http://www.minecraft.net/prepurchase.jsp
It sounds like you misunderstood what you were spending your money on.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090615065558/http://www.minecra...
The security holes is definitely an issue but that doesn't make Notch's criticism any less valid.
Notch's criticism is hypocritical, and invalid on the grounds that he doesn't have enough information to say that the project is a "scam".
It would be _fake_ if they weren't rendering it in real time. He didn't call it fake. He called it a scam.
From the author (old post on Beyond3D): "firstly the system isn’t ray tracing at all or anything like ray tracing. Ray tracing uses up lots of nasty multiplication and divide operators and so isn’t very fast or friendly. Unlimited Detail is a sorting algorithm that retrieves only the 3d atoms (I wont say voxels any more it seems that word doesn’t have the prestige in the games industry that it enjoys in medicine and the sciences) that are needed, exactly one for each pixel on the screen, it displays them using a very different procedure from individual 3d to 2d conversion, instead we use a mass 3d to 2d conversion that shares the common elements of the 2d positions of all the dots combined. And so we get lots of geometry and lots of speed, speed isn’t fantastic yet compared to hardware, but its very good for a software application that’s not written for dual core. We get about 24-30 fps 1024*768 for that demo of the pyramids of monsters. The media is hyping up the death of polygons but really that’s just not practical, this will probably be released as “backgrounds only” for the next few years, until we have made a lot more tools to work with."
So yes. This is a kind of raytracing but I think that the implementation is radically different to the commonly used raytracing implementaions.
EDIT: Taking a step back, remember that with an octree, contiguous areas require less tree depth to fully describe them, so open empty space (sky) and consistently filled space (uniform material underground) require much less data. This of course creates practical limitations in addition to the claimed maximums of what the engine can achieve (so art budgets aren't going anywhere anytime soon) but I think calling it a "scam" is a bit much.
512 petabits = 2 petabytes.
So only 2 petabytes of data. I'd like to see the server that processed those 2 petabytes.
Notch also points out that even still, 8m is quite a small height. Take it to 16m and now you need 4 petabytes of space.
Reading the blog post, I now know how Notch would approach building such a thing, and that he thinks his approach wouldn't really work. I still have no idea how Euclidean's implementation actually works and neither does anyone else who I've seen comment on their demo video.
The argument that it's a scam if it can't render grass blowing in the wind is ridiculous.
Trees & rocks are often animated in modern games, so animation is important. Additionally there is no point using a heavy duty voxel engine to render background landscapes that no one will visit in the game, especially if it's going to take gobs of RAM & CPU time to do it.
Hardware tessellation can already greatly increase surface detail, is already available in modern hardware & has better looking demos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G9anRoYGko
If they cannot they can never have movement through the environment - something that they have failed to demonstrate so far.
Dynamic animation is a similar problem but can be solved using key-frame point data (although this could severely limit the fluidity of animation and greatly increase memory usage). You cannot do this smoothly for movement (without using tiles or a combination of tiles and key-frames).
There are many cool games that could be made despite these limitations but Euclideon is promising more than this: their comparisons are with modern FPS's.
I really hope that they have solved all these issues. But if they have, why aren't they demonstrating them?
If they haven't I hope they are being more honest with their investors than they are with the general public.
Euclideon is asking for money to develop "new" technology that in reality has been done before and does not have any advantages over a polygon based engine. Everything in their demos can be done (if not better) using a polygon based engine and modern GPUs.
Seriously, just watching one of the videos by Euclideon makes me feel like I'm watching late night tv advertisments. If their tech is as "ground breaking" as they claim, surely they wouldn't need to do as much convincing as they currently do in their videos.
