Atomontage Engine - A Large Game-Like Scene

[jokegred]

One more thing, I have a couple of ideas for you:

A)Try bullet physics. It's free and open source, and works well.

B)Go open source. You can later close up the code, but you would be AMAZED at how many people would help.

C)If you go open source, release the beta/ alpha for people to help

Oh, and a couple questions:

How is this with animation?

Does it support image textures and regular polygons?

If it will be for purchase, how much $ will it cost?

What about menus?

Other than that, awesome!

[hedanit0]

The camera movement seems very inconsistent. Is that because the engine is loading in voxels and lagging because of it, or is it just the recording software?

[jonas26a]

The landscape shots are pretty amazing. I think voxels have a bright future. Nice work

[bwrightau]

@suckots Compression can reduce an expression to less then 1 bit. Take for instance the sequence: R R R R R R R B which could be represented as 7 R 1 B. In this instance you can see how each value of R is less then 1 bit in effect.

[suckots]

less than one bit ? :D lol thats nonsense

[AtomontageEngine]

@suckots that's the average value (read the discussion below)

[Antidoxy]

Wow what happens at 3:05??

[masterman321]

Your engine - penis = worth million$!!!! rooting for you!! keep it up...

[KeehanR]

When will this engine be out?

[tmantonym]

All voxel engines have a distinct lighting effect it seems...

[ghost59able]

thats is awesome

hey can you help me make my game engine

[protox4]

Best thing I like about this is the fog at the beginning of the video. All the game's I've played when there's fog it only shows up when you get into it, and it doesn't even look good. Here it looks fantastic! I wonder what it looks like up close....

[oysi93]

Less than 1 bit? That's ridiculous. Because 1 bit can only be true and false. You must mean 1 byte, or a couple of bytes. You can't possibly store position and color in 1 bit.

[whoppix]

@oysi93

"blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa­aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah" (this string takes up 55bytes, each character is represented by one byte)

"bl52ah" (takes up 6bytes/48bits)

this way, I've compressed the original string to less than 1 bit per byte, without any loss of information, assuming the compression-scheme is well-defined and you know how to reverse it. This is an example, and this is not how you compress strings. But it's a simple proof that storing things in less than one bit works.

[oysi93]

@whoppix

The typical color bit used these days is 24. RGB, each component uses up a byte. And by looking at the nice colors and shading from this demonstration, it's a safe bet there's a wide variety of colors. But for the sake of argument, let's say there are only 256 colors. String compression methods have indeed proven most helpful, but only at compressing to ..say, 70% of the original size. Heck, even with 50% each voxel takes up 4 bits. And that's with only 256 colors!

[whoppix]

@oysi93 When you say each color takes 24 bits, you are talking about the data not being compressed at all. String comp. can get MUCH higher compression rates than 70%, but it depends on the algorithm you use, and what kind of text you're compressing. It's the same with colored dots in space -- the more you know about them, the better you can compress them. The question is just what kind of compression is practical in terms of CPU usage, etc.

[whoppix]

@oysi93 Note also that compression doesn't typically act on single entities/voxels (though it might do that as well), but on many. Say "This block of voxels here, I'll use lots of data to describe the surface, but the inside can basically be described by 'fill with brown'". Or Pi, for instance: You can write Pi, which takes up 2b, but you can expand it into an infinite stream of bits that never repeat. It's a question of what's practical, feasible, clever and how much you know about your data.

[oysi93]

@whoppix

Yes, I agree you can extensively compress such data. But face it, LESS than 1 bit used up per voxel is just not possible. No matter what you do, you cannot compress it that much. Such kind of raw data just cannot be compressed to 4% of the original size (And by raw I mean that he uses a wide variety of colors, which can be arbitrary). It's just not possible.

