Notch defends his previous statement calling Euclideon a scam

The hype around Euclideon's Infinite Details engine is reminiscent of the hype around the "infinite polygon engine" (from the now defunct games company Elixir) http://www.strategyplanet.com/republic/totality3.shtml ...

Given how far polygon technology has gone, when we talk about computer graphic animation nowadays in the games domain, we are talking about something where we can actually write a system that can react to things and we don't have to individually animate each from with no particular intra-frame compression game. Compare that to a Kinectimals video. Any video, I don't care which.

In the way we mean the term in video game graphics, no, that isn't animation. And they're not going to fool anybody in the industry with that claim either. I would in fact observe that they'd probably appreciate it if you and others would stop linking that video, as it's obvious from their last video they've dropped the claim to animation, or it would have been in there. It just makes it obvious how stupid their claim to "animation" is.

That's a pretty low detail animation, honestly. Not even close to on par with the level of animation that goes in to games.

Frankly, I expect if this tech gets used, it will be used to create static worlds... and everything that moves or animates will be polygonal.

That's good to know, am I still correct in assuming this still comes down to a memory tradeoff, whether you want large textures+polygons, or voxel data to represent a high detail model?

I have the highest respect for you Notch and personally know people on your team (Carl), but you're out on a limb here.

Sparse Voxel Octrees are frickin awesome and Euclideon aren't wrong for saying so. There are drawbacks with them, but they are one by one being picked off by research. Animation is one example, dynamic lighting and shadows can be done in screen space. There is a real chance that soon enough voxels are going to be the shit for realtime rendering.

You even agree with them that rendering octrees can be thought of as a search algo but you still hold it against them? What is up with that?

Euclideon are not saying they are more awesome than everyone, they are saying they are up against the polygon industry. And in the video they are very careful to not cross that boundary, for example when the claim they are rendering at much higher geometry resolution they say "except other examples of procedurally generated geometry".

Because that's just what this is. Of course they are repeating elements, of course they are using common knowledge in their work. So are you and so everybody else. Blizzard doesn't point that out in their marketing either.

Granted, Euclideon's marketing is using a different tone than your craftsmanlike humbleness. But that doesn't make them a scam. Soon enough their code is gonna test it's mettle ut in the wild. It will be interesting to see what happens.

You are above ridiculing people based on what can be gleaned from a marketing video. Give them a break until you can ridicule their actual code. Let them have their fight against the polygon industry.