"Sir, this computer has a... TEN... MEGAbyte harddrive! You'll never fill that one in your lifetime!"



Storage capacity grows every year. But let's look at it from another perspective. A triangle requires at least three polygons. We're approaching (tesselation) detail of more than a triangle per pixel (Crysis 2 useless PC Tesselation patch). At this point, storing models with that kind of (non-tesselated) polygon detail requires much more than a single voxel in an octree. You can actually get that voxel data down to one bit on avarage in a sparse voxel octree. That means that voxel data suddenly become much more compact to store.
I just finished Ultimate Doom (all episodes). To me gameplay matters more than graphics, by far. But what I want is a total experience out of game. Doom gives me a whole better experience than Crysis, because it's much more believable.
Comparing Doom's graphics to Crysis, I find Doom a much better emersive experience. That's because Doom doesn't look like a washed out tattoo, spreaded as a wallpaper over paper-model shape with a custom shiny wax job on top.
When I play Doom, I think of this:
http://v1.studenten.net/graphics/con...5-23-storm.jpg
When I play Crysis I think of this:
http://media.vam.ac.uk/media/thira/c...838_jpg_ds.jpg
It's so much cooler seeing I blast a monster's shoulder of in Doom, than seeing some model drop like a doll with a washed out stain of ketchup in Crysis.
So far what voxels can do that traingle can't. Now the lightning...
When I play Doom I think of this:
http://www.cornwalls.co.uk/photos/da...ithian-bw1.jpg
When I play Doom with an OpenGL engine upgrade I think of this:
http://www.destination360.com/north-...state-fair.jpg
I don't know...