Lain
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- Yaywalter
Let me start by apologizing in advance. This has practically turned into an essay rather than a forum post. So if you don't feel the desire to read my post, which I wouldn't blame ya, still feel free to contribute to the thread any information or videos related to next-gen graphics. đź‘Ť
Also, this thread is partly redundant because I earlier created a thread specifically about an engine mentioned herein. This thread however is geared towards discussing next-gen graphics in general, and not just a specific engine like the old one was. If you're a moderator, please close my old thread, found here, as it is rendered unnecessary by this thread.
So without further ado...
Ever since fully 3D games started to become the norm, the improvements to real-time 3D graphics have been mostly evolutionary. As the hardware increased in power, the number of polygons that could be pumped out was increased and that's about it, save for the development of techniques like bump mapping to create the illusion of there being more 3D detail than there really is.
However, hardware is reaching the point where an alternative to polygons called voxels is starting to become a viable option. And might just give us a true real-time 3D graphics revolution.
"What's a voxel?", you might be asking. Well, a voxel (volumetric pixel) is essentially a point with volume. Thus in a voxel-based game, objects would be constructed out of a bunch of tiny points instead of a bunch of flat triangles like they are in polygon-based games
The thing that's been holding voxels back from being heavily used in games is the fact that a 3D world would have to be constructed out of a vast amount of really tiny voxels in order to not look extremely blocky.
Well nowadays, with 4 GB of RAM being fairly standard for computers, and with efficient compression techniques being able to compress a single voxel to take up less than 1 bit in memory, dealing with large quantities of voxels isn't nearly as much of a hurdle as it used to be.
A company called Euclideon is developing a voxel-based engine called Unlimited Detail which uses clever algorithms to figure out which voxel in a 3D scene needs to be rendered to a particular pixel on the screen. This essentially allows for unlimited detail, as the engine's name implies. Not truly unlimited detail, because you'll still be confined by how many voxels you can load into ram, store on a disk, et cetera. But with their engine, the amount of detail in a 3D world has zero effect on how fast the graphics can be rendered. This has huge implications for games... no more level-of-detail/pop-in, no more sluggish frame-rates during certain visually complex moments, and most importantly: a huge jump in the amount of detail that can be rendered.
Skip to 22:00 (or watch all 41 minutes if you're interested) for a demonstration of Euclideon's engine rendering a 3D world containing trillions of voxels utilizing only a 2.0 GHz Core i7. They aren't even using the graphics card at all, except to draw the final image rendered by the CPU to the screen:
Also worth noting is the laptop's 8 GB of RAM. This is more than a lot of people have, but it isn't absurdly high. Eventually 8 GB will probably become fairly commonplace.
But Euclideon has it's fair share of skeptics. And you probably have a concern or two after watching their demo as well. Big concerns like "Can anything be animated?", which would drastically affect whether their technology could even be used for games. You certainly can't have a game where nothing ever changes.
Euclideon themselves insist that things can move, but their skeptics insist that Euclideon is just lying, otherwise they'd have demonstrated it already. Well, there are some things worth noting before jumping to that conclusion. Euclideon's Unlimited Detail engine is not a full-blown games engine. It's not an animation engine either. It's an engine whose sole purpose is to make rendering of voxel-based 3D worlds independent of the number of voxels in the particular world in order to allow extremely detailed worlds able to be rendered in real time.
So... onto Exhibit B: The Atomontage Engine.
The Atomontage Engine is a voxel-based physics engine. In conjunction with the features of the Unlimited Detail engine, we could potentially have extremely detailed worlds that can move. Not only that, but they can move in more detailed and life-like ways than polygon-based games. Imagine a beach in a game where every grain of sand is made of voxels, and thus is true geometry and not just a sandy texture painted onto some polygons. It can actually be kicked up, moved around, blown around by wind, made into sandcastles, et cetera.
Here's a video of the Atomontage Engine in action, demonstrating tire tracks created by physics-based deformation of the sand voxels:
At this point, if you're a hardcore gamer (and a PS3 gamer in particular), you might be thinking we've already seen something like this before in a game series called MotorStorm. But keep in mind that, unlike MotorStorm, the voxels of sand are actual geometry that deform through physics. In MotorStorm, the illusion of the dirt and mud being displaced by the tires is created using 2D bump maps which the tires of the vehicles essentially just draw on like it's a Paint document. The bump map is then applied to give the flat ground polygons apparent depth. It's not truly real geometry and thus is very limited in the ways it can deform. Mud cannot be sprayed into the air in MotorStorm, thus they use even more tricks like particle effects to give the impression that it is being sprayed about.