[DiamondGameplay]

ohman why notch dont use a other engine :D

[shogg]

too many people are focused on the artwork in this scene, this is to show the capabilities of an engine that is coming along tremendously and that voxel technology with physics and animation is practical afterall

[acolon001]

@shogg

I agree. most people didn't read his site tho. The main problem ppl don't understand is the guy doesn't have beastly hardware to generate the initial data (this would be done by the devs in the realworld, not the gamers) so to make faster progress he has to cut out options that would increase how nice it all looks to generate a level under 10 hours or so. If he had something beefier he could generate the terrain with more detail in a reasonable amount of time, thats how i understand it.

[acolon001]

@shogg ohh yea i forgot to mention, the vehicle is polygon based. His engine merges the best of both worlds. It's actually quite amazing and a stroke of genius. On his site he describes this scene and here is a quote: "The video also features an old-style polygon-mesh based model of a truck."

So that truck you see here is polygon based, not voxel. It's a great idea IMO.

I don't think i've been this excited about new technology since 3DFX came out with their first GPU.

[TomFuIp]

looks nice zoomed out

[sspope]

It looks as ugly as Comanche 3

[Rami1997]

guess what dude....you're gonna change how we play games ;)

[SupremeCommander360]

That would make one hell of an rts.

[IXconnorXI]

I have no idea what any of this means but if it means better graphics then I'm 100% for it :)

[hartejoseph]

Your art work is of pretty high standard as well.What do you think of unlimited details point cloud system.I know their art work and physics are not the most mind blowing but for geometry it has put the bar up.Is your work compatible my be a solution for both parties if you brought your work together.

[MiJaEllis]

@hartejoseph I don't know this has unlimited detail beat on pretty much every spectrum. Don't see why you would want collaboration.

[hartejoseph]

@MiJaEllis Its still a blocky up close like I say put the two together and you would have an awesome beast

[therewillbeboredom]

How many voxels are in this map?

[rydude998]

If Minecraft looked like this I'd shit orphans.

[MiJaEllis]

@rydude998 like 1 voxel = 1 block?

that would be exhausting!

[HAWXLEADER]

now create a cool racing game with this technology where you will be able to shoot the racers with weapons and bullets will remove voxels and weapons will cause random partial damage that will affect physics

[lentoman]

NASA really should have invested in this instead of going to Mars, would have made it a lot cheaper to produce those photos of sand and rocks. ;)

[wallerron]

I'd love to see a solution around the adherence-factor. that is the different adherence between the bricks in a wall, and the mortar - or the leaf and every branch in a tree.

any considerations?

[outbackshaqYT]

neat when I saw the voxels expand, it made me wonder if further away scenery could just be told to be larger, and render slightly blurry. that way it would seem like there was less detail, but it would be just a quick command for something like zooming in on a scope to get high detail

[Therysinx]

Euclideon is better. Keep up the work tho :).

[MadocComadrin]

@Therysinx Aside from the fact that Euclideon is a scam, this already has physics and actual scenes instead of some piece of crap island full of repeated objects.

[00Deific00]

I've got a vauxhall

[MyMMC]

keep up your awesome work guys...

[ross817]

I would LOVE to see dynamic water using a voxel engine like this one.

[Swablerk]

Sound would be nice :3

[DontEatTheReaper]

Cortex Command 3D, anyone?

[ipaqmaster]

@DontEatTheReaper

That idea is what lead me here =P

[ShuddupChip]

2:57 Gentlemen, I give thee MINECRAFT!!!!!!!!!

[Geoxile]

Interesting to see voxels return in a big way, besides minecraft.

[93Gamerz]

A minecraft sandbox like game with that graphics = Epic!

[Reavenk]

Freaking sweet. Is the collision detection between the truck and terrain using voxels, or a geometry proxy?

[Big5000K]

This is so sexy.

[XenonMan1]

Thank God I am part of the Data Realms Family.

2 things I am hoping for:

1) That this game turns out to be a huge hit.

2) And that I donate $50 to the developement of this game.

[minxamo]

TECHNOLOGY

[InternetLad]

who else watched the whole thing waiting for an explosion to show off destructible enviroment that never came.

