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Geek Culture / Unlimited Detail Technology

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CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 00:57
Thank you, Fallout.

Matty H
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 01:06
Quote: "It just makes things look more detailed and avoids the need for LOD."


LOD, imposter systems, advanced culling techniques and perhaps a whole host of optimisations we currently spend alot of time developing

I agree with your general point, I think the devs deserve alot of credit to get as far as they have but they still have alot to do before it will compete with the current technology.

Libervurto
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 02:10
They are trying to catch up with over twenty years of progress in polygon graphics, so of course it will take time. They are baking an apple pie from scratch.

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Quik
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 02:31
Thinking of it.. the thing that the game industry REALLY needs an improval of would actually be: Animations. The newest Deus Ex didnt only dissappoint visually (textures mainly) but in animation quality: as soon as i spoke to someone it looked like i was talking to a robot, so basicly: the graphic quality of today is as good as 6 years ago.. not really that accepted if you ask me.. =/

and for the record, I am a man.

Airslide
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 04:10
I keep hearing that the newest Deus Ex is incredibly amazing, so the graphics not looking super-state-of-the-art-next-gen obviously isn't an issue for a lot of people.
Indicium
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 04:21
Amazing graphics get boring after 5 minutes of playing, after that it's all about gameplay.

Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 04:39
I don't get what you are all saying to be honest. It takes me longer to make a low poly model than a high poly model. So this sounds great to me. And almost any modelling package can make high poly models.. even Anim8or, and it's free. And animations are probably atom assignments so that's fine. Why do a lot of you think its no good? I just spent a week making a low-poly ant that I could have made in a few hours in high poly. It actually makes the work less, not more. Smoothing is just 1 click, instead of moving points for hours to get rid of a crease.

Quik
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 07:17 Edited at: 29th Aug 2011 07:24
Quote: "I don't get what you are all saying to be honest. It takes me longer to make a low poly model than a high poly model. So this sounds great to me. And almost any modelling package can make high poly models.. even Anim8or, and it's free. And animations are probably atom assignments so that's fine. Why do a lot of you think its no good? I just spent a week making a low-poly ant that I could have made in a few hours in high poly. It actually makes the work less, not more. Smoothing is just 1 click, instead of moving points for hours to get rid of a crease."


most companies do spend more time in the highpoly: using a sculpting software, then they retopo the highpoly into a "lowpoly" (iam saying lowpoly with "" since i dont want to call 10-15k+ characters lowpoly..) model,..

edit:
Quote: "I keep hearing that the newest Deus Ex is incredibly amazing, so the graphics not looking super-state-of-the-art-next-gen obviously isn't an issue for a lot of people."


Well it is, if you look by the technical issues, bad animations, bad actors at places (especially the chinese town, the vooice acting there is a pain) also some sidemissione neither make sense or are just dumb..

If anything, honestly need work graphicall it is the animations: Crysis 2 have probably the best animations I have ever seen, but there you dont have to stare people in the eyes and speak to the 90% of the time... Deus Ex's speaking animation quality is as worthless as Oblivions! Oblivion is 5 years old.

And it's not the "first new game with crappy animations either"

and for the record, I am a man.

Plystire
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 07:26
They should make a minecraft-esque terrain generator with this UNLIMITED DETAIL *poses and uses EPIC announcer voice* to show that it truly is unlimited.

I mean, once the generator is made... give it a seed and start exploring the never-ending landscape of UNLIMITED DETAIL *poses and uses EPIC announcer voice*

Srsly, tho, that'd be awesome. Just sayin'


~Plystire

A rose is only a rose until it is held and cherished -- then it becomes a treasure.
Van B
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 11:04
Why aren't people looking at LA Noire as the future of facial animation?

Quote: "And animations are probably atom assignments so that's fine."


The problem is that the more vertices a high poly object has, the more processor time it takes to calculate the frame. If you have a main character with 10,000 vertices then that's fine. If you have a character with 1,000,000 points of information, well that takes up processor time. So much processor time, that I have no idea if it's even possible on current architecture, without dragging performance down to insufferable levels. Now graphics hardware can calculate vertex positions quite efficiently, so most of that drudge work is done on GPU's these days. UD does not have that luxury.

They say that you can't measure the properties of things like atoms effectively, because in doing so you affect it too much. This has similar problems. Displaying these models is one thing, because it can be indexed and then searched really quickly, making it possible to render in realtime. But - this all depends on the index remaining constant, and with animation the whole index would have to be dynamic.

