It's not unlimited detail.

They're using a point cloud based system and either directly rendering that point cloud with a distance based sampling to draw less at a distance, or they're converting it semi-dynamically into geometry (triangles) and rendering it traditionally. Whatever they're doing it's not "unlimited" detail.

Another thing is the number of optimisation techniques they're using; the amount of repetition for example. Each of those "unlimited" blades of grass is identical, we can do that with triangles too, switching from billboards, to models when you're close enough to tell the difference and then up through levels-of-detail if needs be. Same goes with trees, bridges-made-of-bones or whatever else the problem generally isn't the detail it's memory usage and content creation.

Holding all of that in memory is a pain, deciding on LOD schemes is a pain, generating that much detail in the first place is a pain for the artists.

Their videos have always struck me as tech' looking for a purpose. In fact if anything they always strike me as being like the tile-based engines but with their "unlimited" detail for each tile, and the freedom to overlap and place the tiles arbitrarily. Then the same thought always occurs to me... why not just use geometry to do the same thing using existing pipelines?

Andy

Ah I remember this. The voice-over just screams fake 🙂

Yep, there doesn't seem to be anything new there that can't be done better using traditional methods.

They make a lot of claims about 'unlimited detail' but since they don't use fractals or procedural content its kind of hard to believe its not bullshit without several hundred banks of massive hard-drives to store their data. (Detail levels that they claim to use would use a shit load of space)

But still, even if they had this it would not be unlimited, unlimited detail means basically you require unlimited hard-drive space.

Lets take Pioneer as an example... To store just one planet, well I don't have exact figures but its a massive massive number. Like thousands of terabytes to store an entire planet at maximum detail.

I thought the only was you can get "unlimited detail" is to use procedural algorithms like Pioneer does. The video does seem a bit suspect to me.

Remember the hype about voxels when Outcast was released? It was a similar idea, and had to be abandoned somewhere between announcing the tech and releasing the game, mainly due to it being unable to live up to performance expectations.

Outcast was a voxel world with a polygonal character I think, and they're a valid way of rendering stuff, it's just that modern hardware is designed to draw triangles.

Basically triangles won the struggle for acceptance first, so the hardware went that way.

Getting it out of memory again is always the bigger pain for me... 😛