got modellers etc in quite a while ago.
And Notch talks out of his arse. He has some valid points, however you have to remember Notch can't really code for shit all that well and he takes far too many holidays. Infact, I think the only language Notch knows is Java.
He said it's Voxel rendering which isn't correct. As they point out in the interview everyone seems to have their own definition of it, however voxels are technically cubes with predefined data - similar to Minecraft. Admittedly I don't know what the "atoms" exact shape are but we may find out in the future. Two of the videos he links aren't even related at all apart from "they're trying to do the same thing". I'll go further in depth tomorrow if you really want, but that's basically the short version from me.
Interesting concept, but being a modeller I really don't see what they are doing to make things run smoother in games. Don't we already have polygon converters like this? I'd like to see this system used in an actual game engine and watch it liquidate your pc...unless you use the same model 100,000 times. It's impressive yes, but it's also hard to accept the fact that a team of 9 people have the magic answer to every game developers problems.