Oculus + unlimited detail (Euclideon)

You can read a bit more about Euclideon (and various opinions about them) here:
http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13613
http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=15706
http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=16287&p=145004#p145004

You can find a little more here and at MTBS3D by searching, but the links above contain most of the Euclideon-related content. Their stuff looks promising, but they are a bit slippery on providing details, and on changing their target goals, which causes much of the suspicion discussed previously.

The Euclideon folks seem to have diverted their attention AWAY from video games, seeking clients willing to pay more "per seat" than typical gamers, such as the Geospatial Industry:



There are other voxel engines that look quite promising too, such as atomontage (currently stuck in a "seeking funding" phase):



There are some cool precedural engines too, which generate everything "on the fly":

Euclideons plans to develop a game engine are pretty much a hoax. They just targeted gamers in their early media rounds and completely discarded gaming hopes for their geoverse stuff once they got attention.

They claim they just shelved the game engine stuff, based on poor reasoning. But if it ever was legit, if anything it was shelved because not surprisingly they couldn't live up to their own claims. Somethings fishy at the very least since they promised to release a demo in a year and its now been over 2 years since that claim.

If you're interested in such things, I'd suggest instead following development of Brigade. While it requires future GPUs to live up to its potential instead of simply using a CPU, it supports much more then anything shown with Euclideons engine.

"DarkAkuma" wrote:
Euclideons plans to develop a game engine are pretty much a hoax. They just targeted gamers in their early media rounds and completely discarded gaming hopes for their geoverse stuff once they got attention.

They claim they just shelved the game engine stuff, based on poor reasoning. But if it ever was legit, if anything it was shelved because not surprisingly they couldn't live up to their own claims. Somethings fishy at the very least since they promised to release a demo in a year and its now been over 2 years since that claim.

If you're interested in such things, I'd suggest instead following development of Brigade. While it requires future GPUs to live up to its potential instead of simply using a CPU, it supports much more then anything shown with Euclideons engine.

Yea, Brigade supports raytracing at speeds that are, for the first time in gaming history, acceptable for real time applications. That is pretty much the future of gaming.

Euclideons concept, if it were real and effective, is nice, but not very useful for gaming at the moment.

Point data is very inefficient, but has its uses. You can, for instance, run a laser over a model and record a points for as many iterative samples as you want. This can be very important when extreme detail is a must, and has been used to do cool stuff like scan 3d models of tiny bugs with enough detail to see their hairs.

Now lets say you want to scan a small 10 foot tree (in full leaf), at about 100 points per inch to get some nice detail in a game. You are looking at some 5 billion points of raw data vs the 10 thousand poly points of tree in something like crysis. If each point was only 10 bits of data (it has to contain 3 axises of locational data, plus a color), that tree would take up roughly 6 GB of RAM/HDD space.

They claim that they can use special techniques in which they can rapidly search for and retrieve only 1 point per pixel on your screen, reducing the processing load to just a few million points at a time (2mil for 1080p)...but to animate the tree your computer would have to know where every point in the tree is at any given moment of the whole animation sequence (how can it know which pixels to to show you if it doesn't know where all of the points are in 3d space?). What does a game engine do when it needs a point data tree to blow in the wind, load 6 gigs of data into your ram and run calculations on every point? So far no one has solved this problem with enough efficiency to make a capable game engine, including Euclideon. :cry:

I remember seeing their first video about infinite resolution a while back. I've been impressed but reserved.

"needsloomis" wrote:
They claim that they can use special techniques in which they can rapidly search for and retrieve only 1 point per pixel on your screen, reducing the processing load to just a few million points at a time (2mil for 1080p)...but to animate the tree your computer would have to know where every point in the tree is at any given moment of the whole animation sequence (how can it know which pixels to to show you if it doesn't know where all of the points are in 3d space?). What does a game engine do when it needs a point data tree to blow in the wind, load 6 gigs of data into your ram and run calculations on every point? So far no one has solved this problem with enough efficiency to make a capable game engine, including Euclideon. :cry:

Sounds simple enough then. Use Euclidean for the non-animated evironment then put the animated models in that environment. Sure, it'd be a fancier version of what SquareSoft was doing with Final Fantasy games on the PS1 but is that so bad? A hyper detailed and navigable (but non-animated) 3d environment would still be amazing to experience. Given the right animation, hopefully it could blend enough that you don't notice where each engine is used.

Games aside, this would trump what we currently have with Google Street View. In tour type videos I can live without my surroundings being animated if the tradeoff is that level of inanimate detail.

As an artist I can honestly say euclideon doesn't really fix any problems that aren't already fixed by shaders. normal mapping is pretty effective and doesn't compromise your ability to animate the mesh.
http://sphotos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/266963_367010970057889_1979841288_o.png
What would really be nice would be to have realtime raytracing or realtime global illumination, because lighting is what separates video games from animated movies.

"Nevolmon" wrote:

For youtube vids, you can EITHER wrap them in URL tags:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0vHdMmp2_c#t=12

... or you can embed the IDENTIFIER ("n0vHdMmp2_c") in youtube tags:



The downside of embedded videos is there is no apparent way to include a time offset, such as in your URL.

"geekmaster" wrote:
The downside of embedded videos is there is no apparent way to include a time offset, such as in your URL.

And the full screen option has never worked for me on this forum either. I've always had to end up going to the videos page to view as such.

You are correct. Fullscreen does not seem to work.

Honestly can be cool to play a videogames with photorealistic graphics, but to be honest sometimes i prefer to see how beatiful and magical can be a very good graphics of engine. For example,the particle effects of UDK 4 is too beatiful than real life xD

"cybereality" wrote:
You are correct. Fullscreen does not seem to work.

Yea. I'm not sure if its intentional or not.

I had an issue with it on my blogs. I looked into it and found a solution. Youtube changed some things at one point and, long story short I had to use a older style of embedding. The forums script for the [Youtube] tag would need to be editied. If it helps, this is the code I use to embed videos on my blogs.

<object height="390" width="640">  <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zX2smM87r14?fs=1"></param>
<param value="true" name="allowFullScreen"></param>
<embed allowfullscreen="true" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/oyl97TG8jbA?fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="390"></embed> </object>

If I remember right, the main difference is in the URL.
"/v/*******?fs=1"

instead of...

"watch?v=*******"