So.. what's next? How soon can we expect voxel-based games to start flooding the marketplace?
Well... we might have to be a little patient.
For starters, the Unlimited Detail and Atomontage engines aren't even completed yet.
Then there's the fact that the current generation of consoles are too weak to handle voxel-based games of scale. Their major weak point in this regard is the relatively minuscule amounts of RAM they have. So we'll have for the next generation of consoles, and hope that they are improved in the areas that are most crucial for voxels. For instance, 4 GB of RAM is likely the minimum that the next generation of consoles could get away with for there to be any to run detailed voxel-based games on them.
And there are still other areas that need addressing... What about the tools to create 3D models out of voxels? All the current modeling software is poly-based. Thankfully, Euclideon has partially addressed this with the creation of a converter that converts highly detailed polygon models into voxel-based models. But where are the tools to animate these voxel-based 3D models? The physics of Atomontage are all well and good, but you still need to be able to animate characters in specific, non-physics based ways. Euclideon doesn't seem to have made any such tools, so we'll be waiting indefinitely until somebody decides to do it.
So in the mean time, while we're waiting for voxels to gain momentum, what's hot right now world of polygons?
Recently Square-Enix announced a new engine called the Luminous Engine. And they came out swinging with the bold promise of "photo-real graphics". Consider myself very skeptical. They did however provide a very short 15 second demo of what the engine is capable of. It's not super-incredible, but I personally find it impressive just how toned-down and realistic the lighting is. It's not full of bloom effect and exaggerated contrast or color like a lot of modern games are.
But then we've already got spectacular engines out there like CryEngine 3 and Frostbite 2 that are capable of some truly remarkable graphics.
I personally don't think we've come close to seeing just how good a CryEngine 3 game can look with Crysis 2. A more interesting use of the engine is the upcoming MMO, Archeage:
There's also Forged By Chaos, which makes pretty good use of the CryEngine, albeit on a smaller scale:
And what about Frostbite 2? Well, I'm sure you already know how great Battlefield 3 is looking. There's also Need For Speed: The Run, which frankly doesn't do the engine justice IMO. Mirror's Edge 2 will be utilizing the engine though, so I'm very eager to see how spectacular that'll look.
The Creation Engine Bethesda created for Elder Scrolls V looks damn good too.
Needless to say, even if voxels don't pan out anytime soon (or ever), we've still got plenty of jaw-dropping polygon-based games ahead of us.
Also, this thread is partly redundant because I earlier created a thread specifically about an engine mentioned herein. This thread however is geared towards discussing next-gen graphics in general, and not just a specific engine like the old one was. If you're a moderator, please close my old thread, found here, as it is rendered unnecessary by this thread.
So without further ado...
Ever since fully 3D games started to become the norm, the improvements to real-time 3D graphics have been mostly evolutionary. As the hardware increased in power, the number of polygons that could be pumped out was increased and that's about it, save for the development of techniques like bump mapping to create the illusion of there being more 3D detail than there really is.
However, hardware is reaching the point where an alternative to polygons called voxels is starting to become a viable option. And might just give us a true real-time 3D graphics revolution.
"What's a voxel?", you might be asking. Well, a voxel (volumetric pixel) is essentially a point with volume. Thus in a voxel-based game, objects would be constructed out of a bunch of tiny points instead of a bunch of flat triangles like they are in polygon-based games
The thing that's been holding voxels back from being heavily used in games is the fact that a 3D world would have to be constructed out of a vast amount of really tiny voxels in order to not look extremely blocky.
Well nowadays, with 4 GB of RAM being fairly standard for computers, and with efficient compression techniques being able to compress a single voxel to take up less than 1 bit in memory, dealing with large quantities of voxels isn't nearly as much of a hurdle as it used to be.
A company called Euclideon is developing a voxel-based engine called Unlimited Detail which uses clever algorithms to figure out which voxel in a 3D scene needs to be rendered to a particular pixel on the screen. This essentially allows for unlimited detail, as the engine's name implies. Not truly unlimited detail, because you'll still be confined by how many voxels you can load into ram, store on a disk, et cetera. But with their engine, the amount of detail in a 3D world has zero effect on how fast the graphics can be rendered. This has huge implications for games... no more level-of-detail/pop-in, no more sluggish frame-rates during certain visually complex moments, and most importantly: a huge jump in the amount of detail that can be rendered.
