Silkroad Online Forums

Hi, enthusiast about computer graphics research here.

These guys are grade A bullshitters. Anyone remember "Voxels"? Yeah, that's what this is. Just imagine, essentially little blocks. Pixel hits block A, and displays that. Enough blocks it looks like it's "unlimited". It can, in theory, display "unlimited" geometry. But there's about ten thousand problems with this.

First, it's not "their" technology. Demos of high density voxel structures have been around since before them. Second, there's the problem of storing these blocks. The best compression scheme I've heard of for a full 3d scheme is 8bits, or 1byte per block. For, say, a 2k x 2k resolution per meter, not super high, a square kilometer would take 3 terabytes.

Now, ok, there's ways to get much better. But even then John Carmack, the rocket scientist/graphics programming genius acknowledges that this sort of geometry would take a huge amount of storage. It's going to take a lot just to get a single game into a blu-ray.

But there's more problems then that. Can animations be done? Yes, as of this year people experimenting with this (not these guys "our tech hurf durf) have gotten it to work. But there's the question of how you stream all this data out. It's not super expensive to do it once, so the player can see whatever is in front of him. But for modern games you have to do this multiple times. Each light that casts a shadow has to "see" what the light sees, so the program can know what the light does not see (I.E. what's been shadowed). Currently graphics programmers tooling around have been able to get upwards of 256 shadow casting lights at once on screen with our familiar polygons. That's going to be hard with the more expensive voxels.

Long story short: It's not "their" tech in any sense of the word, actual game developers have and are working on the exact same thing, but with a far more realistic and reserved outlook. And secondly, there are a lot of problems to work out yet before our games start to look like big budget Hollywood productions. While certainly a good idea, don't expect it anytime soon.

Putting this here because it's near the top.

This is a consensus of points brought up last time this company's video made it's rounds (the older one with the pinkish models, I can't say these as facts, but if you think of them logically they make sense.

This company is a fraud and everything he talked about in this video and their previous one is mostly bullshit (with our current technology)

Basically they make these crazy amazing videos to get people to invest in their company, then they just pocket the money. Notice how the unlimited example clips are all the same models??

Also, the game industry is all about one upping the other company's; so if this were in fact real at this present time, it would have already been bought by one of the industry giants.

Not to mention all the other problems; such as this will never run on game consoles, cutscenes, animation etc.

protip: it's actually pre-rendered

Edit 1: ****, got buried in a comment train. If one of the other people who have a top comment want to copy/paste they can.

Edit 2: I'm just as disappointed as the rest of you and would love to believe it's true, but as someone who works with technology I can say it just doesn't seem real at all.

The original videos on Youtube are 1+ year old and nothing has progressed with the technology besides adding some color and a single rock. Also note that the Youtube page was made yesterday, trying to disassociate themselves with the older Youtube account (probably because the comments are filled with people calling them out and them not being able to back it) and that their website is nearly blank aside from a few paragraphs spread across templates.