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15 years ago appeared what we called virtual reality. it was cubic, horrible but it was the birth of 3d engines. Back to the future, here is the new 3D engine from Euclideon.

It gonna kick ass :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=00gAbgBu8R4

Its just a polygon converter that softens the model, but it does look cool yeah ;)

Can't see YouTube from here, but is it the same as this article?

http://www.ausgamers.com/news/read/3093969

As far as I was aware, it's using "atoms" rather than polygons that makes this impressive. If their claims stand up, it is very interesting.

yeah, altho there are a lot of claims right now that theyre scamming with this engine and that have tried to scam and sell it to many studios already, but lets wait and see what turns out.

Wouldnt mind this kind of engine for Half Life 3 ;)

Go, go ... In da corner Fanboy lol :) Scammin doesnt mean anything in the world of 3d engine. 3D engines

HL3 ? i dunno but it could really increase my interrest for GW2 :P looooool but it's another debate "Good grafx vs laggy server"

Gringo, i know u r curious French website about Crysis 2 engine
under picture u got links [comment] showing effects used in cry engine.

Oh my, im getting called a fanboy by an adolescent blizzard fanboy, lol.

For the rest of your text, cool story bro. Still king of false informations.

@Hog: Yeah it does use atoms. They are converting polygon models into point cloud data, but the gimmick is that it is incredibly hard to actually make a modern game with this thing, thats why majority of people arent impressed.

UPDATE: Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson isn't pulling any punches when he discusses Euclideon, stating, "They're hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It's a scam. Don't get excited. Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen."

source: Gamespy link

Persson made the comments on his blog, where he goes into detail about the technology, its drawbacks, and the various other companies working on similar efforts.

link to the blog

;)

Well isn't the point of this that making the "cloud of data" is difficult and they have found a way to simplify it? I'm not saying they've done it, but neither am I saying they are selling snake oil, just interested in the physics & maths involved.

Also, the Mincraft quote is just another extreme viewpoint from someone else who also knows no more about this than we do.

I hope it's real, but then again, I had hoped the story about 2/3 years ago about the guy who claimed he had invented a way to do real-time ray tracing was also real...

Check his blog Hog, he explains it in detail, certainly does show a different view on it.

Ill link the contents from it here aswell.

They made a voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees. That’s cool and all, but.. To quote the video, the island in the video is one km^2. Let’s assume a modest island height of just eight meters, and we end up with 0.008 km^3. At 64 atoms per cubic millimeter (four per millimeter), that is a total of 512 000 000 000 000 000 atoms. If each voxel is made up of one byte of data, that is a total of 512 petabytes of information, or about 170 000 three-terrabyte harddrives full of information. In reality, you will need way more than just one byte of data per voxel to do colors and lighting, and the island is probably way taller than just eight meters, so that estimate is very optimistic.

So obviously, it’s not made up of that many unique voxels.

In the video, you can make up loads of repeated structured, all roughly the same size. Sparse voxel octrees work great for this, as you don’t need to have unique data in each leaf node, but can reference the same data repeatedly (at fixed intervals) with great speed and memory efficiency. This explains how they can have that much data, but it also shows one of the biggest weaknesses of their engine.

Another weakness is that voxels are horrible for doing animation, because there is no current fast algorithms for deforming a voxel cloud based on a skeletal mesh, and if you do keyframe animation, you end up with a LOT of data. It’s possible to rotate, scale and translate individual chunks of voxel data to do simple animation (imagine one chunk for the upper arm, one for the lower, one for the torso, and so on), but it’s not going to look as nice as polygon based animated characters do.

It’s a very pretty and very impressive piece of technology, but they’re carefully avoiding to mention any of the drawbacks, and they’re pretending like what they’re doing is something new and impressive. In reality, it’s been done several times before.

There’s the very impressive looking Atomontage Engine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gshc8GMTa1Y

Ken Silverman (the guy who wrote the Build engine, used in Duke Nukem 3D) has been working on a voxel engine called Voxlap, which is the basis for Voxelstein 3d: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB1eMC9Jdsw

And there’s more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUe4ofdz5oI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEHIUC4LNFE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zl9CiGJiZuc

They’re hyping this as something new and revolutionary because they want funding. It’s a scam. Don’t get excited.

Or, more correctly, get excited about voxels, but not about the snake oil salesmen.

I read the blog, but still this guy doesn't know the technical details and is only applying his current knowledgeset to what he is watching on some YouTube video. He may be 100% accurate, but he may be 100% wrong. All I'm saying is to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out...

Had a big discussion with Haz about this lastnight, as much as its all very interesting, the video is extremely bias in how it compares their use of particles to how polygons are used.

True it can look very nice, but the problem is it takes a shit load more processing & data to use particles compared to using polygons if both were used in the same way.

In the video the are using as an example game which has massive animated realtime environment, with realtime lighting & shadows and physics on basically anything you can shoot at, that is designed and optimised to run on a normal (well maybe the high end of normal) gaming PC, and comparing it to a non-animated model thats created using extremely repeated objects, about 3 tree models, about 6 floor tiles (which all contain repeated rock models, look closely when he shows the rock in the model and even the rocks within the same tile are all repeated), etc... with baked on shadows and lighting (no- realtime lighting), running on what PC? well... I bet it aint a gaming PC that cryisi can run on.

Dont get me wrong, I do think it would have some quite nice uses (in the game industry and elsewhere) though very quite limited probably, but we'll see.

1 of the main problems for a game engine like this is that its very difficult to minimise without making the game look like Minecraft, and even when technology advances you will still be able to achieve the same results with polygons & normal maps for less system usage, unless you were designing games that had heavily repeated landscapes, and it would have to be quite heavily repeated.

Can imagine animation with this would be quite a bitch and a half using this type of engine tbh, though as far as physics goes I recon you could get some quite interesting results.

Either way, until they are able to achieve anything near what they say they can do with a massive non-heavily repeated real time open world with physics, lighting and animation and have it running on something near to a gaming pc is the day they can compare it to something like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1LYdpS8ibY (nothing special clip, just did a quick search)
And this game was done how many years ago now?

Anyhow, its definately interesting and would be interested to see more, though if they keep doing clips that compare to optimised games models and not to equivalent polygon models then its just tells me that something aint right. Its like comparing a truck to a Ferrari and saying look how fast we can go. So until they can produce unbiased comparison video clips, imo its all just sales waffle to get funding.

I agree with hoggy and i personnaly simply dont trust Minecraft creator. He's just frustrated :
Minecraft source code to be released

Minecraft is a very good concept programmed in java. Java says everything.

I also agree with gringo :) but he forgot to say that cry engine got more than 11 years. The first demo is 1/1/2000 "X-Isle Dinosaurs Island". Technologies evolve in 10 years, Engines too.

Then then !! We will see with time :) it's a demo after a year and a call for fund clearly. It does not shock me. What is important in fact is the result and i' really would love to play a crysis 4 or 5 with a combined technologie polygon/atoms. Real stones\trees are better looking than tessalation to me.

And finally, i still dont get where is the scam ? u see a scam somewhere ?

I agree that Minecraft designer can aswell be wrong and is just venting on them, we will see what will other designers say when SDK comes out (if it does).