Unlimited Detail Technology

[PascalR]

Someone posted this video at work, thought it was interesting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ATtrImCx4&ttl=1

[ianucci]

Haha, anyone seen the old Alec Guiness ealing comedy 'The man in the white suit?'

Looks very interesting indeed, I liked the guys narration he has an amusing intonation.

[ViCoX]

Yeah, saw this earlier. Interesting stuff! : )
Only problem is, that sorting wont help much on dynamic objects, right?
Then you need to process those points.

another interesting voxel based engine link (http://www.atomontage.com/?id=home)

[ianucci]

I also came across that site while googling ViCoX, certainly looks a lot more mature technology than what this Ulimited Detail guy has shown.

Back to the UD stuff I did some googling and I found this interesting post from about 2 years ago here.

I saw the (non-NDA) demo presentation a few days ago and have a few mixed feelings about it.

He showed a lot of videos and one real time demo (that he apologized for it being a little bit broken as it had some bad artifacts)

I would have preferred to see some of the more game-like levels in real time. Some of the videos seemed game like and impressive. (Also, some of the videos were a bit old and you can see he has come a long way over the years.)

And if I could get actual mouse/keyboard control of a game scene demo would have convinced me much more - as being able to fly around and get up close to geometry to look for artifacts is the real test for me. (It is not like anyone could steal anything by providing an interactive demo)

The developer admitted that he has been working in a vacuum for the last 10+ years - so he knows very little about how current renderer's work.
(Which was very apparent during a Q&A) It appeared that the demos used DX8 to do blitting to the screen. It was also stated that the demos were single core and written in plain non-optimized C, so someone who knew what they were doing could make it run much, much faster. (was a bit distressing to learn he did not know what a memory cache was however)

The main claim is that he has found an efficient way to extract point data in an octree without doing ray-casts into the data structure. The octrees were compressed and supported instancing of objects through-out the level.
(I really do not know a great deal about octrees to really comment on this)

I don't think it was a "smoke an mirrors" presentation, but without seeing some better real time demos I am not 100% convinced. (demos that I can actually control - and display task manager to see mem usage etc)