"There are a bunch of techniques people typically consider being voxel-based. The oldest ones used in games were height-map based where the renderer interpreted a 2D map of height values to calculate boundary between the air and the ground in the scene. That‘s not truly a voxel-based approach as there‘s no volumetric data set in use (ie in Delta Force 1, Comanche, Outcast, and others)."
I saw them doing the same pitch for a decade now, can't find old version because I don't remember their original name but I do remember their terrain demo.
The Notch blog post you linked mentions Euclideon’s “Infinite Detail”. I’ve looked into that over the years (but don’t know anything about Atomontage), so will post my thoughts here.
My understanding of Euclideon (based on the snippets of information, interviews and videos they’ve released) is that the primary technology they created is an on disk spatial index and streaming system that allows only the data that is on screen to be streamed from disk, allowing them to have very large and complex datasets on disk while still rendering in real time. The “infinite detail” branding was referring to that the detail possible is only limited by disk space, not by rendering performance.
That sounds pretty cool to me and not a scam as many people think.
However, they’ve never been particularly convincing in the applicability to games or even that the quality gains are as high as they claim. They kept touting how easy it is for artists since they can 3d scan real objects and use that scan data almost directly (but many polygonal models start as scans too, so...), but I’ve never been impressed with the quality of their scans or demos. Their highest quality demos are nice (a lot nicer than their earlier demos which, to me, honestly looked like it was from the 90s) but they still don’t compare to modern games in my opinion. They also have not proven that it works well for animations or dynamic lighting and shadowing. At least, they’ve never demonstrated it.
They did use their tech for their Holoverse[0] games, but, again, the quality of the actual graphics wasn’t particularly impressive in my opinion (certainly the animations seemed stiff and boring) and from reviews I’ve seen on YouTube, VR headsets provide a better experience and superior quality.
So, my verdict is that they do have some novel and interesting tech, but they haven’t been able to get anywhere close to the quality claims that they’ve made and I certainly wouldn’t bet on them over more traditional modern graphics.
Euclideon are scammers not because they have nothing, but because they don't have what they claim they have. They claim to have revolutionary technology; they have something so well-understood that even I, merely an interested layman in the field of graphics, understand what they have just fine, very nearly well enough to just sit down and implement the core data structure right now, with no sign I've ever seen that they have anything beyond that. They claim to be able to animate in realtime, despite the fact that one of the tradeoffs of the tech is that becomes impossible in the sense we mean it. (You can animate much like a cel-based cartoon, but it can't be very interactive except on very restrictive conditions, ones that virtually no modern graphics user could accept.) It's delta between the rather pedestrian tech they have and the wild claims they make that is the scam, not what they do have.
I've heard it claimed that the whole company is basically a Germany-specific tax dodge method. I have no independent verification of this, but it fits the facts I have about their behavior.
> not because they have nothing, but because they don't have what they claim they have
Absolutely.
> animation
Yep, from what I’ve seen of their holoverse ganes, that’s exactly what they’re doing and the results are, predictably, not particularly impressive. When compared to state of the art notion captured animation we have in modern games, it’s really not very good at all.
> data structure
It may be just their hype as opposed to actual facts, but they certainly make it sound a bit more sophisticated than a “traditional” spatial-index tree data structure in the sense that they claim they can stream just the voxels that are on screen at any given moment from a huge on disk dataset. But we both know they’ve been known to exaggerate, so you could very well be correct.
> It's delta between the rather pedestrian tech they have and the wild claims they make that is the scam, not what they do have.
"It may be just their hype as opposed to actual facts, but they certainly make it sound a bit more sophisticated than a “traditional” spatial-index tree data structure in the sense that they claim they can stream just the voxels that are on screen at any given moment from a huge on disk dataset."
To be honest, while I don't have that much difficulty imagining that they can stream voxels off a disk (since it's a straightforward application of the oct-tree structure; you get a good 50% of the way there just by writing a naive octtree larger than memory and letting the OS swap algorithm do its thing, with some slight preloading), none of the demos they've ever showed should require anything to be streamed off the disk. Everything I've seen would firmly fit in memory of very modest desktop systems of the time of the demo. It's possible you can zoom in farther than they demonstrate, but, I mean, it's a demo. I'm allowed to expect they're showing off the best.
This is another one of the reasons people like me call them scammers; the first few graphics demos they put out weren't even that impressive. They were ugly and lacking in detail. They weren't even the kind of ugly you get when you have an impressive graphics tech and the person showing it off has no visual design chops, they were just plain ugly. Had the demos gone around the internet, but stripped of the hype they were accompanied with, nobody would have given them a second look. Any contemporary nVidia demo put out to demonstrate their graphics card look wildly better.
The demos where they scan real scenes and display them work much better. The weirdest thing of all to me is that they don't lean into that and just make that their business, but no, they won't shut up about how awesomesauce their stuff will be for games, even when they have a perfectly sensible application developed. Bizarre stuff.
yeah notch is talking about a different engine with overly bold claims, but given the technological overlap many of the talking point overlaps.
for example, animation and deformation, light mapping and content production are still going to be issues. sure they have a motion captured talking person and it's impressive, but it's still part of a fixed content pipeline, if you require ragdoll animation or an interactive actor it's way harder.
"There are a bunch of techniques people typically consider being voxel-based. The oldest ones used in games were height-map based where the renderer interpreted a 2D map of height values to calculate boundary between the air and the ground in the scene. That‘s not truly a voxel-based approach as there‘s no volumetric data set in use (ie in Delta Force 1, Comanche, Outcast, and others)."