[shoplifting1is1fun]

@InternetLad

I know haha, it's like what else are destructible environments made for?

[bernverdnardo1]

Hey man cool engine. Can you giv any hints about the compression scheme?  I've noticed an octree is difficult to RLE encode- did you use a fixed grid and RLE it that way (no octree?). Do you use other algorithms than RLE?

[LightningBeast]

holy shit ! imagine an rts game like this ,where you can zoom in to real person size and just watch the whole shit like a movie or something

[RaggyFTWW]

Looks good from afar, awful up close :/

[jarblewarble]

This looks like a potential successor to Minecraft!

[XenonMan1]

@jarblewarble or Cortex Command.

*I hope*

[KaLul1]

This looks so fucking awesome!!!! That means... future games with full destructible everything??? :D OMG!!!! I am happy to live in 21th century

[jarblewarble]

@KaLul1 Minecraft is one of the best-known games with a fully destructible environment, but I don't know of many others.

[InternetLad]

@jarblewarble a 2d side scroller called "Cortex Command" is another one, reminiscent of the old style "tank" games where you'd lob things back and forth but fully fleshed out. it's indie and still in development but still hella fun

[myteoboy]

Выглядит как настоящеее все

[Dth091]

This is very, very nice. I've always had some strange fascination with voxels, and this video blew me away with the level of detail at the start. When the engine is 'finished' (although nothing like this is ever truly finished :P), will you be licensing it to game companies?

[Perskjans]

What is the engine maximum resolution and framerate?

[monstercameron]

is the truck made of voxels?

[MGinshe]

@monstercameron No, the truck is made of Polys :) Not sure if you even still want to know xD

[LinesGrey]

@monstercameron in my opinion not. At 2:55 there is no compression on it (as they show this feature) AND -if they turned it off for the truck- at 4:53 you see the triangle lightning caused edges. (if you want to see it ;D )

..but better you get an answer from the producer!

[youmakeitwhatitis]

@monstercameron no the website says the truck is a polygon model. I think part of the idea here is hybrid rendering.

[15Larsy]

@monstercameron No the truck's just polygons

[Ichvyenichalster]

@monstercameron EVERYTHING IS

[PandaMojo]

Compression is all about taking advantage of patterns. If you have a perfect cube of a single color made of 32x32x32 voxels, you don't have to store each voxel -- you can just store 'there's a cube here' in a handful of bytes (only storing e.g. position and size) -- much less than the 32x32x32 bits = 4096 bytes. Even this pattern will appear a lot in a scene with lots of solid underground areas.

Depending on the scene and how you count, 1 bit / voxel can be trivial, or it can be impossible.

[AtomontageEngine]

@SikGamer70 a single bit cannot be compressed, a group of a thousand can (to let's say 753, or less if the information entropy of the data allows that).. and the cascaded compression scheme in atomontage allows pretty much more than that :)

[jimbo80982]

@AtomontageEngine and at the cost of cpu time surely?

[minhtri7821]

@AtomontageEngine Now i have to find SikGamer70's comment

[monstercameron]

i thought that a bit is the smallest unit in comp storage?

[metabog]

How can you possibly store a voxel in less than one bit?

[AtomontageEngine]

@metabog Hi. As stated on Atomontage website the data is organized with respect to the applied compression methods and it is compressed a number of times, each time with a different compression method (one method can't be used twice efficiently). The numbers show that the typical result will be about 0.5bit/voxel after the compression scheme is finished (currently it's slightly less than 1bit/voxel).

[IAMTHEPROCESSOR]

@AtomontageEngine Please develop for PC!

[WinterXL]

@metabog in terms of general compression, you can squeeze a uniform(ish) sequence greatly because it is just repeated data. think of a red line that is 10 pixels long. all you really need to store is the color red and the length, as opposed to recording the color info 10 times (and perhaps this info itself is compressed!). If you expand this concept to voxels, you can see how a voxel might "average" less than a bit when considering the whole.