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djvelho
Posts: 1262
Location: Finland
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 Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 19:46 Post subject: Outcast: Second Contact |
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http://www.dsogaming.com/news/praise-the-lord-outcast-to-be-revived-more-news-coming-later-this-year/#more-52461
Yann Robert, Franck Sauer and Yves Grolet announced today that they have signed and closed an asset purchase agreement with Atari Europe SAS recently regarding Outcast intellectual property.
Yann, Franck and Yves, the three founders of Appeal S.A., the studio that developed Outcast, have started the revival of the franchise and will soon announce further developments.
Yes yes, you read that right; Outcast will be revived and the trio will announce more news about later this year – hopefully.
According to Wikipedia, Outcast’s graphics engine is mainly a combination of a ray casting (heightmap) engine, used to render the landscape, and a texture mapping polygon engine used to render objects.
“Although Outcast is often cited as a forerunner of voxel technology, this is somewhat misleading. The game does not actually model three-dimensional volumes of voxels. Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are modeled using texturemapped polygons. When Outcast was developed, the term “voxel engine”, when applied to computer games, commonly referred to a ray casting engine (for example the VoxelSpace engine). On the “Engine Technology” page of the game’s website, the landscape engine is also referred to as the “Voxels engine”. The engine is purely software-based; it does not rely on hardware-acceleration via a 3D graphics card.
Outcast features effects such as character shadows, depth of field, bump mapping and reflections. Anti-aliasing is used to smooth certain texture boundaries. The heightmap engine renders reliefs with self-occlusion, motion parallax, andsilhouettes (but no shadowing)–even for details such as cobblestones. Water surfaces appear both translucent and reflective. The surface appears to reflect the environment (the skybox) and appears rippled with moving waves, which react to the character’s movement while in the water. The degree of translucency depends on the viewing angle. The more vertical the angle, the clearer the water appears while the more horizontal the angle, the stronger the reflections.
Other visual effects include bloom and lens flares, falling snow, fire, and other glowing particles. All of these taken together would have crippled even the most advanced graphics card at the time of release. As a result, the graphics were considered beautiful and well ahead of their time upon Outcast’s release. The disadvantage of this type of CPU-intensive software-rendering was that Outcast required an extremely powerful CPU (nothing but the most powerful Intel Pentium III processors of the time, in the 500-600 MHz range) and massive amounts of RAM (128 megabytes were recommended) to run at full speed and maximum resolution (512×384).”
Outcast was a third-person action-adventure game that was developed by Appeal and was released for Windows in 1999. In this game, players took the role of a former U.S. Navy SEAL Cutter Slade, Slade is given the job of escorting three scientists on a mission to this alien world to recover the probe and close the black hole. Arriving in this alien world, Cutter is separated from the other scientists and is hailed by the natives as their messiah, the Ulukai. Thus, his adventures begin.
We’ll be sure to keep you posted with any news we get about the revival of Outcast, so stay tuned!
Last edited by djvelho on Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 19:57; edited 3 times in total
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murgo
Posts: 1928
Location: Brezelcountry
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 19:50 Post subject: |
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 19:50 Post subject: |
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Sin317
Banned
Posts: 24322
Location: Geneva
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 19:57 Post subject: |
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oh awesome, another revival, remake, reboost, rewhatever.
Because they usually work out just great ... wait .. hm ... yeah , not really ...
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JBeckman
VIP Member
Posts: 34968
Location: Sweden
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Werelds
Special Little Man
Posts: 15098
Location: 0100111001001100
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 19:58 Post subject: |
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Do want. Do want a lot. |
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 22:21 Post subject: |
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Hell yeah! Everythng is outstanding in Outcast, especially the soundtrack.
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dsergei
Posts: 4051
Location: Moscow, Russia
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 22:27 Post subject: |
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Yes! I still have my CD somewhere in my old appartment.
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 23:09 Post subject: |
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Never seen or heard of this game. Seems it was a big deal at the time judging by the reactions laid on here.
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 23:17 Post subject: |
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Goat game, played it recently  |
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 23:30 Post subject: |
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Reviving an IP after 14 years. I don't know what to think about that.
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Werelds
Special Little Man
Posts: 15098
Location: 0100111001001100
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 23:36 Post subject: |
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| human_steel wrote: | | Never seen or heard of this game. Seems it was a big deal at the time judging by the reactions laid on here. |
Fully voiced, story-driven, open world TPS with RPG elements where you can hop on the back of a fucking Ostrich-like creature for transport. While listening to an epic soundtrack.
And it has motherfucking star gates.
What's not to like? 
And parts of it were very pretty at the time, such as the water - some other parts...not so much  |
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 23:37 Post subject: |
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Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo..
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| Posted: Tue, 2nd Jul 2013 23:52 Post subject: |
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Holy men what great news this is!
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 00:10 Post subject: |
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 00:16 Post subject: |
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omfg 4treyu, if you want to be considered a conosieur you need to get with the program and play ss2, outcast, anachronox and pretty much everything I approve of  |
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 00:21 Post subject: |
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Last edited by Interinactive on Tue, 5th Oct 2021 03:19; edited 1 time in total
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 00:26 Post subject: |
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| Drowning_witch wrote: |
omfg 4treyu, if you want to be considered a conosieur you need to get with the program and play ss2, outcast, anachronox and pretty much everything I approve of |
Man, by that criteria I'm a long way to being considered a If you could check my backlog there's games like Thief 1,2,3, Baldur's Gate, The Longest Journey, Amnesia, etc.
I just don't want to play all of them one after another, I prefer to mix it up with games that are not considered masterpieces but that I'm still interested in
Last edited by 4treyu on Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 00:27; edited 1 time in total
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Werelds
Special Little Man
Posts: 15098
Location: 0100111001001100
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 00:27 Post subject: |
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Well we'll have to see, but I sincerely hope they stick to the formula laid out above. Even though Outcast is "famed" for its "voxels" (and the fact that it required a fucking MMX-capable CPU at the time, which was the only reason I replaced my P133 at that point  ), it's everything else that made it such a great game. Just the fact that it was fully voiced showed how much thought and care went into it. Sadly, most likely also the studios' downfall; remember, that was 1999 and they spent a lot of money on that
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 00:43 Post subject: |
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ixigia
[Moderator] Consigliere
Posts: 65074
Location: Italy
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 02:00 Post subject: |
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Fuck yea Outcast Such a gem, it was way ahead of its time.
Please don't screw this up with annoying derpgen features, awesome buttons and the likes 
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 02:31 Post subject: |
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 02:55 Post subject: |
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I remember you had to ask for directions to find NPCs and places. It's still an impressive feature, especially considering that today 99% of all games uses some kind of retarted quest-arrow.
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| Posted: Wed, 3rd Jul 2013 10:33 Post subject: |
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| 4treyu wrote: | | Drowning_witch wrote: |
omfg 4treyu, if you want to be considered a conosieur you need to get with the program and play ss2, outcast, anachronox and pretty much everything I approve of |
Man, by that criteria I'm a long way to being considered a If you could check my backlog there's games like Thief 1,2,3, Baldur's Gate, The Longest Journey, Amnesia, etc.
I just don't want to play all of them one after another, I prefer to mix it up with games that are not considered masterpieces but that I'm still interested in |
I know, I am just giving you a nudge, so you don't steer clear of the path to
I still have many classics as well, so you are not alone on the path to glorious knowledge.
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All times are GMT + 1 Hour |
Though there are a few others that look like they *could* be doing old franchises justice, like Rise of the Triad and Shadowrun (for all its apparent faults, Shadowrun does at least look/sound like the SNES/MD originals)
