Unlimited Detail Tech blahblah

Why this is fairly obviously shady:
They're not interested in selling this to anyone in the industry, their language clearly shows that they're targeting it at people hwo have no clue about how 3D engines work. They explain POLYGONS, for fuck's sake!

Buzzwords galore - "UNLIMITED DETAIL" - we all know that unlimited is impossible with finite memory. Extremely large, but not infinite. The point is, they're going through this "oh we're so amazing, we're infinitely better than anyone else, anyone who questions us is clueless".

They're painting themselves as being hard-done by the corporate interests, as if the only reason they haven't been hired by EVERYONE is because their tech is so amazing that people are in denial. Bullshit. Not only do they repeat the same item in a pattern in their video (they say this is because they don't have the resources - it sure would be handy if they had a polygon-to-voxel converter, and there were masses upon masses of free polygon models on the internet to use).

Voxel technology? Dunno what'll happen with that. These guys are obviously scammers though. I'd bet all my tradable hats that they'll never come up with the technology they've promised, and it'll turn out that it was a scam all along.

If they've improved on rendering tech by 100 000, they should release something beyond a single easily-faked video. They haven't even come up with any new concepts.

Just to comment on your last two lines...
They have released more then one video and many Australian journalists/press have seen the tech first hand and used it. Including but not limited to, Gamespot, Game informer, PCPP, PCMAG. and so forth.
It also has government backing. Just so you know.

My opinion however is let us have the tech if you really want to prove its real.

Edit: Also they just hired about 20 artists or so from the recent shutdowns of game companies like THQ in Australia.

AngryAngus said:

Just to comment on your last two lines...
They have released more then one video and many Australian journalists/press have seen the tech first hand and used it. Including but not limited to, Gamespot, Game informer, PCPP, PCMAG. and so forth.

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Interesting. Source? What details about the tech have we learned?

It also has government backing. Just so you know.

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That suggests possible legitimacy, but it's also likely that they were just successful at BSing the government, too.

My opinion however is let us have the tech if you really want to prove its real.

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MY POINT EXACTLY. THIS. Still, I'll eat my hat if the tech is everything it's cracked up to be.

EDIT: Why haven't they patented anything, though? Or have they, and I just haven't heard about it?

Numerous said:

Why this is fairly obviously shady:
They're not interested in selling this to anyone in the industry, their language clearly shows that they're targeting it at people hwo have no clue about how 3D engines work. They explain POLYGONS, for fuck's sake!

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News flash, not everyone knows how current tech works!

There is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be explaining this to people who don't understand the basics of game engines, and why this is a big deal if it's real.

Numerous said:

The point is, they're going through this "oh we're so amazing, we're infinitely better than anyone else, anyone who questions us is clueless".

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Well uh to be fair they have a point. Everyone who does question them is clueless because they haven't got their hands on the tech, or any way to really prove that they're scamming everyone including their own government.

Numerous said:

They're painting themselves as being hard-done by the corporate interests,

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I'm going to stop you here and say, "What?".

Selentic said:

News flash, not everyone knows how current tech works!

There is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be explaining this to people who don't understand the basics of game engines, and why this is a big deal if it's real.

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The point is, they're clearly not trying to sell anything to the people who are actually going to use it.

Well uh to be fair they have a point. Everyone who does question them is clueless because they haven't got their hands on the tech, or any way to really prove that they're scamming everyone including their own government.

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The fact that they're implying that raycasting is new technology doesn't help. And the fact that they have yet to say what they've done to actually allow people to use so much memory, let alone *show* it (because voxels and raycasting have all been done before). After all, saying they've magically improved it by 100 000 is quite a claim (thus the "snake oil salesman" comment from Notch).

I'm going to stop you here and say, "What?".

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This, from 4:56 onwards.
This, from 0:52 onwards. He's basically implying that everyone is too hung up in their own little fights to believe what's in front of their eyes.


When it comes down to it, what have they actually shown us that couldn't have been faked in the years that they claim have been spent developing this?

Numerous said:

The point is, they're clearly not trying to sell anything to the people who are actually going to use it.

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Are you serious lol...

