what i meant is that i wouldn't store the voxels in a big array for the whole world but in many separate 16x16x16 arrays with the chunks. at the beginning the world gets filled with a certain amount of chunks around the player and if the player moves more chunks get added dynamically. the landscape gets generated procedurally on the fly (but i don't have a clue about this yet) and if the player changes something then some flag gets set for the chunk. if you want to save the level then only the parameters for the procedural world generation and the chunks with manual changes need to be saved.

Ahh okay, so you give every chunk its own voxel array which will contain the 16x16x16 blocks of itself. And then i only have to keep track of where a chunk is and access its own voxel array to know what happened when i save or recreate the models (to only render visible faces).

I guess that can work. Then the big chunk array for the manager would only be 4096 times smaller than the whole voxel array which i won't need anymore so i can create a much bigger world.

yes, i would try to do it kind of like that. maybe i will also continue my experiments with gamestudio once the next beta with the mesh fixes gets released.

edit:
i also immediately thought of ulillillia when i first saw minecraft. maybe he wouldn't like some details like the scary monsters though.

Really nice work!
Runs ok on my old laptop (2.2 GHz, 3 GB RAM, GeForce 8600M GT). When adding hills and caves it gets somewhat laggy.

Perhaps you can even implement Minecraft's lighting style? I don't know how to do that, though. According to Notch "it adds no performance penalty per frame, and a small one every time a tile changes". Perhaps it's a bit tricky.

by the way... i think with the same approach you could very easily do a voxel terrain system like the c4 engine features. you just would have to use something like the marching cubes algorithm instead of simply creating block faces from the voxels.

And the Server IP again: 46.4.226.210

Its not tricky.
Its very easy. You just have to change the lightning if something in the level changes.
Since the sun shines only in -z direction you can just update the "pillar" were a block was added/removed.
And you just have to update the upper 2 blocks, because all blocks underneath those two are and will stay dark.
EDIT: And i think minecraft only changes the ambient value. Since this is the easiest way of doing that.

Nice work!
I would change it so that the creating of new blocks is in minecraft-style. I find it very hard to create blocks where I want them with the two things (cube and surface) showing at the same time.

less talking and replicating and more Joining the server!

46.4.226.210

!

http://notch.tumblr.com/