Unlimited Power!

[Banefull]

The future of videogame graphics will soon reach unlimited potential:

[iron_jones]

Aaaaaaaaannnnd.... I came.

[Tsyal Makto]

What were the specs of the computer this was created on?

It will be interesting to see how this works for large-scale, dynamic environments like Fallout or Oblivian.

[Aquaplant]

It's a scam! : The Word of Notch

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.

Voxel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Isard]

Originally Posted by Aquaplant

It's a scam! : The Word of Notch



Voxel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Actually, Notch printed something of a retraction, it's being hyped, but this is a major step foreward.

(voxels aren't a point cloud, Notch just assumed that's what they meant)

[Clarke]

I want to see it do animation.

[Raiden]

Meh.

Graphics don't make the game. They never did, and they never will.

A good game with fantastic graphics can lose the fantastic graphics and just have okay graphics, and it's still a good game because it still possesses the gameplay to make the game function and the storyline to draw the player in.

If that same game lost the storyline and gameplay, and kept the fantastic graphics, it would be nothing more than a pretty picture.

[Human No More]

It's good, certainly, even amazing (although I would doubt that it could retain that detail level when in an actual game), but some people are acting like it's going to completely change everything. It won't.

[Sight Unseen]

Impressive. I bet this takes a massive amount of gpu memory, notice that there are no super-long sight lines? Also, it takes a lot more horsepower to simulate all those individual points inside an object than, say, a deformable skeleton. If this was realtime I'd like to know the specs of the computer running this.

Also, they're talking about importing movie models directly into games, and as cool as this may sound, movie datasets are *huge*. Games would have to come prepackaged in several hard disks, but hey, in the eighties Gates said 640k of RAM should be enough for anybody, now 3< GB is considered standard.

Another interesting thought, the way this is done naturally lends itself to efficient parallel processing, most, if not all of the engine running this could be pushed over to the GPU, with the traditional CPU functioning as a glorified northbridge that happens to be able do floating point as well. Will the games of the future make hardware manufacturers push for the "APU" design? Isn't it time everyone moves away from the x86 architecture they've been tacking things onto since the eighties?

[Aquaplant]

Originally Posted by Isard

Actually, Notch printed something of a retraction, it's being hyped, but this is a major step foreward.

(voxels aren't a point cloud, Notch just assumed that's what they meant)

As a rule of a thumb when something seems too good to be true, there's always something fishy behind it all. Theory is all well and good, we just have to wait and see how and if it can be applied in practice.

But as Notch stated, being wrong is awesome, that's how you learn.

[Advent]

Originally Posted by Raiden

Meh.

Graphics don't make the game. They never did, and they never will.

A good game with fantastic graphics can lose the fantastic graphics and just have okay graphics, and it's still a good game because it still possesses the gameplay to make the game function and the storyline to draw the player in.

If that same game lost the storyline and gameplay, and kept the fantastic graphics, it would be nothing more than a pretty picture.

^ My thoughts exactly. Though it would be interesting regardless to see how this technology fares in an actual, moving game.

[Raiden]

Originally Posted by Advent

^ My thoughts exactly. Though it would be interesting regardless to see how this technology fares in an actual, moving game.

Yeah, it's still kinda cool, I just hope that nobody loses sight of what a game is in pursuit of realistic graphics.

[Cyvaris]

Just wait till those dirt particles start flying through the air. Sure it looks pretty but its probably not going to be "moving" anytime soon. In all honesty I really don't see what is so impressive. That doesn't look that much greater then some game engines I have seen. Sure its a little less boxy but other than that I really don't see anything that special.

Focus on the story and characters. If you make those impressive I will stay for your graphics ****ery.