WARNING!
This blog post is going to be about an experimental technology that is essentially untested in gaming. There are no games made from this tech yet, and there are questions about how real it even is for gaming right now. However, this is all real technology that you can get into right now.
Alright, to kick things off I'm going to show you a screenshot.
A little small I know, but you can tell that's a gorgeous screenshot. The game that this is taken from is Crysis 2, perhaps the best looking video game out to date.
Now imagine that this screenshot, that is so beautifully detailed, could in a few years be considered 'far below average'.
That is not a pipe dream. There is a very real technology being developed and it has finally begun to take shape, and the initial results look very promising to bring games so close to looking realistic most companies that pride themselves on "photo realistic graphics" are going to look like the biggest liars in the industry. Or at least that's according to Euclidean founder and CEO Bruce Dell.
Now for a technology lesson. Everything that you see in a game, from the sky, to the ground, to the characters, to the weapons is made up of polygons. The reason games continue to look better and better is because of the arms race between the two big graphics card companies, Nvidia and ATI, to find ways to increase the number polygons that can be used to make up objects. The more polygons, the 'rounder' an object can be. The 'rounder' it can be the more realistic it looks. As games are built, the simply slap textures over the polygons. Textures are not standing objects, they're more like a coat of paint. If you've ever played Dragon Age II and seen the citizens of Kirkwall appear as shiny white models because of a glitch in the games design, then you know what character models look like without their textures.
There is another method to making object called point cloud. Point cloud works in an entirely different way from polygons. Instead of making the objects out of flat polygon shapes, you make them out of points. Thousands of little dots that allow designers to make incredibly complex models that look realistic. An example of why this is so much superior is designing the ground of a level. With polygons, you have to put down a basic surface of shapes, and then slap a texture on top of it. No matter how detailed that texture is, it is a flat object. In many games, the ground looks incredibly detailed and life-like. But if you zoom in, you can see that everything is flat. All that dirt is just a flat painting or picture. With point cloud, instead of making a floor out of polygons and then putting a texture on it, you can design the ground, the grass, the flowers, all right there. By using the points you can construct complex shapes. So instead of making a tree out of a bunch of polygons, you can design the tree with points and actually make it round, and add in all the details while designing the object. The result is a tree that looks like a tree. You can see if you zoomed in on a tree made in point cloud that the wood's textures and qualities as far as shape and appearance are concerned are nearly photo-identical.
If the above confused you greatly, let me put it simply: Instead of making objects out of polygon shapes and then adding a texture to it, you can essentially build the object itself.
Now point cloud is something people use all the time when designing objects, the problem with it's application for something on the scale of gaming is the amount of processing power required to animate the world would be unreal. It would, according to the tech demo, "take the same amount of time to process one frame, as it took the Egyptians to build the Pyramids."
Now there are other ways of making graphics, such as voxels and ray rendering. Voxels have some very restrictive problems that make them almost useless in graphics animation. You can only have so many, and the require a lot of processing power to utilize.
Now, Mr. Dell is dead on up to this point. This is the problem with point cloud, is that the amount of processing time is so large, it's impossible to make a game with this technology, and really, it should be at least a decade or two away from even being an experimental option, much less a realistic one. But Dell claims he has developed a complex algorithm that he compares to a search engine, like Google. He claims this algorithm drastically reduces processing power by searching for and then using only the points necessary at a given time. Thats about the point where, in his tech demo, he gets little bit...dodgy. He explains some of the problems with something like this, such as how big or small an object is, what perspective it's being seen from etc. He simply says "we've found ways around that." No explanation, no nothing.
And then it gets even more hard to believe him. He essentially disappeared for the past year since he announced this technology. He has reappeared recently and has reasserted that this is real tech and that it could be available for developer use in the next two years.
This all sounds amazing right? What could possibly be wrong with it then?
Well what indeed, is the question seeing as how Dell has never once stated any problems or limitations or specifications of unlimited detail technology. Thats a problem because every tech has it;s limitations and it's issues. The fact he has not even mentioned any, and has simply danced around obvious questions with answers like "we can't show you that yet" or "we've found ways around this."
Anyone else smell that?
I've seen a lot of people going nuts about this, and I did too when I first saw the tech demos. But once you sit down and look at it for a bit, you can see a lot of pitfalls and problems with this. Some people are even saying this is all a big hoax. Now I don;t know about that, but there are some obvious questions that need to be answered, and we also need to see more of the things that really make unlimited detail tick instead of just having Dell explain what he's doing without really explaining what is making work the way it does.
For now, it's best for everyone if we just push this to the back corner of our minds and get back to our polygon count battles between ATI and Nvidia. Eventually we will see how much merit is in Robert Dell and his technology.
The rest of this week is going to be lighthearted blog posts about games that are important to me, because this one was REALLY over the top and I need a break after writing this. In the meantime I am sad to say I still haven't raised single cent for Extra Life up to this point. I will put my own money towards this around the day of the event but I seriously would be eternally grateful to those of you who donate to the cause. I know I've got some UK readers out there, and you guys count too! Send me a an e-mail if you want to donate but your not sure how you want to do it, and if you've got paypal, just head over to the donation link on the side of the blog and donate whatever you can. We can make a difference, but I can't do it alone.
Alright that last bit got a little depressing/angry so here's a picture of a funny sign to wrap things up.
Later.
