As soon as I see animated objects moving about in a dynamically lit world, I will start to believe that Euclideon is on to something.
Maybe there could be some middle ground like in the old voxel days, where you would have a static (unlimited detail) background world and some traditional, polygon-based actors in the foreground. Looking at any modern game, just about everything on the screen is constantly moving, so color me sceptical even on that idea.
Also, I would like to know how they do lighting. It looks like they might use precomputed highlights and shadows. Needless to say that this would not be of much use for dynamic lighting.
This may not be as big an issue as you think. We had the same issue in in the Crash Bandicoot games: the background was rendered a completely different way than the foreground (animating) elements. We made it work by approximating where the foreground elements should "sort in" to the background polygon layers. Where the heuristics were wrong, we tuned it manually, by pushing a foreground element forward or backward in the scene until it looked right.
Remember: you can hack stuff in games until it looks right. It doesn't actually have to work perfectly from a theoretical standpoint; it just has to work practically without too much additional tuning labor.
That still does not solve the issue that current games have a lot of moving assets and really not that much static geometry. Trees, shrubs and grass move in the wind, water flows, walls crumble when hit by bullets, that kind of thing. Everything is animated.
It seems to me that voxel worlds could make this problem easier, not harder: you can deform the world algorithmically, voxel by voxel, rather than using polygonal approximations. Imagine an acid blob eating an outdoor environment in a fantasy game: in a voxel world, this is like a fancy seed fill. In a polygonal world, this is much harder to simulate.
I'm not saying voxel worlds solve every such problem; just that there are likely to be as many things that are easier w.r.t. animating elements as there are things that will be harder.
[Edit: maybe I'm not explaining this well, but I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see any reason why any voxels in a voxel world have to be static. The data structures don't force that; in contrast, in a voxel world with a clever data spatial structure, every single voxel can be a dynamic, particulate object, subject to computing power. As I argue above, though, this is not practical until computing power improves enough. Perhaps this is your fundamental point, in which case we're in violent agreement.]
Not sure if you want to SEE it. But in the article it says they are doing just that.
.
"Dell shows me an as yet unreleased demo – not real-time in this case – that suggests Euclideon has already made some positive inroads in ensuring Unlimited Detail is compatible with existing middleware. The short video shows traditional polygon objects happily coexisting and interacting in the same space as a small Unlimited Detail environment"
Collision detection is the big thing for me, sure you can fake it with invisible polygons but that usually leads to weirdness in the player experience.
Comments
As soon as I see animated objects moving about in a dynamically lit world, I will start to believe that Euclideon is on to something.
Maybe there could be some middle ground like in the old voxel days, where you would have a static (unlimited detail) background world and some traditional, polygon-based actors in the foreground. Looking at any modern game, just about everything on the screen is constantly moving, so color me sceptical even on that idea.
Also, I would like to know how they do lighting. It looks like they might use precomputed highlights and shadows. Needless to say that this would not be of much use for dynamic lighting.
This may not be as big an issue as you think. We had the same issue in in the Crash Bandicoot games: the background was rendered a completely different way than the foreground (animating) elements. We made it work by approximating where the foreground elements should "sort in" to the background polygon layers. Where the heuristics were wrong, we tuned it manually, by pushing a foreground element forward or backward in the scene until it looked right.
Remember: you can hack stuff in games until it looks right. It doesn't actually have to work perfectly from a theoretical standpoint; it just has to work practically without too much additional tuning labor.
That still does not solve the issue that current games have a lot of moving assets and really not that much static geometry. Trees, shrubs and grass move in the wind, water flows, walls crumble when hit by bullets, that kind of thing. Everything is animated.
It seems to me that voxel worlds could make this problem easier, not harder: you can deform the world algorithmically, voxel by voxel, rather than using polygonal approximations. Imagine an acid blob eating an outdoor environment in a fantasy game: in a voxel world, this is like a fancy seed fill. In a polygonal world, this is much harder to simulate.
I'm not saying voxel worlds solve every such problem; just that there are likely to be as many things that are easier w.r.t. animating elements as there are things that will be harder.
[Edit: maybe I'm not explaining this well, but I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see any reason why any voxels in a voxel world have to be static. The data structures don't force that; in contrast, in a voxel world with a clever data spatial structure, every single voxel can be a dynamic, particulate object, subject to computing power. As I argue above, though, this is not practical until computing power improves enough. Perhaps this is your fundamental point, in which case we're in violent agreement.]
Not sure if you want to SEE it. But in the article it says they are doing just that.
.
"Dell shows me an as yet unreleased demo – not real-time in this case – that suggests Euclideon has already made some positive inroads in ensuring Unlimited Detail is compatible with existing middleware. The short video shows traditional polygon objects happily coexisting and interacting in the same space as a small Unlimited Detail environment"
Dammit, we spent years working toward a unified lighting model, and now we want to split it apart again?!
Collision detection is the big thing for me, sure you can fake it with invisible polygons but that usually leads to weirdness in the player experience.