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I saw this vid in my friends facebook feed, so I went and checked it out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Now while it looks amazing and the likes, I did see that Notch(Creator of Minecraft) was spammed all over the video comments. So I went and read his blog.

http://notch.tumblr.com/

Just wondering what other Dakanaughts think of this, as for myself I dont really see this happening anytime soon but if it does I shall be impressed.

NOTE: Alot of technical talk of which even I am unsure of even though I have some knowledge of programming for games.

EDIT: Oh yea, another reason I call BS on this is because neither of the 2 Links in the description of the video lead to a website, just an unavailable one. Why would you put links into a video when there is no proper page for it??

Very nice. I hope this can be utilized in the near future.

More info: Interview with Bruce Roberts CEO of the company mentioned in the video.

http://thisismyjoystick.com/interviews/interview-bruce-roberts-dell-unlimited-detail-technology/

This just does not seem possible. How on earth can you convert polygons and GAIN frame-rate?

Because UD only renders per-pixel (instead of every single available voxel). You would have a flat flamerate, because the CPU and GPU aren't rendering individual objects (just the picture as a whole). It's an abstract idea, but I understand it to a degree.

I can see why animating voxels would be much more difficult than polygon animation, but I hope they're able to formulate a good system for that (grouping voxels together wouldn't be too hard, but animations might look fairly awkward for a while).

Yea if that works out the way the guy in the video was saying, good god games will look fantastic! I have to say, I was really impressed with the rocks they were showing, that was just awesome

Say, if this is Notch, then...

HOLY SHIZZLE INFINITE MINECRAFT.

Looks cool but I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting for it to come. Hopefully we don't all die in 2012 and we'll get to see it first hand in like 5 years.

The technology we have now isn't going to cut it. They're not going to make a game that barely skids by on your $1000+ hex-core computers when consoles won't have a snowball's chance in hell of playing it and most people don't have expensive computers.

Mr. Self Destruct wrote:The technology we have now isn't going to cut it. They're not going to make a game that barely skids by on your $1000+ hex-core computers when consoles won't have a snowball's chance in hell of playing it and most people don't have expensive computers.

I don't see why hardware is the limiting factor here. At the start of the video he says the problem with the original concept was that it took too much processing power to do it all like this. He and his company claim they found away to process all the data more efficiently and effectively so that it is possible. In any case, the PS3 has a wealth of extra processing power, more than most home computers at least, so I don't see that being an issue for the console side of the house, though Microsoft might need to put its next gen console out sooner rather than later.

Besides that, the guy seemed to imply that the technology will be available to game developers rather soon.

Now, the Notch blog seems to call some of this stuff in question. I'm going to reserve judgement on whether or not its a scam until they post an actual tech description of how their technology works.

chaos0xomega wrote:In any case, the PS3 has a wealth of extra processing power, more than most home computers at least....

PS3 vs PC Debate in 3....2.....1.....

jp400 wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:In any case, the PS3 has a wealth of extra processing power, more than most home computers at least....

PS3 vs PC Debate in 3....2.....1.....

Theres no debate there. The PS3 has tons of processing power, theres a reason why the Air Force uses them to collectively form a super computer instead of blade servers, etc. What PC's have that the PS3 doesnt are powerful GPU's which have a different architecture, etc. optimized for processing graphics. If this new method just requires raw processing capability (which is what was suggested), then those GPU's don't matter anymore, in fact, they become virtually useless, as they are less effective at processing large quantities of data than an actual CPU. The PS3 has one of the most powerful CPU's commercially available. Done.

Kasrkai wrote:This just does not seem possible. How on earth can you convert polygons and GAIN frame-rate?

Because the way current cards render is stupid

basically you render something far away, then the next layer on top of that, then the next layer on top of that, until you reach the frontmost layer that the person can see. Only recently is programming getting smart enough to only render wat you can see.
However that video is plain wrong, voxels are fun and are possibly the future, but not at the level of detail they are showing, its just too much info to store in a raw format.

I would imagine adding 'physics' to these sculptures would be rather difficult. You could make a cool movie set style game with limited interaction but the other cool side of games technology: physics would have to take a back seat.

So your suggesting,.......remaking the Sega CD again? Oh dear god no

KingCracker wrote:So your suggesting,.......remaking the Sega CD again? Oh dear god no

Hey now, the Sega CD had a cool startup screen. The logo even moved around and stuff!