The game originally used a "voxel" engine [1], but the final release switched to affine texture mapping (with a heightmap-based terrain, still).

The voxel-style engines tend to feature a longer draw distance (due to it being cheaper to render, as you can easily use various hacks to eg. halve texture accesses far away).

For a detailed look into the rendering of Magic Carpet, start from Slide 8 of [2].

[1]: https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:Magic_Carpet_(DOS)#1993 [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180330004301/http://www.glennc...