Numerous said:

After all, saying they've magically improved it by 100 000 is quite a claim (thus the "snake oil salesman" comment from Notch).

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Unless you have proof to the contrary, instead of claims by idiots like Notch, who obviously don't have their hands on the tech and are in no position to claim it's all faked. They've claimed that next year they're going to be ready, so all you have to do is wait and see, because that's the only way anyone is going to be proved right or wrong here.

Numerous said:

This, from 4:56 onwards.
This, from 0:52 onwards. He's basically implying that everyone is too hung up in their own little fights to believe what's in front of their eyes.

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Still not seeing this bitching about being hard done by big bad corporations.

Assuming their tech is real he's entirely right, the industry fight over graphics would be over, and the GPU competition would become entirely unnecessary.

Plus Notch coded a game in Java, so... i wouldn't take anything he has to say on experimental game technology seriously.

grazr said:

Plus Notch coded a game in Java, so... i wouldn't take anything he has to say on experimental game technology seriously.

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And even then the community-made performance mod Optifine basically doubles FPS and the amount of video settings you can change as well as totally removes the frequent low fps spikes

Trotim said:

And even then the community-made performance mod Optifine basically doubles FPS and the amount of video settings you can change as well as totally removes the frequent low fps spikes

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And community also managed to make npc villages with working AI way before Notch decided to try that and failed to make anything worthwhile out of it.

W.S Wankhouse said:

And community also managed to make npc villages with working AI way before Notch decided to try that and failed to make anything worthwhile out of it.

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sounds like community should just make CommunityCraft and move on from mc

Overall I think what I want to say to them is I think it cant be done, please prove me wrong with a physichal game I can load up on my old Windows 98 PC running 1/4 a GB of RAM with no graphics card and a bad processor, and get graphics better than lets say, what we imagined Rage to be like, with the computer still running fine. Otherwiser I dont beleive you Alternatively I could use an up to date computer.

Sergis said:

sounds like community should just make CommunityCraft and move on from mc

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The trouble for indie developers these days is that mod communities are just as talented as actual game designers these days.

MC is a cult game that has acquired higher expectations through its success than what it was supposed to be, it's attracted a lot of attention from very skilled "modders". It comes as no surprise then that Notch has competition from other developers who have been attracted to his "cult" game.

Notch had a great idea and executed the concept relatively well. What modders have done has been essentially fill in the gaps where a development team comes in. As far as we can tell Notch has what, at least 1 to 5 other people working on the game?

grazr said:

Notch had a great idea

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you mean Zachary Barth had a great idea (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniminer#Infiniminer)

the only thing Notch did was take that and program it slightly better, he even said so himself (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/227922045/the-origins-of-minecraft). that he's getting "innovation" awards is kinda sad. yes he executed the idea better and that's an achievement in itself but it's not his idea and you can tell because his additions especially the last few months before release don't fit or work out at all

W.S Wankhouse said:

And community also managed to make npc villages with working AI way before Notch decided to try that and failed to make anything worthwhile out of it.

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yeah. also wolves and more importantly pistons were mods too. it's not a bad thing he added those to the game but afaik he failed to credit the creators in any way and it really bothers me how people constantly give that one programmer dude notch credit for everything

the end, enderdragon and credits weren't made by modders. the end is also easily the worst part of the game...

one more thing: the default textures are bad. no they're not retro, good retro games never looked bad. it's because most of the default textures are all just programmer/placeholder art notch had since 0.1 and he kicked out the one artist he had on the team out very early on. yeah there are texture packs and that's fine but again people (like "professional critics" hurbadur) totally misunderstand and overrate that

sure it's a decent game and fun and that there's any freedom to mod it is great. it's still full of bugs, bad performance, bad ai so sorry I fail to see how "professional critics" honestly and sincerely gave "released minecraft" scores like 9/10 when there's all those obvious flaws :I
yes I like the game and play it and watch the yogscast minecraft series. it's just that the game is full of bad things that could easily be fixed in a minecraft 2, which then maybe is designed properly and actually deserves a high score.

but then review score numbers haven't meant anything in like a decade. the review texts themselves though always ignore the obvious flaws

Sergis said:

sounds like community should just make CommunityCraft and move on from mc

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much like there should be a community fortress 2

The issue is this: If some quack had said "I made a car that can run pretty-much forever, because it runs on this new fuel called hydrogen gas" last year, everyone would laugh at him. Why is this any different?

