Hypatia Callisto

Read about the voxel rendering and the compression. It's a lot like how irradiance caching works. A subset of the full data, which is highly compressible.


It's a peer to peer system.

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Compulsion

That makes no sense. the whole point of it is that they can stream an image far beyond the capabilities of the users machine directly to them and yet at the same time its rendered on several other users machines? if the sum total of the collective users processing power is less than the total needed to render the images what happens then? and considering the average home pc is far from the latest hardware that's no small problem.

Charlemagne Allen

Even if that works, I really can't imagine it succeeding if it can only be run in Crysis-ready rigs.

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Hypatia Callisto

No, they are trying to put Crysis level graphics on iPhones and Eee's. But Crysis level rigs will be doing some of the crunching.

If they succeed, watch SL's "business customers" empty out in droves.

Chalice Yao

Sorry, gotta call it pure vaporware until there is any kind of beta. To pull something like this off for thousands of users at once requires a little more than mere cloud computing.

And if it's not supposed to handle thousands of users, it's not an SL rival.

Hypatia Callisto

Some people are like me and do 3d graphics development, and refresh our computers every several years. I also don't see the traditional gamer going away. I already do distributed rendering on several computers on a network. Irradiance caching can be saved as maps to be rendered by several computers on a network at once.

This stuff exists for 3d programs *now* ... the difference here is that it will be adapted to virtual worlds.

More from the white paper:

It's in the white paper, like ragu

Hypatia Callisto

*shrugs*

Yes, of course, let's ignore all those videos, movies and commercials which are rendered in real time with OTOY.

No, can't exist.

It does exist and is a real time rendering engine. What we don't know yet is if its going to be a useful tech for a virtual world.

Liveplace might be vapor - OTOY isn't vapor at all. It's existing and it IS being used in Hollywood.

Right. Now.

But hey, let's all give money to former SL bankers. That's the cool kids thing to do

I'm not. I'll wait and see if new technology develops, more of the same that I'm fed up with in SL is not what I want.

Compulsion

you seem to be taking peoples rather obvious reasons for sceptisism somewhat personally?

Hypatia Callisto

When it doesn't state or goes as far to misstate what the technology is actually doing, I get a bit annoyed. I see distributed computing working very well. Bittorrent works very fine. So does all my 3d software that leverage other computers over the network for rendering.

I've not been against a little scepticism. Yes there are problems that need to be overcome. The compression problems, most certainly. I've been poking into their claims, yes.

But going as far to label the developers of various aspects of this software as a fraud by some, is going way way too far. I've seen that this is not scepticism. It's propaganda bordering on libel, and yes, I have something of an allergy to this sort of propaganda.

But of course I understand the why. Nearly every person who has gone that far, has had a vested interest in LibSL or OpenSim. I see this as Open Source religion and not scepticism as you say. Which is fairly sad, considering... as open source often has things to offer in some aspects. But its not really the answer for virtual worlds - only part of one.

I'm not against Opensim grids per se, but I don't think they are the future either. In fact they don't even work as well as SL, and SL doesn't scale very well.

Can an SL sim support more than 40 people without turning into a lagfest? No. And forty people in a sim is not a "massive amount" of users.

Does SL stream a tremendous amount of image data - You betcha. I'd dearly like to see if OTOY is actually streaming more data than an overtextured and oversculptied SL sim. I somehow suspect those numbers might be a little surprising.

Do SL clients do any computing across the network for lower end clients - No, and SL doesn't even test the capacities of high end graphics cards. It's far more bloated than the OTOY voxel rendering approach, at the same time poorer in graphics quality.

Compulsion

"The video was available to the public at LivePlace.com alongside the ambiguous headline “Live or Virtually Live?”, but apparently nobody was supposed to find it. Soon after we published the post, LivePlace removed the video from its servers. Brad Greenspan, the entrepreneur behind MySpace who owns LivePlace, says that the site was never meant to be seen by the public, explaining that it was for internal mockups, viral videos, and “something similar to a Funny or Die episode.” That explanation doesn’t sit well with me, but it’s unlikely we’re going to get anything more substantial out of Greenspan.

