How can I hide certain faces of a cube model In XNA for a Voxel Engine to optimize it?

Question

Hello I'm trying to make a terrain engine similar to that of Minecraft.

I was able to get a chunk loaded. It is very laggy and when there is more than one chunk loaded at once it becomes unplayable.

This is my render code:

public static void renderNormalBlock(GraphicsDevice g, Chunk chunk,Texture2D texture, int x, int y, int z)
    {
        float tileSize = 0.5F;
        Vector3 blockPosition = new Vector3(x / tileSize, y / tileSize, z / tileSize);
        Model blockModel = Main.defaultBlockModel;
        ModelMesh mesh = blockModel.Meshes[0];
        g.SamplerStates[0] = SamplerState.PointWrap;
        BasicEffect effect = (BasicEffect)mesh.Effects[0];
        effect.TextureEnabled = true;
        effect.Texture = texture;
        effect.View = Main.camera;
        effect.Projection = Matrix.CreatePerspectiveFieldOfView(MathHelper.ToRadians(45), g.DisplayMode.AspectRatio, 1, 128);
        effect.World = Matrix.CreateWorld(blockPosition, Vector3.Forward, Vector3.Up);
        mesh.Draw();
    }

As You can see I am not using for-each or for loops because as it's only a cube; It is not required.

I did some research and the best answer I found was that I need to hide the cube's faces that are not visible. So say if there's 2 cubes next to each other, I don't want to render the in between faces.

This is where I get stuck, Most people are using cubes that were drawn in XNA, and I'm using a model.

I'm new to XNA and I don't understand too much of the Math involved in manually drawing a cube since I'm currently in grade 9, so I used a model.

So how would I go about rendering only the faces that are visible?

Answer 1

your starting to develop a game before learning the basics. you wont get too far this way. First grab a book about XNA development and go through it. This is a basic subject that will be covered there. In addition, go visit techCraft http://techcraft.codeplex.com/ and download their implementation which comes with all the code. you will learn alot from that alone.