I wanted to run through a few graphical bits about it. First, the voxel display engine is surprisingly fast for something that runs in the browser. Minecraft uses the Lightweight Java Game Library to drive OpenGL. Max McGuire figures that the program tracks the visible faces, i.e. all those between air and non-air, and then brute-force displays all these faces (using backface culling) within a given distance. The file format keeps track of 16x16x128 (high) chunks, so just the nearby chunks need display. I don’t know if the program’s using frustum culling on the chunks (I’d hope so!). Looks like no occlusion culling is done currently. The lighting model is interesting and nicely done, we haven’t quite figured it out; the game’s author, “Notch” (Markus Persson), notes that it was one of the trickier elements to make work efficiently.

Me, I’ve been looking at voxelization programs out there, to see if there’s a good one for turning models into voxel building plans (it’s a sickness, seriously). Patrick Min’s binvox (paired with his viewvox viewer) looks promising, since Patrick’s a good programmer (e.g., his CalcuDoku app), the program’s been around 6 years, and it’s open-source. Binvox uses the GPU to generate the voxel views, so it’s quite fast. It supports both parity counting and “carving”, and can also remove fully-interior voxels after processing. Parity count is for “watertight” models (closed and manifold, i.e. the polygon mesh correctly defines a solid object without gaps or self-intersections, etc.). Carving is taking 6 views and recording the closest occupied voxel from each direction. It won’t give you holes or crevices you can’t see from the 6 directions, but is otherwise good for polygonal models that are just surfaces, i.e., that don’t properly represent solids. See his page for references to all techniques he uses. I found a bug in Patrick’s OBJ reader yesterday and he fixed it overnight (fast service!), so I’m game to give it another go tonight.