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It's not gaussian splatting, but Outcast (1999) has an interesting voxel-like rendering for the world surface. It has a pretty distinct feeling when walking around in the early areas, and a somewhat clunky but usable UI.

> The game does not actually model three-dimensional volumes of voxels. Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are modeled using texture-mapped polygons. When Outcast was developed, the term "voxel engine", when applied to video games, commonly referred to a ray casting engine (for example the Voxel Space engine). On the engine technology page of the game's website, the landscape engine is also referred to as the "Voxels engine". The engine is purely software based; it does not rely on hardware-acceleration via a 3D graphics card.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game)

by sqrt_15 hours ago|

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There was this FPS demo recently https://playcanv.as/p/qxGSuzYq/

People have also converted some small sections of Unreal 5 demos into splats https://superspl.at/scene/692c4f91

Or perhaps use a real world scan - it was suggested this one would make an ideal setting for zombies https://superspl.at/scene/6359774f

by monkpit38 minutes ago|

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Can someone explain the unreal demo linked here - is the reflection in the street also using splatting, or is it something else?

by speps16 minutes ago|

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Yes splats do reflections

by cyber_kinetist6 hours ago|

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Note that the first published work of rendering Gaussian Volumes was in this 1991 paper (https://articles.tomasparks.name/publications/Westover1991.p...) - so 3DGS is really a rehash of an old method from the 90s!

The contributions of 3DGS lie in how fast you can make them in modern GPU hardware (tiling + sorting with threads), and how to make the pipeline differentiable so that you can fit the Gaussian splats with photogrammetry data. Similar to the history of deep learning, it became technically feasible once the GPU hardware was powerful enough.

by jamwise39 minutes ago|

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I think it's inevitable it goes there. Right now the level of detail and quality of games is limited by the console/PC hardware you're playing on. But with the splats they can render the whole game's world in a massive server farm at Hollywood Movie quality. I imagine there might be some balance of splat and traditional rendering technology since not all objects will lend themselves well, but this might be truly transformative.

by grumbel5 hours ago|

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Many years ago there was a game called Casebook[1], a small little detective game where you investigated rooms for clues. But unlike similar FMV games where you jumped from point to point, it had photorealistic environments that could be smoothly walk around in, much like later lightfield or gaussian splatting experiments.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-VAaC5BgVE

by cubefox4 hours ago|

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Any idea on how they achieved this?

by Cieric3 hours ago|

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I can't say I know how they actually did it, but taking a look at the trailer I can point out that it looks like the spaces are confined and your character is on rails. I'm mainly going off of the instant direction changes that don't appear to be 45 degrees off from the camera direction. Once it's constrained down to a single line/path you could do some wild things like cube mapping a video, where the position in the video is tied to the characters position. I can't say I know how they would take that video though, my best guess there is the scenes are constructed in 3d software, just it was to expensive for real time rendering.

by cubefox2 hours ago|

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Cube mapping a video sounds plausible, this is commonly known as 360° video. Putting the camera on rails (though I don't really notice rails in this case) and tying the video playback speed to the speed of the rail movement has also been done in the past in some pre-rendered PlayStation games, though without cube mapping. But I think it's not pre-rendered in this case. It looks far too realistic for a game that is at least 17 years old. My best guess: they captured the 360 degree videos with a real camera (stabilized in some way) and edited the equipment out frame by frame.

by jayd161 hours ago|

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Bladerunner: Revelations used a similar technique to bake down large CGI worlds with expensive lighting into something that ran on a Pixel 1 at VR specs.

Its honestly really very hard to work with this stuff because you ultimately need to be able to meshes inside these scenes triangle seas and you need to do it in a way that plausibly fits in the world. You can't have unlit characters walking around a baked lit scene and have them fit in. That's just from a visual design perspective.

You also always want to have bounce light from your dynamic things onto the baked scene and depending on the tech, you might not even be able to spatially place a dynamic thing and have it properly occlude what splats it needs to occlude.

As is, its a niche technology for games. That might change one day.

https://github.com/googlevr/seurat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf5Q3bvXj8E

by avaer6 hours ago|

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This is "rendering a 3D world". It's basically the exact same techniques that traditional rendering uses, just with a different primitive that's not triangles. Everything else pretty much carries over.

If you mean the technique of splatting specifically, Dreams for PS4 [1] is prior art.

If you mean pre-rendering, there's Myst and games like the original FF7 for PS1.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(video_game)

by modeless4 hours ago|

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Dreams for PS4 used point splatting and has a very unique look as a result. The splats were created from distance fields instead of being scanned, so they don't look like modern gaussian splats. They have a painterly look instead. https://youtu.be/2ltgkcoQzow