So this isn't my code, but I remember seeing this old cave demo a long time ago and thinking these guys are doing it right. Didn't realize it at the time, but it was Ken Silverman of Duke3D / Build engine fame and Tom Dobrowolski who I think worked off Ken's initial engine prototype. So think of a voxel like a 3d pixel, the smaller the block, the better the fidelity. Issues that you run into are data sizes (as a 3d array of small blocks gets very large very quick) Animation, (ends up becoming frames of blocks, which dont look very good unless again you have small blocks) and the difficulty of using traditional 3d hardware, which is set up to transform and raster triangles. So far other than worms3d I havent seen many voxel based games out there. A more modern engine, Atomontage, brings things further than this example. But this example has source code designed to run on older machines (Pentium III's) where atomontage sort of duped investors into thinking there would be a ROI on their investment and squandered their money while keeping the code closed source. See Ken's page for the source and cavedemo seen here: http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap/voxlap05.htm -- Note to compile this you'll probably need an older visual studio -- might want to cruise github to see if anyone has already brought this code into the present -- also dont confuse voxels with minecraft, which uses the GPU to render a lot of cubes, like voxels, but made of triangles. One more thing, Kevin Bray has a pretty cool sparse voxel octree demo here, sparse meaning dont store all voxels (only outer visible shell) and use an octree to compress storage by using bigger voxels where everything is uniform. In terms of rendering, the voxlap demo does something slightly more advanced than wave surfing to allow six degrees of freedom. -- So I was thinking you could probably use a DDA type line drawing algorithm in 3d to raycast voxels, and googled about and found this video which does exactly that:https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gAeR2PLTwA8 I took his code and took out all the borland stuff and got it going in visual studio voxel.zip He is using the voxel file format from Ken's demo, and it ends up using 4GB (1024 * 1024 * 256 blocks at 16 bytes each) just for the voxel data structure (compile as 64-bit to prevent malloc failing) the voxel.zip code is using opengl which I compiled with glew, but is essentially just using it as a frame buffer, so I'll go back in later and take OpenGL out as it's not needed. Still looks kind of low res, but the code is interesting and compact, theoretically if you get the algorithm right it would look like Ken's demo, but without all the license restrictions -- one thing I noticed though is that it doesn't set interior voxels as solid, so things are a hull only (ie: pressing x to shoot should make tunnels) -- Version without OpenGL voxel_sw.zip -- throw threads into this and I'm sure it'll look much better