Outcast Reboot HD

[egofree]

In 1999, Appeal released the game 'Outcast'. It was rather innovative when it was released, as it had Voxel graphics and advanced AI. (c.f : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_(video_game) ).



The original team tries to make a new HD version. If you are interested, more info here : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/outcast-reboot-hd/outcast-reboot-hd

[Goombert]

Wow holy shit, you should put up a different image in your post. Their new voxel terrain rastering looks amazing.

1080p @60fps

[TheExDeus]

Wow holy shit, you should put up a different image in your post.

The image in his post is the ORIGINAL game. The fact that you missed it shows how awesome it was then and even is now.

Also, I don't think they are using voxels now. Fresh3D (the company doing this) made the FreshEngine, which is a very cool, but polygon engine. Probably because GPU's are quite useless at rendering voxel geometry.

[Goombert]

But Harri, they said it's the original guys that made it working on it. They also mention voxels in the one question/answer.

What exactly do you mean by 'Reboot HD'?

The shapes of the worlds will be greatly enhanced too as can be seen in the screenshot above as we don’t have the same voxels convexity constraint anymore. However we will need to preserve most of the ground terrain features to maintain some of the data for enemy covers and the like.

[TheExDeus]

Well it's just hard to say from the stuff I have seen. The word "Voxels" have kind of lost the original meaning I guess. Like the Voxel Farm Engine doesn't actually use voxels for rendering as far as I know. They use it for the data and manipulations, but not the actual rendering. Because by that definition even Minecraft is a voxel engine, while in reality it isn't.

For me voxels are something that doesn't actually use polygons for rendering. That is why original Outcast was so cool. It was totally software rendered and didn't use polygon boxes as voxels. Voxels are more like ray-tracing.

So taking all of this into account I doubt they use voxels. I think they use voxels to represent data, but they don't use it for rendering. For rendering it's regular polygons.

[Goombert]

Yup Harri, I was a tad confused myself. Voxel only refers to spacial differentiation, Minecraft and most Voxel engines are Volumetric, but Minecraft is vector graphics (OpenGL) and Voxel engines are usually raster graphics, that's the best way I know how to explain it.

I think a huge problem with kickstarter projects and the likes is lack of advertising, they don't broadcast what they're doing to reach a big enough audience.

[egofree]

Unfortunately, the kickstarter campaign has failed, but the developers didn't leave the goal to make a reboot HD version. Meanwhile, they decided to make a slightly updated version, outcast 1.1, which runs smoothly on modern computers : http://store.steampowered.com/app/336610/. The goal is to make the original game more famous for the new generation.

About this version
Outcast 1.1 has been recompiled from the original source code and improved to run smoothly on today's computers.The main improvements compared to the original version are: multithreaded voxel renderer for higher performances, software bilinear filtering on polygonal meshes, part of the HUD redesigned to match higher resolutions, new high-resolution sky paintings, new launcher, native support of xbox gamepad, user-friendly controller configuration, a lot of bugs fixed and improved stability.

[The 11th plague of Egypt]

Unfortunately, the kickstarter campaign has failed, but the developers didn't leave the goal to make a reboot HD version. Meanwhile, they decided to make a slightly updated version, outcast 1.1, which runs smoothly on modern computers : http://store.steampowered.com/app/336610/. The goal is to make the original game more famous for the new generation.

About this version
Outcast 1.1 has been recompiled from the original source code and improved to run smoothly on today's computers.The main improvements compared to the original version are: multithreaded voxel renderer for higher performances, software bilinear filtering on polygonal meshes, part of the HUD redesigned to match higher resolutions, new high-resolution sky paintings, new launcher, native support of xbox gamepad, user-friendly controller configuration, a lot of bugs fixed and improved stability.

That's the way to go.
If more publishers released actually updated versions instead of repackaged DOSBOX versions, that would be great.
That is, if they don't completely screw up and make a mess of a buggy "remake".