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.
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.</>
>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.
><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.
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.
To me the video is a scam. It gained massive attention attempting to compare itself to contemporary game engines without clearly representing any of it's limitations that prevent it from being used for anything. To me is screams as a way to get enough attention to continue funding of the project with no short term result (at least in the video game field that they are contrasting themselves with.)
They display two scenes side by side, but to the untrained observers eye, their solution looks fantastic, but there are important details that they never even touched upon. Dynamic lighting, keyframe/bone/ivk animations, physics/collisions, deformation. These are all extremely important elements in a modern video game to create the experience that consumers expect.
Someday this technology may replace the current approaches in video games, and it certainly has useful approaches in static 3D captures of real world scenes (crime scenes?) but the computation systems we will need for that aren't here.
Additionally, video gaming systems jump around in capabilities. This is becoming very relevant as casual gaming is making large waves in the handheld space. If the power/performance ratio of this approach can't beat more traditional polygon rendering, game developers won't work with it. Game companies are companies, have market demands to meet, not just play with the latest and greatest in technology.
I respect your opinion. If the points you make are true, I would however phrase that as a lack of product/market fit, not a scam.
Each of us put different meanings into words. I want to reserve the word scam for when there is provably no intent to create real value. To me there is no conclusive evidence of malicious intent here, only a heap of speculation.
I did the same math as Notch, independently of him, and came to the same result: This will never run on current consumer hardware because of space and computation constraints. I don't think this is a massive stretch considering the numbers involved.
The math Notch did was to prove that they are using procedural generation of geometry, which makes it feasible. In his mind it also makes it a scam. Beats me why.
Euclideon are not saying they are more awesome than everyone, they are saying they are up against the polygon industry.
The point is that they're the only ones being deliberately misleading in order to attract investment, which is pretty easy to see as unfair. There's no mention that the variety of what you're seeing is severely technically limited by space, despite specific attention being given to the fact that a "real video game would use artists and everything would look a lot better"
Comments
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.
You're missing the part where they said basically the same thing here a year ago, and haven't delivered on most of it.
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.</>
>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...
><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.
Ok then, sorry. I sincerely didn't know that they are using published code and claiming it to be their own.
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.
To me the video is a scam. It gained massive attention attempting to compare itself to contemporary game engines without clearly representing any of it's limitations that prevent it from being used for anything. To me is screams as a way to get enough attention to continue funding of the project with no short term result (at least in the video game field that they are contrasting themselves with.)
They display two scenes side by side, but to the untrained observers eye, their solution looks fantastic, but there are important details that they never even touched upon. Dynamic lighting, keyframe/bone/ivk animations, physics/collisions, deformation. These are all extremely important elements in a modern video game to create the experience that consumers expect.
Someday this technology may replace the current approaches in video games, and it certainly has useful approaches in static 3D captures of real world scenes (crime scenes?) but the computation systems we will need for that aren't here.
Additionally, video gaming systems jump around in capabilities. This is becoming very relevant as casual gaming is making large waves in the handheld space. If the power/performance ratio of this approach can't beat more traditional polygon rendering, game developers won't work with it. Game companies are companies, have market demands to meet, not just play with the latest and greatest in technology.
I respect your opinion. If the points you make are true, I would however phrase that as a lack of product/market fit, not a scam.
Each of us put different meanings into words. I want to reserve the word scam for when there is provably no intent to create real value. To me there is no conclusive evidence of malicious intent here, only a heap of speculation.
I did the same math as Notch, independently of him, and came to the same result: This will never run on current consumer hardware because of space and computation constraints. I don't think this is a massive stretch considering the numbers involved.
The math Notch did was to prove that they are using procedural generation of geometry, which makes it feasible. In his mind it also makes it a scam. Beats me why.
Euclideon are not saying they are more awesome than everyone, they are saying they are up against the polygon industry.
The point is that they're the only ones being deliberately misleading in order to attract investment, which is pretty easy to see as unfair. There's no mention that the variety of what you're seeing is severely technically limited by space, despite specific attention being given to the fact that a "real video game would use artists and everything would look a lot better"