I've seen this video posted on youtube talking about a way to give computer graphics "unlimited power" I've seen some of the graphics they were talking about in the video, and they were very impressive you could even see grains of dirt ( it sounds dumb but trust me you'll know what I'm talking about).

View it here.

Unless i could see some animations on that, i am not really all that impressed.

I believe this technology has been in the works for a while now...

But it's good to see it coming along nicely!, just wondering how this works from an artists point of view, how do you make those grains of sand....

You make the model In, Max, Maya or many other modelling programs, Then convert it into the particle technology.

Yeah, but then what?, I suppose they have an editor or the likes that handles such things, that will have to be integrated into whatever game engine uses it...

The bottom line seems to be you have to make immensely detailed models one by one as you would before, then convert and add into the engine....

I know one thing, games that use this technology will take a lot longer to make, even if you use certain tricks....

Yay! I was playing Medal of Duty: Battlewar the other day and thinking to myself "If only I could see the grains of dirt, that's all its missing!" These game are completely awesome and innovative in every other way, I mean look at those magnificent, revolutionary, earth-shattering stories, plots, characters, themes, art and mechanics! (Not to mention how they keep you thoroughly entertained for 100 hours and cost on $30.) The graphics are certainly the weakest point... Increasing the costs of producing games will definitely have good results for everyone.

I personally find the games pretty enough, even if I think the fact that the consoles are "slowing" the graphic upgrade is pretty much a good thing actually, nobody needs to upgrade every year their computer to get the best benefit of their games. And also it forces the developers to find techniques or rendering that guarant fluidity and prettiness in therms of graphics.

Now personally I lost my hype towards games graphics because I saw that the graphics aren't the most important thing in games, a game have to look good, that's certain, I don't think anyone will sell a game using lithtech 1 engine and hope to get sales, because the game will look very awful.

I think the industry should focus more on gameplay and even find tricks that makes stuff being easy to do. I just see that everytime we progress in graphics technology, more the games are difficult to produce, though actually it's pretty possible to make different bits of objects and make them appearing in different ways so it saves power and the game is still looking good.

When I say focusing more on gameplay, it's about level design, player movement, interactivity, challenge and good use of the scripts...

Haha, good one...

And if we just increase the advertising budget from %70 to at least %85, we can get people to buy this lovely bucket of shiny gold sick....

I really don't see the point in all this graphics hype, the technology we have now is enough to get a good point across with frankly, still a lot of work...

If it requires even more graphically to get a game to sell, then we are losing our way.. We have enough shiny rubbish out there already as it is, we don't need more...

I can just see what'll happen, games will be %10 gameplay(if you're lucky), and %90 work put into graphics, thus more rubbish games that look shiny but have all the contents of an un-flushed toilet...

Indie developers with low, even, really low budgets will be the only way to turn for innovative gameplay and proper substance in a game...

To be honest, UE2 always seemed like the perfect engine. There wasn't so much graphical detail that you can't focus on what's going on, *cough*UT3*cough* and the graphics were good enough that a good artist really stands out. Sure, there are a few graphical additions I'd like to make, but I don't really like UE3 anywhere near as much.

Just in case somehow, someone missed the fact that my last post was a complete joke...

I don't think fancy new renderers are all that important. Just because the steaming subject matter of a shitty game is delivered in high fidelity doesn't make it any less crap.
I do, however, like good looking visuals, but I think this comes down more to the art than the tech. I think the DX9 era renders have great artistic potential and have certainly yielded some awesome things.

One can make the game look identical to UT2k4 using UE3. The problem is the art design. I didn't really like the art in any UE2 game and I also don't like that overly busy, blurry grey old porridge look of most UE3 games either.

My general opinion is I appreciate the potential of a good renderer, but the other aspects of the game are more important.

I prefer improvement of overall interactivity, sur physics are complete part of it.
but most games actually have a lot of details in the levels but we just can't interact with ...

One thing that I find interesting is that in a few short years, we've gone from having a few dozen triangles on-screen to having millions of them on-screen, all with insanely fancy shaders and post processing. At the same time, we've gone from having scores of enemies on-screen to having less than 10...
(I know there are 1 or 2 examples with more enemies like L4D or Serious Sam, but they are rare exceptions)

That's what i am afraid of.

Quoted from notch on his blog

"Perhaps you’ve seen the videos about some groundbreaking “unlimited detail” rendering technology? If not, check it out here, then get back to this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4

Well, it is a scam.

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."

That's pretty much what I was thinking, not necessarily the 'scam' aspect, but the obvious limitations in the technology, and their story about being able to process that amount of information is a load...

But still, this technology is whats been worked on many times since the early days. There just isn't a solution to the limitations yet...