Unlimited Detail in 3D Graphics [UPDATED]

[Radikalizm]

I read the entire article, and the fact that any technical question is being avoided completely says enough...
I'm interested in how this will turn out, I can't believe there are still people who want to invest in this so-called company

[Kojack]

its funny how they stole the video's from the one "engine" a few years ago that claimed the same thing You can tell by the logo in the corner on some of the clips.

What was stolen? The company changed it's name recently from Unlimited Detail (using the eye logo in some of the video's clips) to Euclideon (the greek column looking logo). The actual engine is still called Unlimited Detail. Bruce Dell is still the guy in charge (and doing the voice overs).

Don't forget that the opening post contains videos of 2 completely different engines. Unlimited Detail is an australian point cloud engine, Atomontage is a Slovakian (is that the right way to say it?) voxel engine.

I still have the demo cd from Bruce from back in 2003 when he was first showing off the engine to australian game developers. It contains 3 videos of Unlimited Detail (sadly no executable), and includes animated characters walking around an environment.
Here's a pic:

(The legs, head and body move independently, but they don't rotate and it's not skinned)

I'd post the videos on youtube, but the license says I can't redistribute without permission.

Eucledion recently got $1.8million funding from the queensland government.

The biggest potential problem with the UD engine is data size (well, plus how does it handle stuff like transparency, shaders, etc). While representing a rough object with point clouds is ok compared to the same roughness with triangles, we can also represent flat surfaces with triangles. When modelling a long smooth wall in a building, would you rather use 2 triangles or several million points? I just wish Bruce would say somewhere in the videos "limited by memory or hard drive" instead of constantly saying it's unlimited.

A combination of point clouds with triangles could be cool. I don't think the 2 technologies are mutually exclusive.

[Insomniacp]

I didn't spend much time researching the company I just noticed the logo in the video and figured it was just taken from them. The fact they have no demo or anything to show after working on it since 2003 kinda shows that what they say is not what they can do. Did they really give them money?

[Kojack]

Yep, they really got a $1.8million grant. Another queensland engine got $4million from the government: Auran Jet back around 2004. Jet was used in the game Trainz (which is still around) but they tried to sell it as an indie game engine for $100. It was pretty crap though (I was forced to use it for a short time).
Oddly enough, one of the ex-Auran guys (the one who created the Game Monkey scripting language) now works for Euclideon. He has publicly stated that the tech is real, but he can't say more yet.

I'd really like to see this thing working as well as it's supposed to, but until they give me a free sdk so I can test it myself, I'll believe it's just an interesting tech demo but not a useful game technology.

[fmx]

Kojack thanks for the infos

I cant believe queensland was dishing out so much funding, just too incredible
My opinion is that their work is probably real, but continuously ongoing and nowhere near completion.
I'm not holding my breath, could be another 5-10 years from now

[Kojack]

There's a cool blog post on UD by one of the X-Plane developers at http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/08/poi ... ys-will-be
X-Plane is already dealing with 78+GB of game data to map the entire world (and X-Plane 10 does weather with point clouds (or voxels, can't remember)), so it's devs know a thing or two about large detail scenes.