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[BenKenobiWan]

Just for the sake of discussion, what do you all think of Euclideon?
Here's two YouTube videos:
1. Their demo video
2. An interview

Notch said it's a scam, but they (Euclideon) denies it in this interview.

[BenKenobiWan]

(I did that partly to experiment with links on this forum )

[pspeed]

If you want to model a scene with molecules then you need some way of heavily compressing them or you'll never fit even the simplest scene on your computer.  It's clear even from their videos that they repeat a lot of the same shapes over and over and over and it's unclear how far they can take that.

I sort of believe it is a scam also and without a working demo, it will remain a scam to me.  It's easy to produce videos and in the years and years they've been selling this line it would have been easy to kill all of the nay sayers with a simple tech demo.  But you can't get investment dollars for a lousy tech demo like you can for a pretty video.

I may dig up the link from the JME forums where this was discussed even before notch posted about it.

[diegokilla]

I hope that this is real My mind boggles at the thought of what could be done with this.

[randomprofile]

I'm not educated very much on the topic of graphic design, how ever my programming side says it's a scam simply because you cannot do "unlimited" things with the CPU's we use now... How ever, can paul please explain to me whats the deal with "They repeat the same objects many times". Could someone recreate something like this if all they had to do is repeat the same objects over and over. Which leads me to an idea for NPC for Mythruna, could you model lets say 10 colors of hair, shirt, pants, shoes, and/or hats. Then make the game generate a random number every start and make every NPC look somewhat different, then store the  NPC data in the save. Sure you would find copies... but alot less bad idea? good?

[BenKenobiWan]

The biggest issue I see with it is like Notch said:

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.

An interview or two were done after that, I think, and they never addressed this. If they just made the same model over and over, though, it might work.

[pspeed]

It's still pretty near impossible (I like to hedge my bets but I really do think it's a scam).

My only point was (like Ben says) that if it isn't a scam then for all the reasons Notch mentions, they would have to have some kind of killer compression that was somehow still fast enough to index into to find the right value for the voxel.

When you look at the island in the video... and I look at it with Mythruna eyes so I see "blocks" even where there aren't any... the whole thing looks like a block world to me.  It's just that some of the blocks can be elephant statues, some can be palm trees, etc..  That could either be because the person that made their scam video was really lazy, or because they were trying to make their scam video appear real by giving us something to explain the data issues, or because it's real and that is one of the ways they deal with data explosion.

Even still, they'd have to have some way to compress even a single block and somehow be able to render that quickly from compressed data.

I can guess about ways to do this.  I know how I would try to do this.  But it does not pay to speculate, really, since a) it could all be fake, b) the way I'd do it is probably the way most other 3D devs would do it, c) if that's actually the way then it's not very novel because anyone would think about it given the same limitations... which means that in that case either it's a scam or they are naive.

So if it's real... they have found ways to do four or five different things that seem impossible or overly limited to the rest of us.

[diegokilla]

Nanomachines.

/end debate

Seriously though, that guy in the video (and the whole team including the interviewer) just oozes suspicion. However I do still hope this is legit, for the gaming industries sake.

[scorch]

I don't think it's complete scam, but also I don't think things are completely like they say they are. As Paul said, the size of the files would be giant if they were going to save all the atoms. What they mean by unlimited detail I think, is because there are no polygons, so a simple cube would eat as much performance as a high-poly character. I believe that if this technology gets optimized to be used in regular games, they will have to use some sort of compression for the model files, perhaps like movie files. So if there were 1000 atoms wich were very similar or even the same, it would create some kind of container shape with the information about it, which could save a lot of space.

For the first years (if this ever gets out), this technology will probably be used by Holywood blockbusters, to get even more realism to their computer-rendered environments, since with a few modifications, this can make possible to simulate the real path of light and it's effects, as also accurately simulate water and such fluids. And for filmmakers, space is less precious than performance.

It's like when someone remembered to say that Earth was round, nobody believed. Even now, we don't accept strange things that seem impossible for us. Just my two cents.

[pspeed]

Yes, but the earth is in a system that we only have a small percentage of understanding.

This program has to run on hardware that is 100% fully understood by millions of people... since it was a system 100% manufactured by man.

I think the chance that they've come up with something so far in outer space that none of us can understand how it works is probably pretty slim.

The fact the no one outside of their company seems to have played a tech demo leans it squarely into the realm of vaporware.

Prediction: 3-4 years from now, we'll still be talking about this wondering if it's real or not.  After all, these discussions have been going on for a couple years just for this company.

I'd like to believe it is real.  I'd also like to believe that time travel is real.  I think they are about as likely... and the fact that I've never sent myself a message back in time is reasonable confirmation that time travel is not invented in my life time.

[randomprofile]

That... or machines rule the future which reminds me the Mass Effect story is very nice... never played any of the games but I read the almost the whole Mass Effect wiki It's about how some AI using the reapers to keep killing organic life in the solar system every few million years to prevent organic life from creating "machine" life forms (forgot the technical term) since machine life forms always tend to be better then the organic and would eventually wipe out all organic life forms including the reapers soooo the reapers destroy the galaxies populace before it can achieve that level of technology and to allow better, stronger organic life to form after them. cool shit

[scorch]

@Paul Well, they played a demo on the interview. Unless you are saying the interviewer (who played it with by himself) belongs to the company, then someone outside the company really played the demo.

Also, this technology exists for many years , it hasn't just been adopted because it still didn't reach the quality of polygons-based rendering. Actually, games like Minecraft and Mythruna (at least until now) are voxel games that use polygons, but they could use the same technique as Euclideon. The main diference is that the blocks form Mythruna and Minecraft are much bigger than simple atoms, but are voxels too.

[pspeed]

@Paul Well, they played a demo on the interview. Unless you are saying the interviewer (who played it with by himself) belongs to the company, then someone outside the company really played the demo.

Also, this technology exists for many years , it hasn't just been adopted because it still didn't reach the quality of polygons-based rendering. Actually, games like Minecraft and Mythruna (at least until now) are voxel games that use polygons, but they could use the same technique as Euclideon. The main diference is that the blocks form Mythruna and Minecraft are much bigger than simple atoms, but are voxels too.

I don't know the interviewer.  I don't know what smoke and mirrors they have.  If they setup a demo at a trade show and let random people walk up and play then maybe I'll start believing.

It's not the same technique that minecraft and Mythruna use even if the source data might be similar.  We take simple low-resolution voxels and turn them into sets of polygons.  This is very straight forward but cannot be scaled up to the "atom" level.

If these guys had anything novel that could deal with arbitrary source data then they'd already be making a fortune in the medical imaging market.  You deal with HUGE point clouds.

So, if it's real, the source data must be highly compressed and highly contrived.

I guess we'll know for sure in 10 years or so.

[Moonkey]

Actually time travel IS believable, we can only time travel back to when time travel was invented. So as soon as we make a time-machine someone in the future is going to go through his/her time machine and destroy ours. So it's most likely we will just see an explosion as soon as we start it up. 

My kaspersky anti-virus is flipping out about things... It says Youtube has...
A dangerous link. (through its reputation service) Even to paul's channels.

[randomprofile]

I won't even begin to go into the details of why time travel is impossible... but for your entertainment