It's not nearly "virtually unlimited" either, though. Virtually unlimited would mean that it would suit all regular needs without you having to compromise (you could of course not make an infinitely huge world, but you could make a regular sized game world as they are now without problems). It won't do that; to achieve good results you're going to either have to limit the play area (or at least the number of unique objects) significantly or combine it with other technologies to achieve certain things. E,g. it won't be able to do terrain with smooth height-curves (since you can't store that much unique data); however, you could use it almost as you use a texture now by applying it to a (polygon) heightmap and let the polygons do the curves whereas the point-cloud data stands for grass and texture of it. You could use it like "tiles" (like they've done themselves, though without a heightmap like I'm talking about). Granted, I'm not that great of a programmer so I don't know if there are problems with this that I haven't thought of but it seems like it could work to me.
So let's assume it's just 1 mm of ground (less than they showed in the video) and no other objects exist. Just one mm of plain ground (a very moderate guess considering we are shown ground with geometry more complex than that). That's still 64 000 000 000 000 atoms. One byte per atom (which is very low for voxels, let alone impossible for point-cloud data) means 58,2 TB of data. And those are
very generous approximations for the ground alone (so, no grass, rocks, etc.).
Now, what they have done (as far as I can see) is amazing. That's not the point I'm making. The problem I have is that I know they're lying. If they simply would have told the truth I'd be amazed, but now I don't know what other statements I can trust and what statements I can't. (Can I trust that it's now running on software only and not GPU considering I know they're dishonest about other stuff?)
