Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam

This is the biggest issue. A lot of hype, but their technology isn't very useful unless they've managed to solve some major, longstanding problems. It's extremely misleading.

I don't think that people have issue with your factual analysis of the Euclideon system. We more have an issue with your use of the word scam. Every time I watch american television, I am inundated with ads for various medical products that claim that they have been scientifically PROVEN to do x, y or z. I know for a fact that science does not give proof, it only provides evidence. This is why we call it the theory of evolution or the theory of gravity.

Now, does that make these medical products a scam? Not really. At worst that makes it false advertising.

I think the evidence you have gathered indicates strongly that there is a flip side to their advertisement, that there is still a lot of work they have to do and that their claims are probably only barely true, or are subject to strong interpretation.

But a scam? I think not. What they are doing is still pretty cool, and I am looking forward to whatever product they release.

Sparse Voxel Octrees are frickin awesome and Euclideon aren't wrong for saying so. There are drawbacks with them, but they are one by one being picked off by research. Animation is one example, dynamic lighting and shadows can be done in screen space. There is a real chance that soon enough voxels are going to be the shit for realtime rendering.

You even agree with them that rendering octrees can be thought of as a search algo but you still hold it against them? What is up with that?

Euclideon are not saying they are more awesome than everyone, they are saying they are up against the polygon industry. And in the video they are very careful to not cross that boundary, for example when the claim they are rendering at much higher geometry resolution they say "except other examples of procedurally generated geometry".

Because that's just what this is. Of course they are repeating elements, of course they are using common knowledge in their work. So are you and so everybody else. Blizzard doesn't point that out in their marketing either.

Granted, Euclideon's marketing is using a different tone than your craftsmanlike humbleness. But that doesn't make them a scam. Soon enough their code is gonna test it's mettle ut in the wild. It will be interesting to see what happens.

You are above ridiculing people based on what can be gleaned from a marketing video. Give them a break until you can ridicule their actual code. Let them have their fight against the polygon industry.

"Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging."

https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/statuses/98127398683422...

Here, though, they're suffering a huge PR backlash, which I suspect is because they're out-marketing the work of passionate amateurs and academic researchers instead of e.g. big phone companies.

It admittedly does feel dirty not to give due credit in this scenario, but I can also empathise with their desire for a descriptive term which can resonate with the general public.

On an unrelated note, I'm often impressed by how large a portion of the game development community manages to stay aware of the bleeding edge in their field. I haven't seen any other arena where that's quite so much the case.

This is the best possible attitude to have. I think calling it a "scam" is perhaps going a bit too far, I believe they can actually render what they are showing us... but I agree that this isn't really that exciting, and definitely isn't practical for the applications they talk about.

Notice that most demos which zoom in on the model don't use textures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI, because they don't have textures with high enough resolution.

There is an intermediate form, non-uniform rational b-splines or NURBs, which the first nVidia card rendered directly. That made it possible for the NV1 graphics card to render a perfect sphere with just 6 NURBs vs triangle based engines which required dozens if not hundreds of triangles to approach the visual quality of that sphere.

Of course 3Dfx (and Matrox, and NEC with their PowerVR architecture) made triangle engines, they needed fewer gates and had far easier texturing pipelines. Once the NV1 was retired I haven't seen hardware NURB support re-emerge (although it would make for a wonderful thing given a multi-billion transistor GPU).

Voxels make the argument that once you get below the oversamping fraction of a pixel, be it 1, 4, or 16, you don't need a complex structure. And while geometry culling using a z-buffer and clipping rectangle is well trod, voxel culling has some subtleties that make it more challenging.

Voxels have, to date, over promised and under delivered.

Notch's analysis is pretty much spot on, with one minor exception, the math. Just like polygon engines don't bother creating layers of polygons to represent solids, a voxel 'rock' or other solid doesn't need to represent the 'inside' with voxels, it only needs to represent the surface of the solid to a degree where you can't see between the voxels. As long as voxel resolution is comfortably above the pixel resolution of the 2D project plane (aka the screen). So lots of data to represent surfaces, but they can be 1 'atom' thick so less than the petabytes he supposed.

Rendering then is the process of taking a rectangular solid which is 1x1 pixel at the screen surface and then expands based on the field of view out from the eye, and once you've gone deep enough into the geometry such that the cross section parallell to the screen has no gaps, you can compute and render that pixel and move on. And, as the Euclideon people point out, since you're not really doing polygons at all, changing the 'complexity' (in terms of surfaces) on the scene doesn't change either the render time or the effective voxel count.

Yes, its pretty abusive of memory bandwidth, since at range the number of voxels that have to be looked at to fill a single pixel can be large. Imagine a 747 airplane flying across the sky at a visual 35,000', if its only 2 x 3 pixels by the time it renders, its still made up of potentially billions of voxels which form the surface you can see.

For a look at a game based voxel terrain engine that's been around for a couple of years, download and try the C4 demo game and editor from terathon.com! (That engine is just one guy, too)

Both of them take time to explain that all of those who create games and those who create video card DON'T want something revolutionary.

Are you kidding me?

The gaming market has defined itself on change. Most games companies work really hard to throw in extra eye candy to set show up their tech against other games (including their own previous versions). You aren't going to find a more pragmatic industry than gaming.

If you show up to GDC and show a better way to do something, the next year you will have 20 game companies using the same technique.

The gaming industry is not tied to polygons. Gaming was once 2d, and countless technologies have come and gone over the years. Any technology used 20 years ago has likely been replaced 4 or 5 times.

Video card makers compete with each other on performance and features. They aren't tied to polygons either, in fact both nvidia and ati have been enabling non polygon features. Can anyone say pixel shader's or GPGPU?

So back to the original Euclidean videos. Why try to make the ridiculous point that game and hardware companies are scared of change?

Euclideon makes the point in both videos (this years and last years) so this isn't just a foot note, but part of their main sales pitch.

It also seems counter productive for their own goals. I mean, if you honestly believe that game companies will be unwilling to change since they "invested billions [in polygon tech]...", it wouldn't be very smart to create a company that sells licensees to those same companies based on the tech that they are actively fighting against?

So here is theory one...

It's a preemptive FUD strategy meant to head off any reasonable questions about the technology. I mean if someone offers legitment questions about Euclideon's tech, then they must be in the polygon conspiracy camp and are just trying to sabotage Euclideon because of all the money they've invested in polygons, right?

We live in a world where its pretty easy to prove computer technology. Just release a compiled tech demo. Companies do it all the time. Source code doesn't get released as its compiled, and it would be great marketing for the company.

No, all we get over each year is a utube video with a bunch of claims (not to mention the videos lack animation, and i have yet to see any video game, not involve some sort of 2d or 3d animation.) The lack of any sort of tech demo is significant. Most tech companies (at least the real ones) release multiple tech demos.

This all seems like smoke and mirrors. Most people who are smart enough to invent something revolutionary are smart enough to know how much bullshit is out there and how important it is to prove ones claims. In fact, if you've actually done something, the best way to different yourself from the bullshits is to prove it.

I completely agree with Notch, Euclideon's video's all appears to be pandering to investors with no real plan to deliver. Investors aren't going to question the tech as thoroughly. This is where the "Scam" part comes from.

It explains the lack of a real tech demo. It explains the videos' lack animation and it explains why the videos include odd comments about the game industry not wanting to change.

It might not of been a scam to start. It's likely that Eucldeon didn't set out to steal money from investors. I imagine they hoped to find some novel solutions and take the tech further. I'm guessing they ran into the same limitations of the tech that others have found, then panicked and started soliciting money under false pretenses.

Repeating the same fraud, one year later kind of does make this a scam.