Smooth of voxel terrain isn't new, ultimately it doesn't play well so it isn't included in most voxel games. Minecraft stores data as voxels but renders as poly

Smooth of voxel terrain isn't new, ultimately it doesn't play well so it isn't included in most voxel games. Minecraft stores data as voxels but renders as polygons (blocks). There are voxel rendering techniques as well. But at the end of the day it comes down to triangles or rays, right? So that voxel data has to be turned into polygons sooner or later, and the more magic you do to it, the less coherent these polygons are as a gaming mechanic. Blocks turn out to be fast/cheap to render and are highly usable in gaming mechanics. I think the reality is that in Minecraft for example, every voxel is in memory, including the 99% of them you can't see. In minecraft, a chunk is up to 16x255x16 or 65,536 voxels, and with a view distance of 10, that's 21x21 or 441 chunks loaded, with up to 28,901,376 voxels in memory. So whatever we do to turn voxels into polygons, we're going to likely be doing it across an enormous amount of data (relative to a home computer). (And remember, in minecraft, chunk generation occurs live too. No world pre-gen. As you walk around, the game is inventing the world 65k blocks at a time!)