pouët.net

Stunning? I'm playing the original Far Cry nowadays and that looks about the same up close, except it's almost 10 years old now. If anything, that realtime demo made me even less impressed.

Far cry is certainly impressive too, and has way more impressive environments, but for detail? Nowhere near, surely. It's running a limited number of polygons and textures for the detail, not extremely detailed voxel objects.

You can't zoom in and see a 3d leaf resting on 3d grains of dirt in far cry. That kind of detail I think is totally stunning. If they can make it work in a real environment like the far cry ones, it'll be utterly mind-blowing.. but I'll believe that when i see it. ;)

the demo running on his laptop in this video is actually quite cool...

Blocks of predefined objects, If this is the only way he can get it to work, then I'm not sold. As psonice said, if it can be put into real environments, then yeah, they will have won the internets. But if it's limited to blocks, they'll have a hard job trying to get someone to use it.

Even if it is just blocks, there's a lot that can be done with blocks and a decent artist. And even if it was just pretty much cubes, would you complain about mine craft with graphics like that? Ok, so I'd still be complaining hard about their marketing claims :D

Nothing is too certain until we get a binary - hopefully with more varying objects and animation. But it sure as hell feels fishy.

and yes, that is a minecraft texture pack

He should do a universe where you can fly from galaxy to galaxy, zoom in to planetary systems and where you also can watch the stars/planets in them ;)

...and it looks like a texture pack, and would look even more like a texture pack in motion. Hi-res photo textures aren't impressive these days, seeing that in full 3d sure as hell would be :)

seppjo: with planets perfectly aligned in a grid? :D

even more important wirh realistic physics :D

So to reiterate, which one looks better again?

I don't need to, because this company has had ample time to file patent applications and protect their technology and show the world how it works, and yet: they don't. They release half-assed videos on YouTube and brag about the amount of hits they are getting. They make fun of known 3D technology geniuses and make outrageous claims to get press -- press they've used to pat themselves on the back and get grants and financial support to keep developing something that inn all likelyhood will end up as a useless piece of tech that (most likely) shines in one very limited usecase, or not at all.

Why do I know this? Because we've seen this a gazillion times before, and all the pieces fit. If you have brilliant technology? Show it to people, get it peer reviewed. If you don't do that, you don't have shit.

And I don't like cocky people who do whatever they can to get press and yet produce no proof what-so-ever. I guess both of those types of people have equal right to speak up, so.

Correct. Until they explain themselves everything is speculation. Therefore they should explain themselves, something they deliberately will not do, therefore nothing is proven, therefore I reserve the right to state that they have nothing.

If you mean they look like the Uwe Boll of computer graphics, then yes. Also: they _do_ have a reason to explain themselves if they want to be believed. The fact that they refuse to do so tells me that they have a reason _not_ to explain themselves, and therefore -- again -- have nothing.
added on the 2011-08-12 12:37:25 by tomaes

The only good marketing is the marketing that results in money earned. Yes, they are getting a lot of press because of their outrageous claims and general dickishness, but if the day comes that they finally show off this tech of theirs and it doesn't hold water, all that press was for nothing. :)

Sure, and so would a lot of people. However, "Unlimited detail!" isn't the same as "Unlimited detail! (...as long as this VERY LONG AND COMPLICATED LIST OF THINGS YOU CANNOT DO IS FULLFILLED!)" :)

second one from my point of view

Unlimited details means infinity... Those guys are gods!
Still i wonder, is this discrete or continuous infinity?

You should write them a mail and ask. I'm sure that they would be more than happy to tell you all about it.

is infinity a successor of itself ?

Well, i've read the thread and already lost enough of my, sadly, finite sparetime!

gargaj: show them both at the same scale, then definitely the first one ;)

More interesting would be to show the infinite detail demo and the far cry screenshots, both distant and up close. You'd have a different winner for each case, and in each case one of them would look like yesterday's tech ;)

For the vast majority of games, the distant view is more important than the close up one, so unless they fix this whole tiling issue this is a totally nice product.

what

I would say it's the exact opposite. Most games look good from far away anyway, and ALL games look crap up close. :)
"so if they fix this whole tiling issue" you mean? Well, since it looks like the tiling-technique is the _basis_ for their whole "technology" then I seriously doubt they'll be able to "fix it" :)

But tetris looks good up close too :(

And 2D games miss all these detail problems anyway, why doesn't the game industry see this!

Lol! NICHE product :D

baah: Aleph 0 is an upper bound here. However, it is so encouraging to witness the actuality of one's achieving such a thing out of inventing some hyper-wheel. Leibniz wrote at some point that hobbyists/non-professionals do often make quite novel insights, because they question what others take for granted. cf. this: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/10/1008636108.full.pdf