I want to create a minecraft-like browser game in away3d and I want it to be as efficient as possible. Cubic blocks will be used to construct buildings. To achieve this, I have two alternatives:
1. I can use straight up cubes to generate the whole thing. This will mean that there will be duplicate vertices and sides when cubes are placed next to each other. It will also mean that some sides will exist although they will never actually be visible by the user. However, using this method, the graphics card only needs to load in memory the basic cube geometry and the textures. So there will be very little stress memory wise but it will need to do more processing to draw more vertices and sides.

2. The alternative is to optimize buildings after they are constructed. This means removing duplicate vertices, if a building has an entire wall that is flat, it would use only to triangles for it. I believe that this method will greatly reduce the number of vertices. However, each building will become a different mesh entirely so I would have to load all of them to the graphics’ card memory.

I would really like to know the opinion of someone with more experience in the matter, regarding which way is the most efficient.

Thanks