So what about that 3D virtual world - is it a sham?
Jules Urbach, founder of OTOY, explains that while he can’t comment on what Liveplace is doing (or why they released the video), virtual worlds running on the rendering engine in the video are on the way. He says this video isn’t representative of his system’s capabilities (which have actually improved since the footage was shot), and is actually just a number of random clips spliced together by Liveplace:"


"One concern readers had beyond the lack of consistency seen in the video is the possibility that it contains material pirated from other artists. The video begins with a brief clip of cars that is apparently taken from a artists’ portfolio and was originally created years ago. As it turns out, the footage is old, but Jules Urbach explains that the artist is now part of the OTOY team:"

Lordfly Digeridoo

Uh. So let me get this straight.

Crysis rigs will be doing real-time ray-tracing with other Crysis rigs, as well as smaller, less powerful machines (cell phones, EeePC) in an ad-hoc rendering cluster, at 30 frames per second, for clients on cell phones as well as the aforementioned Crysis rigs and eeePCS?

So an ad-hoc, decentralized render farm is going to do live ray-tracing on data that is going to have to be analyzed, chopped up, and distributed on a network constantly in every possible direction for 30 frames a second? With photorealistic graphics on an eeePC? OVER A PEER TO PEER NETWORK? WITH REALTIME MOVEMENT AND INTERACTION?

What the fuck are you smoking?

If they succeed, expect the second coming of Christ, hell to freeze over, and the Mayans to blow the world up at the same fucking time too.

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Charlemagne Allen

But how good will the graphics of that be? That would melt down (and then freeze) a rendering farm.

Lordfly Digeridoo

Sure, if we all had fat bandwidth pipes up and down to transmit the retarded amount of data needed to do real-time raytracing.

BT works great if you have an hour to kill to transmit 600 megs over a well-seeded network of properly connected computers. You're not pulling warez off a series of iPhones with BitTorrent.

Likewise, your 3d software is rendering on a) a local network, with conditions much more optimal than even the best internet connection, and b) a frame every 15 minutes, rather than 30 frames a second.

I hear the physics problems are a fucking bear too. They'll have to rewrite the second and third laws of thermodynamics.

Try prozac.

So, how much money do you have invested in OTOY?



A render farm of iPhones isn't the answer for virtual worlds either.

Nothing scales as well as vaporware does.

It's more than zero.

If they're streaming a static environment that has no interactive graphics to speak of (aside from moving around), I'm sure they can stream it very nicely. But that's not a very compelling virtual world, it's a 3d painting.

It also is a completely dynamic environment, one that can change from second to second almost violently. A rendering farm setup is going to be more static than my television set on channel 99.

Lordfly Digeridoo

Let's create an ad-hoc network of eeePCs and find out! It'll be prettier than Crysis and solve all the world's problems too! Also, free kittens made of candy!

Chalice Yao

Ohhh, you're getting me wrong then.

I'm not saying there is no real time renderer. I'll instantly believe a networked realtime renderer is no problem, on a cluster at a datacenter location. Depending on rendering quality, that could be done ages ago. Actually, there is a port of the quake3 engine that, with a modern graphics card, raytraces in realtime. Of course the graphics are kind of 1999.

Heck, nVidia is getting ready to do a mixture of classic GPU rasterization and raytracing in one chip in the future sometime, when they need to enhance GPUs that way due to not being able to cope with the power and/or transistor increases (tho it won't be pure raytracing for years and years to come.). They will get into a fight with Intel's Larabee first, anyways.

I just don't believe the cloud RT renderer will be used for much more than individual applications for a long, long, long, long time. The networked nodes will all be at one, maybe two datacenters. And basically no mass usage by random clients.

Hope that clarifies things.