Comments - aihtdikh

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, my calculations are horribly over-simplified.
But I am talking about just a 2D surface, over the whole level - every square mm, but not every cubic mm.
The reality is probably better, and worse.
Better: I'm ignoring instancing and repeated sections of the terrain (which they clearly use).
Worse: I'm also ignoring the fact that every atom will have more properties than simply colour - because they're not stored at every point in a fixed array, they at least need to somehow record what their position is.

I realise my comment above looks very negative, so I'd just like to add:
I'm a huge fan of voxels, and I would love it if somebody (like Euclideon) were to make it feasible for use in games. As they clearly show, beautiful graphics are possible.
I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, but until they give some hint that they're working around the problems that have plagued voxels forever (amount of data, animated shapes, physics), all I'm seeing here is pretty pictures and potential disappointment.
So if you're reading this, Euclideans, please do your best, and prove me wrong!

I've been pondering the number of polygons mentioned in the video - 21,062,352,435,000 - and I'm not sure what to make of it. They are talking about polygons though, not 'atoms', so I can't tell how that would translate to the 'point cloud' form that they generate.

So I'm working with the only clear numbers they did give us - 64 'atoms' per cubic mm, and the level is 1 square km.
Even assuming that the level is only 1 atom thick (and that the atoms per cubic mm are arranged as a 4x4x4 cube), that gives 16 atoms per square mm of surface.
We have 1,000,000 (mm per km) * 1,000,000 square mm, times 16 atoms.
Am I on the right track? Cause if so, that's 16 trillion atoms.
Assuming only 1 byte per atom (i.e. 256 colour) that's ~16 terabytes.
Full (24-bit) colour? That's ~48 terabytes. For a simple coloured surface heightmap.
I hope they've worked out some very very clever ways to work around this, cause I'm not ready to buy a petabyte RAID just to install a game made with this tech.

Haha cheers Keith.
Looks like things are going really well, good job!
Credit where credit's due though - when I said that I was quoting somebody else.
I don't remember where I got it from, but Google tells me it is available printed on a rather charming ThinkGeek shirt. :)

Good stuff! I love the QOTD.