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According to this interview...

I'd say, I don't really understand his choice for octrees, he would get about 3 times the performance if he used kd-trees... But besides this...

Comments? Thoughts? :-)

nystep: Do you really think that after reading an interview you can say anything about the change in performance he'll get by switching data-structures?

yes. just so you know, it's not the first time i read the word raytracing.

Nystep, the real question is :

The day Carmack claims eating poo is healthy, how many faithful followers will change their daily diet without even questioning his arguments ? :)

is this the same Carmack who doubted the use of multi-core processors in games programming?

(o_O) I think you didn't get Carmack's point of view.

/former post to nystep :)

omfg that American site *depicted* john carmack. i'm going to burn their flag.

Eating poo is about 3 times healthier than eating fish

Apart from that the sparse voxel octree is quite good, given dedicated hardware.

"quite a good idea" i wanted to say. memory usage is a point tho, but as Carmack won't do anything below a few hundred gigs per level anyway, that's probably no issue for him :)

nystep: and btw, octrees lean toward an efficient hardware implementation, as traversing them just means "flip and leave out bits". KD trees are my choice for software space traversal too tho :)

I know what a voxel is, I know what an octree is..

What are sparse voxel octrees?

knos, as far as i've understood you have voxels but only store the "surface" voxels that's needed for rendering instead of a full volume. This data is (in contrast to a 'full' voxel space) quite sparse and you can easily partition it using octrees.

It's almost TOO simple. :)

... and if those voxels are small enough to have a quite 1:1 voxel<->screen pixel representation, you can store tex coords and normals with them and basically use normal pixel/fragment shaders to render them. And geometry level of detail is no problem at all, too.

As said, given dedicated hardware this could fly; and I'm saying this despite normally being in the "carmack si teh overrated" in-crowd too :)

And the intent is then to use those voxes as organisational structure / description of the geometry to be then rasterized traditionally? That's sort of what I could get from his description, which like the octrees themselves, was a bit "sparse"

ah ok so no :)

well, if he starts coding such an engine now.. that'll take let's say 5 years.. by then we all have quadbussed octocores clocked at 4,4ghz with 32gig RAM!! (and nuclear fusion of smth with nitrogen to power all that + the being the cooling unit simultaneously) MARK MY WORDS!!!

then again, we'd also have the ATi Radeon XX800 XXL that could do it a lot quicker the raster way... hmmm

also, ue4 will probably not focus that much on PC anymore!

What the hell is "John C" wearing?

a blue shirt...

Oh, come on. I mean, he coded some of the most incredible games ever. He founded ID and earned a great deal of money, plus a few extra Ferraris. He's trying to push the limits of the hardware and has gained credit in the 3D-acceleration industry. And now, he's launching rockets in Oklahoma, trying to basically bootstrap a new private stage in the space race.

Take two seconds and explain to me : what's gonna REALLY impress you, guys ? :D

A manly blue & pink short, with his blue Tshirt inside the short. This is the style of the future.

where's toxie...