So, this is probably old news to some of you, but I recently learned about a new system or game engine rendering which is based on point-cloud data. Essentially, it allows the engine to handle unlimited amount of 3 dimensional data (doesn’t handle unlimited monitor sizes). There are many websites, videos, and I’m sure siggraph papers about it, and here’s one such site devoted to it. But, anyway, I’m wondering, and here’s another of one of my ‘I think it’s a good idea but is actually ridiculously hard and impractical’, but would it be possible to implement such a thing (or voxels, its brother) in the BGE?
From what I’ve read on it, I think it may be fake. It could so easily be an animation and no one could tell any difference. But you guys think it’s real? Awesome.
If you are referring to the notorious video you might have a read on notch´s opinion: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam
There are divided opinions. I would not take a single man’s perspective regardless of their native work place. It may be the case, as is often the way, that Notch’s implementation of voxels differs to that of Unlimited Detail. However, it is not uncommon for companies to pretend to have created a new technology in order to earn sponsership.
Either way, It’s not just voxels it’s an entirely new render workflow.
There’s one website, two videos, no papers and a whole lot of hype. Voxel/Atomic techniques are promising, but ‘Unlimited Detail’ is not.
sigh That’s unfortunate to hear. I guess it makes since though. I thought there was something fishy about it. Regardless. Could detailed atomic voxels be implemented? I still don’t know how these differ from the voxels created in minecraft.
So, real?
*** Moderation ***
moved from: Game Engine Resources
*** End of Moderation ***
Possible? yes
Worth? no
Everyone, ignore me for a while… I’m going to my corner of shame…
There is nothing to shame. The wish is understandable (I wish I could drive with a Ferrari to work 
).
With the BGE you got a pretty powerful toy you can play with. Other toys always seems to be better ;). (wasn’t that something with green?)
so if we use poly as animate and physic object and use voxels as static object it would be perfect.
but I think it not worth to made engine like this.
I’m working on an engine with a similar concept. It uses my own methods for “voxels”. So far it’s very promising, but development is slow. It may be able to render huge amounts, but the main limitations is memory.
My opinion is that the ‘unlimited detail’ video is authentic, although unlimited detail may be slightly exaggerated. My method will in theory be able to render unlimited number of “atoms”, but it is impossible to have unlimited with only 8 GB of ram average on a computer. How did the unlimited detail engine do it? Well if you look at their island, you might notice that it seems to be sort of tiled. I believe they simply made a few assets and made instances everywhere. Even the ground is done this way. It is the only way you can use this technology at the moment.
When my engine is done I am considering implementing it into the BGE for stuff like water, smoke. (Procedural is one way to avoid the RAM issue)
“Unlimited Detail” is like “Unlimited Bandwidth” of the Hostings 
1 thing: Haha!
Sounds interesting Mokazon, good luck with that.
Unlimited Detail is real. However, it’s not as “revolutionary” as Dell claims it to be. Unlimited detail has several problems which have yet to be solved. As mokazon said, Unlimited Detail has not solved the extreme memory constraint that plagues volumetric rendering (and the only way they can render that much detail is by using instances). The second problem is that they have not demonstrated animation or dynamic deformation of geometry (aka: everything is static).
BTW: I think “Unlimited Detail” refers to the fact that they can render an unlimited number of points on the screen (at a constant resolution) - not the fact that they can store unlimited geometry.
What the “Limit” of the BGE anyways?,
you can have all detail you want, limited by Hardware Resources and ability to represent what you try to do,
and it will be slow, but it will render, at least at 0.0001FPS i think very few people has reach that “limit”
I can have Unlimited Bugs on BGE and proud of it 
I think the technology is most definitely real, just not as mind-blowing as they claim it to be. Okay, they made a renderer that can display a ton of detail, using some kind of voxel raycasting, or point clouds, or whatever it is. The problem is, fitting all that detail in RAM/VRAM is hard. To get that high amount of detail, they had to make the entire island made up of a repetitive set of “tiles”- that’s not a practical solution for most games. Most games require more variety than that.
I also think that on a powerful gpu, adaptive geometry tesselation with displacement could deliver similar results. So this technology isn’t exactly blowing anything out of the water.
That’s really cool! Is the rendering done on the gpu? What programming language are you writing the engine in?
Unlimited detail is real and i followed euclideon since a year, from what i saw on videos and interviews the problem shouldn’t be the RAM, since mr Dell explained that the algorithm behind Unlimited tech is something like a “google search” for point data i.e. the engine can look for points/atoms to be showed on screen, one per pixel. It just calculate needed data to fit the resolution. Sorry for bad explaining.
They said the tiling of the island was due to the fact is a small team and the only artist who worked on the models was not able to produce such amount of variations for the tech demo. And right now they’re working on soft shadows, animations etc…