The animation system would have to compensate for the amount of calculations, maybe for each point, add in a flexibility value, and then points allocated to a single joint could be calculated faster, no blending the calculations between joints. That's one thing they could do to maybe make animation conceivable, but then I guarantee that the quality on polygon model animations would far exceed it.

Now that is my opinion, I don't believe in magic, the tooth fairy, santa, elves... or the pixel fairies who come along and promise the earth but fail to provide suffucient evidence.

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CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 11:08
Quote: "I don't get what you are all saying to be honest. It takes me longer to make a low poly model than a high poly model. So this sounds great to me. "


Anim8or can't handle a million polies like professional software can. Your concept of high poly falls short of the industry's concept of high poly.

Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 11:57
What they have said though is that say for 1024*768 screen you have 786,432 pixels. Which isn't even 1 million. So instead of updating poly's it is now easier to just update the pixels on the screen. So the highest poly model you would ever need is 786,432 facing you. They are converting all of the models first in their own editor. And I suppose for animations, they just convert them as models. But that's not all, they are also compressing the models. When jpeg first came out, it made the internet possible. I believe that they are using similar compression techniques, because they keep mentioning Google. Which probably means that curves, and angles are readjusted to certain limits. Then you can divide the screen by 10 so 786,432 pixels is now just over 78643. With an atom working out the surrounding atoms due to restrictions on what those surrounding atoms could be. Basically, the idea is that a lot of poly's are wasted now per frame, so share them all by restricting what they can be.

Ocho Geek
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 14:16
Quote: "Why aren't people looking at LA Noire as the future of facial animation?
"


The technology of it was good, but the animations themselves were really overacted and the rest of the game's graphics struggled to keep up


Not Spanish, Not Eight, Just Ocho

CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 14:59
@Pincho Paxton

Discounting the amount of memory necessary to store the new model data?

Also, most gamers would run it at far above 1024*768.

Kevin Picone
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 15:42
This reminds me of the infamous "Can a Doom (clone) be done on the Amiga" merry go around..

Van B
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 15:42
If LA Noire wasn't over-acted, it would be damn near impossible - and even so, it's still pretty challenging to 100% an interview based on that over-acting. My point is that it has the best facial animation system available, it works so well that it's almost creepy how lifelike it can make characters. Deus Ex brings nothing new to the facial animation table, it doesn't even try, so what relevance does it have when talking about UD! - which doesn't even have animation!

People are glossing over the bits they don't understand, or don't want to believe, and putting all that faith into UD. And those people will only be left disapointed, while the realists here will already be shells of their former 'hater' because of threads like this.

I'm a realist BTW, I work with databases every day, and a big chunk of that is finding ways to improve performance. Data for me is a tangible asset that has to be managed and justified constantly - to have someone claim any system is unlimited is plain offensive, and I don't see it as negative to question that. People have the right to question the guy selling the magic beans, don't just hand him all your cattle like the Aus government did.

Health, Ammo, and bacon and eggs!
Quik
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 16:07
Quote: " Deus Ex brings nothing new to the facial animation table, it doesn't even try, so what relevance does it have when talking about UD! - which doesn't even have animation!"


I am answering to the whole: "GRAPHIX NEED IMPROVING" by saying that considering how far behind animations is, compared to the visual feast we have, it feels like Animations should step it up a bit

and for the record, I am a man.

Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 18:37
Quote: "@Pincho Paxton

Discounting the amount of memory necessary to store the new model data?

Also, most gamers would run it at far above 1024*768."


Lets say in avi each screen is part of another screen. Well that's how you would store the animations. Like a walk animation is almost always the same images.

1024*768 is well worth a trade in for more detail. I think that's where you lose something to gain something.

CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 19:46
But what's the point of a gamer trading in their HD monitor resolution to get less detail? It goes against the point of this technology if we have to downgrade.

bitJericho
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 20:13
Quote: "But what's the point of a gamer trading in their HD monitor resolution to get less detail? It goes against the point of this technology if we have to downgrade."


Isn't that what people said in the downgrade from high resolution CRTs to 1080p flat panels?

But I agree, I don't think the future is in this kind of system.


Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 20:47
Wikipedia...
Quote: "1280×720 (for a total of 0.92 megapixels or 921600 pixels)"


It might manage 720p... that's still HD.

Fallout
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 21:26
@Pincho - I'm not at all getting your explanation for how animations for millions of atoms would be stored. I get the bit where you say only approx 800k atoms are retrieved at 1024x768, but I don't get how it's possible to do 800,000 3D translations in real-time on a normal compo.

CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 21:35
Quote: "It might manage 720p... that's still HD."


I run all my games at 1440*900, otherwise the money I spent on this monitor would be wasted.

Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 21:48
Quote: "I run all my games at 1440*900, otherwise the money I spent on this monitor would be wasted."


It's like the guy said though you are looking at plains most of the time, that is not what I would really call HD. Just flat plains, and stuff popping up on the screen.

Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 22:04 Edited at: 29th Aug 2011 22:09
Quote: "@Pincho - I'm not at all getting your explanation for how animations for millions of atoms would be stored. I get the bit where you say only approx 800k atoms are retrieved at 1024x768, but I don't get how it's possible to do 800,000 3D translations in real-time on a normal compo."


OK a 2 hour movies is 60 fps * 1million pixels per frame. It stores quite small. You take the 3D scenes, and put them in an editor. You compact them from various directions, and move the vectors to match, get rid of some floating points, and limit the angles. You check for player movement. You rotate the player with limited 3D angles like isometric, but more powerful. Then some sort of compression technique grabs the data from in front of the player and decompresses it like a jpeg.

I'm just trying to go with the words that he used. Google images, compression, 3D editor, atoms, screen pixels. And also by viewing the funny jerky angles, that seemed to snap into place like isometric games do. But to be honest he was trying not to give the whole thing away. But it would be great for the games that I'm working on, because I could use that soil type system for 2 of my games.

CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 29th Aug 2011 22:18
Quote: "It's like the guy said though you are looking at plains most of the time, that is not what I would really call HD. Just flat plains, and stuff popping up on the screen."


I don't spend my gameplay time staring at walls, thanks. I often spend it looking at the models representing players/AI that are about to kill me.

So you want to add a compression sequence too? That'll result in extra processing oveheads, surely?

You forget, we can't use the same compressing techniques for real-time displays as we can for re-recorded. Otherwise it ends up usurping the whole purpose of a real-time game anyway.

If I have to lower my res, and then suffer jittery, compressed viewing angles, then I'm gunna close the game.

heyufool1
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Posted: 30th Aug 2011 04:39 Edited at: 30th Aug 2011 04:39
Quote: "OK a 2 hour movies is 60 fps * 1million pixels per frame."

If you are talking about a normal movie that you see in theaters then I think those are normally shot at 24 fps.

"So hold your head up high and know. It's not the end of the road"
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Benjamin
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Posted: 30th Aug 2011 04:42
Quote: "So you want to add a compression sequence too? That'll result in extra processing oveheads, surely?"


If this really is revolutionary technology (which it isn't) and it took off, we'd end up seeing hardware perform intensive tasks like these, so that's not really an issue.



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Fallout
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Posted: 30th Aug 2011 09:14
Pre-rendered frames cannot work. If we pre-render an object in only 1 degree increments of rotation, that are 46 million combinations (360x360x360). 1 degree increments would look really choppy for slowly rotating objects. Multiply that by frames per animation and numbers of animations, plus the number of atoms to pre-render, and the numbers are obscene. That also doesn't take into account blending between animations or manually rotating limbs.

Kevin Picone
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Posted: 30th Aug 2011 10:24
Quote: "So you want to add a compression sequence too? That'll result in extra processing oveheads, surely?"


Depends upon the method, as it can be quicker to decompress on the fly than doing a straight memory copy, since there's less fetching.

Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 30th Aug 2011 20:04 Edited at: 30th Aug 2011 20:09
Quote: "Pre-rendered frames cannot work. If we pre-render an object in only 1 degree increments of rotation, that are 46 million combinations (360x360x360). 1 degree increments would look really choppy for slowly rotating objects. Multiply that by frames per animation and numbers of animations, plus the number of atoms to pre-render, and the numbers are obscene. That also doesn't take into account blending between animations or manually rotating limbs."


pre-rendered in 3D like slices of an orange. You can join them back together in different ways. Then you get lots of duplicates too.

Grog Grueslayer
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Posted: 31st Aug 2011 19:30
I think the best benefit when Unlimited Detail is out there where we can actually use it it'll stop this constant need for us to upgrade. I recently bought Witcher 2 only to find out that my computer barely runs it. Every cut scene and actual game play was like it was in slow motion. The solution was to get a $150 video card so the higher amount of polygons didn't slow down the game. I don't like being forced to buy a new video card every 3 years just to play the latest game. In the video he said "Any card from the 90's will work." that fact alone will save us a lot of money and we'll get beautiful Unlimited Detail to boot.

CoffeeGrunt
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Posted: 31st Aug 2011 19:36
I'm not the only person who can see voxel density replacing polygon count, and inevitably presenting the exact same problems?

It'd give companies the chance to sell hardware again. Otherwise the markets would stagnate.

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