Games have used them, C&C:RA used them IIRC, but in terms of using them for everything in a completely 3D environment, I can't imagine that happening anytime soon.

Amongst other things Voxels suffer from the same problem with regards to GPUs that raytracing does, GPUs are designed to handle and accelerate things that are convenient for polygon based graphics. Resulting in an immediate disadvantage before any technical aspects get factored in.

Didn't the Delta Force games use voxels for something? I thought I read that somewhere. To be honest, though, I don't know enough about that kind of stuff to really know how it would affect a game.

Didn't Outcast also use voxels??

Outcast and many Novalogic games used voxels. They were mentioned earlier. The effect at the time was more natural, rolling landscapes. Compare them to a game like Jedi Knight, all hard, angular walls. Now polygon and texture resolution are high enough to conceal much of the blockiness.

Is Bruce Dell an Unlimited Detail programmer? He seems more like the pitchman for his company. Enthusiastic and a believer in what he sees from day to day, but not necessarily fully versed in the details.

He's the programmer that originated the project.

Less excuse for errors, then. At least some of it's intentional. There's an old post somewhere where he acknowledged they're basically using voxels but preferred saying atoms for marketability. The HardOCP interview is consistent with that.

LOD, DOF, CGI...easy to lose track of the original language if the abbreviation is everywhere. Meaning stays clear even though literal phrasing is lost.

Yeah, there have been a few but like you said, they're rarely solely dependant on voxel systems alone. I forget the name but I remember looking into a case study of using voxels as a base for deformable terrain, and using either NURBS * or subdivision to skin over the top. Some surprisingly sweet results for a relatively cheap overhead in both cases, think suprisingly the NURBS approach sacrificed some detail but ended up being a lil bit lighter. The Voxel system in question was on a much less detailed scale though, more like minecraft chunks as opposed to the atomic level being discussed here. Whether it ould work under load in practice though...

I think even without the specifically tailored floating point GPUs (especially with the way CUDA and the like are progressing), an atomic level voxel system would simply too expensive when applied to games. The huge increase in number crunching for any sort of realistic physics system is likely to leave it dead in the water.... or your PC on fire :P lol

* (Non uniform rational B splines for the initiated, 3D point based curves for everyone else ;) )

Hmm, maybe you should take some time away from gaming?

OK but

how are voxels different from ultra small polygons?

I just now did. =)
Some dude with text-adventure.. as said.. you can tell him to suck a lemon.

Polys are surfaces, usually triangular, and objects are represented as meshes of polys. An example of an object that can be represented exactly in triangular polys is an icosahedron (e.g. a 20-sided die).

Voxels are volumes; typical discussions show them as cubic, but they may take any packed form. An example of an object that can be represented exactly in cubic voxels is a salt crystal. Bruce Dell's technology appears to rely heavily on cubic voxels, though he claims it does not.

They have traditionally been used for different purposes. Polys are useful for anything you would construct with a wireframe editor, like character models. Voxels are useful for digital images such as medical imaging, since they can represent values at a point in 3-D (or 4-D) space efficiently.

Frankly, I think that Euclideon could subdue the more rational haters (e.g. those who are willing to change their tune when proven wrong) IF:

1. They answer truthfully the main, unanswered questions regarding the Unlimited Detail Engine.
2. They hire an artist(s) to produce movie-quality models and textures since, to their own admission, their tech-demo assets are low-quality.
3. They hire an advertising agency to do their promotions (seriously, avoiding important questions aside, using a voice-over guy who fails to convey any seriousness and not using industry-standard terminology for stuff is not the way you go about advertising The Next Big Thing!)

Just my two cents.

Forum Necro. Is anything being done with this new technology?

Not really It has some big burst of "this is awesome and new" like it had when Outcast was released but a lot of time will pass until you can make a game with that technology without heavily downgrading the rest of the graphics.

Not likely, the technology is at least 15 years old, I remember C&C used something similar to avoid needing 3d acceleration.

You'll probably see it pop up from time to time for bits of a game, but you'll never see an entire game based on it, computers and storage space are unlikely to ever be powerful enough to make it work well.

You might see a few trees or similar done like that, but procedural is really slow which is why you don't generally see it used where you also need details.