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EuclideonOfficialControversyIn a blog post, Minecraft developer Markus Persson described Unlimited Detail as a "scam", as well as a "voxel renderer, probably based on sparse voxel octrees", arguing that while Euclideon portrays the software as "revolutionary", it suffers the same limitations as existing voxel renderers. Among other concerns, Persson expressed that the proposed test "island" would require an unfeasibly large amount of memory to store as unique data, and so must be built using repeated chunks. Bruce Dell later claimed that Unlimited Detail uses less memory than current polygon systems. Persson also said the term "search algorithm" was a semantic obfuscation, as traversing a sparse voxel octree essentially is a search algorithm.[14][15]
Euclideon has since released several interviews with CEO Bruce Dell in which he refuted several of Persson's claims stating Unlimited Detail is only a rehash of current technologies. Dell replied with an emphasis on the technology's ability to display unlimited quantities of data by processing only the pixels, and demonstrated its uniqueness against other similar but distinct engines such as the Atomontage Engine. He also ran a real time and interactive demo of the engine on a laptop, utilising only the CPU under a software renderer.[16][17]
On 3 August 2011, the technology blog Kotaku posted an interview with CEO Bruce Dell of Euclideon in response to Persson's post. Dell started off by saying that "I think what I would like to make clear is that this is not the finished product,” and went on to discuss the points that Persson made about his technology.[18]
According to John Carmack, founder of id Software and a 3D graphics innovator, the technology is potentially feasible in the near future:
Re Euclideon, no chance of a game on current gen systems, but maybe several years from now. Production issues will be challenging.[19]