Well, I asked myself a question today. What do I want to achieve by studying Voxels and such...... The answer was, "Chuck a load of blocks together to make a world".

That is not the right awnser.....

I then asked myself, "Hey what is a voxel engine going to achieve". At first I believed to would create the entire world for me blah blah. No.

So what does a voxel engine actually do?

This is a very ambigious question as, it is what the programmer wills it to do, however through my studies, I believe it is mostly for optimisation. Anyone can chuck blocks together and make them destructible. But think about it like so, in the larger scale.
If you want an area of cubes 100 wide, 100 tall and 100 depth, it equates to 1 MILLION blocks..... A very big number, and it is hard for the computer to render that much.
So a voxel engine, would (in my oppinion) focus mostly on optimisation/

But But But..... How do we achieve this?

Well, I am only a n00b at this stuff, so for me to suggest anything with certainty would be unjustified. But from what I have researched the best optimisations involve:

1. Showing only what could be visible to the player

2. Chunks

I have no clear idea how to implement these, but I am working on it but if you want to rush ahead check out :
References
1. http://unitycoder.com/blog/2012/02/15/dummy-craft-chunk-renderer-js/
2. http://www.blockstory.net/node/56
3. http://www.blockstory.net/node/57

Of course I am reasearching almost 3 hours a day and recently downloaded a source package to play with:
http://unitycoder.com/download/index.php?link=178&uid=un1t3c0d5r



Myhijim