Skip to 22:00 (or watch all 41 minutes if you're interested) for a demonstration of Euclideon's engine rendering a 3D world containing trillions of voxels utilizing only a 2.0 GHz Core i7. They aren't even using the graphics card at all, except to draw the final image rendered by the CPU to the screen:
Also worth noting is the laptop's 8 GB of RAM. This is more than a lot of people have, but it isn't absurdly high. Eventually 8 GB will probably become fairly commonplace.
But Euclideon has it's fair share of skeptics. And you probably have a concern or two after watching their demo as well. Big concerns like "Can anything be animated?", which would drastically affect whether their technology could even be used for games. You certainly can't have a game where nothing ever changes.
Euclideon themselves insist that things can move, but their skeptics insist that Euclideon is just lying, otherwise they'd have demonstrated it already. Well, there are some things worth noting before jumping to that conclusion. Euclideon's Unlimited Detail engine is not a full-blown games engine. It's not an animation engine either. It's an engine whose sole purpose is to make rendering of voxel-based 3D worlds independent of the number of voxels in the particular world in order to allow extremely detailed worlds able to be rendered in real time.
So... onto Exhibit B: The Atomontage Engine.
The Atomontage Engine is a voxel-based physics engine. In conjunction with the features of the Unlimited Detail engine, we could potentially have extremely detailed worlds that can move. Not only that, but they can move in more detailed and life-like ways than polygon-based games. Imagine a beach in a game where every grain of sand is made of voxels, and thus is true geometry and not just a sandy texture painted onto some polygons. It can actually be kicked up, moved around, blown around by wind, made into sandcastles, et cetera.
Here's a video of the Atomontage Engine in action, demonstrating tire tracks created by physics-based deformation of the sand voxels:
At this point, if you're a hardcore gamer (and a PS3 gamer in particular), you might be thinking we've already seen something like this before in a game series called MotorStorm. But keep in mind that, unlike MotorStorm, the voxels of sand are actual geometry that deform through physics. In MotorStorm, the illusion of the dirt and mud being displaced by the tires is created using 2D bump maps which the tires of the vehicles essentially just draw on like it's a Paint document. The bump map is then applied to give the flat ground polygons apparent depth. It's not truly real geometry and thus is very limited in the ways it can deform. Mud cannot be sprayed into the air in MotorStorm, thus they use even more tricks like particle effects to give the impression that it is being sprayed about.
So.. what's next? How soon can we expect voxel-based games to start flooding the marketplace?
Well... we might have to be a little patient.
For starters, the Unlimited Detail and Atomontage engines aren't even completed yet.
Then there's the fact that the current generation of consoles are too weak to handle voxel-based games of scale. Their major weak point in this regard is the relatively minuscule amounts of RAM they have. So we'll have for the next generation of consoles, and hope that they are improved in the areas that are most crucial for voxels. For instance, 4 GB of RAM is likely the minimum that the next generation of consoles could get away with for there to be any to run detailed voxel-based games on them.
And there are still other areas that need addressing... What about the tools to create 3D models out of voxels? All the current modeling software is poly-based. Thankfully, Euclideon has partially addressed this with the creation of a converter that converts highly detailed polygon models into voxel-based models. But where are the tools to animate these voxel-based 3D models? The physics of Atomontage are all well and good, but you still need to be able to animate characters in specific, non-physics based ways. Euclideon doesn't seem to have made any such tools, so we'll be waiting indefinitely until somebody decides to do it.
So in the mean time, while we're waiting for voxels to gain momentum, what's hot right now world of polygons?
Recently Square-Enix announced a new engine called the Luminous Engine. And they came out swinging with the bold promise of "photo-real graphics". Consider myself very skeptical. They did however provide a very short 15 second demo of what the engine is capable of. It's not super-incredible, but I personally find it impressive just how toned-down and realistic the lighting is. It's not full of bloom effect and exaggerated contrast or color like a lot of modern games are.
But then we've already got spectacular engines out there like CryEngine 3 and Frostbite 2 that are capable of some truly remarkable graphics.
I personally don't think we've come close to seeing just how good a CryEngine 3 game can look with Crysis 2. A more interesting use of the engine is the upcoming MMO, Archeage:
There's also Forged By Chaos, which makes pretty good use of the CryEngine, albeit on a smaller scale:
And what about Frostbite 2? Well, I'm sure you already know how great Battlefield 3 is looking. There's also Need For Speed: The Run, which frankly doesn't do the engine justice IMO. Mirror's Edge 2 will be utilizing the engine though, so I'm very eager to see how spectacular that'll look.
The Creation Engine Bethesda created for Elder Scrolls V looks damn good too.
Needless to say, even if voxels don't pan out anytime soon (or ever), we've still got plenty of jaw-dropping polygon-based games ahead of us.
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