He's acting as if he's found a way around the primary issue, with no downsides. He hasn't actually explained anything new. He has a video which could EASILY have been faked, and just having "the government believed him" could mean that he's credible, OR it could just mean that there's an idiot in a high position in whichever department gave out the grants.

I think we should basically wait until they show some actual tech to some actual programmers, before we give it any credibility.

Also, while Notch DID take a large part of Infiniminer and copy it, did infiniminer actually have anything that Minecraft has, apart from the actual mining?

Numerous said:

Also, while Notch DID take a large part of Infiniminer and copy it, did infiniminer actually have anything that Minecraft has, apart from the actual mining?

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This is pretty much what i meant when i said Notch had a good idea. Not that It was originally Notches idea to begin with but that it was his idea to follow through on a concept and make it better/improve upon it. I just couldn't think of any other way to word it since he is to be credited with MC's existance no matter which way you look at it.

Also as Trotim said there's no reason for MC getting such high scores by critics when it's essentially only half finished and still needs very much improving visually and stability/performance wise.

Also as Trotim said there's no reason for MC getting such high scores by critics when it's essentially only half finished and still needs very much improving visually and stability/performance wise.

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You know what they could do? Use there own engine rather than using Java.

Numerous said:

He has a video which could EASILY have been faked

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The video I linked just before your first post has a real time demonstration, and while I'm still skeptical about this, I can't really argue with two guys on a controller exploring the world.

Based on the information they've released about the Unlimited Detail tech, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, I think it's perfectly possible that the tech can work as they describe.

This part is probably understood by most of you, but I'm going to paraphrase anyways. The detail is "unlimited" because of the way the renderer works. It's probably a lot more complex than this in practice, but it's basically like each pixel on the screen casts a ray out into the world and the "atom" it hits is what gets drawn. So the density of objects in the scene doesn't matter, because you don't actually render the world; you just render the screen space.


That really only leaves 2 big problems to tackle to make it work. 1) you have to efficiently sort through the atoms in the world to be able to choose the ones to draw, and 2) you have to be able to store the data for the world. The first one they've claimed they've accomplished with a new algorithm, which is a good enough explanation for me at this point. It hardly seems like an "unsolvable" problem.

The second one is what Notch was taking issue with. Basically he said that in order to store the atoms for a scene that big you'd need a ludicrous amount of storage space, and passed it off as a scam. I think that's a dumb reason to dismiss the tech. Assuming that every atom is stored individually doesn't even make sense.

The first thing you have to realize is that the atoms aren't on like a 3D grid, filling up every space in the world. The atoms only need to make up the surfaces of objects. And what do you know, there are tons of techniques in computer graphics for drawing surfaces with a small memory footprint. Things like NURBS and Subdivision Surfaces are nothing new, and I would guess that the Unlimited Detail tech employs some kind of modified version of one of these techniques. When the guy in the video zooms super-close to the rocks on the ground, those surfaces of the rocks probably just interpolate the atoms along them as you zoom closer.


This is hardly an exhaustive analysis of what they've shown so far, but I just want to say that it's silly to assume this new tech is a scam, or that it "can't be done". Based on what I've seen so far, I think the tech hinges on incredibly complicated and difficult algorithms, but that it's perfectly possible provided they've figured it out.

Edit: and as for it being called "unlimited". Just so you know, it's about the lowest-hanging-fruit of this topic to go "do-ho nothing in computers in unlimited and they say it's unlimited lololol it's a fake." The rendering process draws an unlimited density of objects with no drop in performance, hence the name Unlimited Detail. That's not impossible, as I described above. They're not implying storage space is unlimited.

Dr. Spud said:

Assuming that every atom is stored individually doesn't even make sense.

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Seeing a lot of people making this assumption and really getting sick of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irf-HJ4fBls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csvmRgi0gZQ