I've "dug a little deeper" into the rendering method of minecraft and it seems to be very simple. It uses OpenGL. Here is a screenshot where I made the grass texture transparent. Simply change the alpha channel of parts of the terrain.png in the minecraft.jar archive.



There seems to be no advanced occlusion culling. The Game seems to render every block face that is potentially visible, meaning that the "grid place" (aka voxel) it is facing is empty or is glass.
Its pretty similar to Superkus meinkraft, except that meinkraft renders the whole block, not only the face that is possibly visible. The lightning system is said to be a little more complex, don't know much about it yet. I'd like to hear how Superku did his, although his is currently block based, not face based likes minecrafts.

The game world is divided into 16 x 16 (x128 depth) chunks, the nearest are rendered, depending on your view range setting. I don't see why it is not possible to do this with Gamestudio, you'd only need some clever coding. I'm very temped to try something similar multiplayer-only with better griefer-protection mechanisms. Not sure about this yet...