Tired of video games where the trees aren’t round, but squared-off hexagons? So are the people at Unlimited Detail Technology. They say they’ve invented a way to go beyond polygons (the current method of improving graphics is just to have smaller and smaller polygons) and display graphics as pixels on your screen.
If you read their “What Is It” page, it sounds like they are doing all the hard work ahead of time, so that your computer only has to work out where the camera is, not what the background is supposed to look like.
Promising, sure, unless you want to have backgrounds that the player can interact with. Or if you want to have other characters moving around that haven’t been pre-rendered. We already have high-def pre-rendered cutscenes.
If you download their showcase video, you’ll see that it all sounds very convincing, but pay attention — they say absolutely nothing about animating their ‘unlimited detail’. It all sounds like textbook vapourware to me.
(Thanks to PatJ, who posted this on his Facebook)
Grant Hamilton
-
Colin