I trust Carmack's response over pretty much anyone's in matters of rendering engines. The guy is a god of coding them.

I saw a comment on Reddit about this 6-7 hours ago suggesting that Carmack had a horse in this race and that we might be best to presume the very slightest of bias in his response(s).

That said, I also view his perspective in this field as tending towards unquestionable. He's always seemed to have had a pretty sparkling reputation as well as the obvious talent.

The tech basically has to be a variant of sparse voxel octrees. Carmack has mentioned it in an interview years ago, It's reasonable to assume he's built his own prototype, as he does with pretty much anything else.

gods have been known to be blindsided by revolutionaries

He, and his company, have done research into the field of SVOs to compliment megatexture.

I don't know enough to say if it's the same approach, but it's certainly the same field, so you'd expect him to know a fair bit about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpEpAFGplnI

His latest tweet on it is interesting:

> @Foggen insufficient information to say if it is tracing or splatting.

They state their method is based on a well-known technique used in engineering and medical visualization, and splatting seems to be used there. I'm still not 100% clear on what splatting is, but there's a bunch of papers applying that term to voxels, e.g. http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/projects/objewa/

Splatting is when you draw with a point cloud but fill in in-between the points to make a solid surface during the rendering. It's only necessary if you get close enough to your point cloud that the points don't map to adjacent pixels.

I remember reading years ago that id was considering using vortex graphics for Quake2 and Carmack had even started to work on it, but they abandoned the idea seeing that industry is heading into "more polygons!" thing (the context: it was a time when 3dfx released Voodoo2, nVidia was starting to gain popularity (Riva TNT2) and first Unreal was on a horizon).

By "production issues" I would think "pipeline" first of all. It doesn't matter if it's possible to convert a high-res mesh to an optimized voxel format, if the result takes hours of compilation. That is too long an iteration time for a single asset.

Not if it's a scalable thing, i.e. you can get a "decent" conversion in a short time, and only do the full-scale conversions for milestone builds.