What's the point if it's not voxel-based?

[Notabene]

Probably the most remarkable thing that made the success of Outcast more than the game itself which was passable, was of course the very particular voxel based engine which gives it an unmistakable 90s feel.

What is even the point of remaking Outcast if it doesn't have voxel-based graphics?

[Plex]

why would you need voxels when you can achive the same thing with polygons?
Most great games nowadays aren't using voxels.
But then I don't even know if Unity can handle voxels, maybe through a middleware.

[Notabene]

Originally posted by Plex:

why would you need voxels when you can achive the same thing with polygons?
Most great games nowadays aren't using voxels.
But then I don't even know if Unity can handle voxels, maybe through a middleware.

You can't achieve the same things with polygons, that's the point. And in fact, that was one of the main point of the particularity of Outcast. Meh

[Vamosalapaljas]

Revolutionary, yes. Yet not the only thing that made this game remarkable, e.g. its content, art,music and storyline. Let's hope it creates a baseline for the developers to bring another great game.

[Desiire]

I hope you realize that Outcast never featured voxels. It uses the same kind of ray casting tech stuff like Delta Force used. It might look like voxels, but it's an entirely different thing altogether

The only time voxels were ever legitimately used was pretty much only in C&C. Tiberian Sun had extremely detialed voxel based vehicles and they had their own shading renderer and everything

[Ulukai]

Originally posted by depaljas:

Revolutionary, yes. Yet not the only thing that made this game remarkable, e.g. its content, art,music and storyline. Let's hope it creates a baseline for the developers to bring another great game.

100% agree

[Catel]

Besides, the choice for this game was not aesthetic, but constraint. As the dev began in 1996 it was the only way to render huge landscapes with CPU-based PCs as they mostly were back then.

Should Outcast 2 not have been cancelled, it would have used the techs of its time - Pentium IV and GeForce.

[Notabene]

Originally posted by Catel:

Besides, the choice for this game was not aesthetic, but constraint. As the dev began in 1996 it was the only way to render huge landscapes with CPU-based PCs as they mostly were back then.

Should Outcast 2 not have been cancelled, it would have used the techs of its time - Pentium IV and GeForce.

Making a remake without using it's most striking particularity which is voxel, especially knowing how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ugly modern polygonal/texture graphics look compared...to the future of video game which is going to be voxel-tracing based...is a terrible choice.

[Ultr4Chrome]

Originally posted by Notabene:

Originally posted by Catel:

Besides, the choice for this game was not aesthetic, but constraint. As the dev began in 1996 it was the only way to render huge landscapes with CPU-based PCs as they mostly were back then.

Should Outcast 2 not have been cancelled, it would have used the techs of its time - Pentium IV and GeForce.

Making a remake without using it's most striking particularity which is voxel, especially knowing how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ugly modern polygonal/texture graphics look compared...to the future of video game which is going to be voxel-tracing based...is a terrible choice.

You may want to go read up on the (rather extreme) limitations of voxels. As of yet there is still no way to accelerate them with a GPU for example, making them entirely CPU limited. Voxels also only account for terrain, and not anything else in the original outcast: That was all polygons.

http://abload.de/img/oc12014-12-1911-15-08zgo6l.jpg

See the jagged edges on the bottom right? That's the kind of artifacts you get from trying to use voxels at 1080p, let alone 4k.

See the "awesome" textures on the terrain? That's the maximum possible "resolution" in this implementation of these software voxels.

Voxels are currently completely unused, and for good reason. You may be confusing this with current voxel-based terrain or model rendering, where voxels aren't 3d pixels but just an invisible 3d grid from which a polygonal terrain is calculated. This technique is used in games like No Man's Sky, Astroneer and Space Engineers.

Another extremely popular game you might know which uses these "voxels": Minecraft.

Voxels *only* worked back in the late 90's, in games like Delta Force or Outcast, because polygonal terrain wasn't far enough along yet and no other reason. If you can use polygons, you will, and voxels have rightly fallen out of use because they're an utter pain to work with, can't be gpu accelerated and are less detailed in the end than a texture in the original Wolfenstein game. They are not coming back.

Outcast was never about "voxels" either. Where did you get that idea? It's a 3rd person, action adventure game about exploring an alien world you've been stranded in.

Also, "polygonal terrain looks ugly?"

CryEngine 3 (2009): http://www.picshelf.com/images/frostbite2_valley_ss_02.jpg
Frostbite 3 (2013): https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/003/988/674/large/joakim-stigsson-joakimstigsson-01.jpg
UE4 (2014): https://cdn1.epicgames.com/ue/item/Store_photoreal_landscape_3_screenshot_5-1920x1080-90a9d3e9c706fba3bcc2a23638373aae.PNG

Hint: These kinds of terrains are flatout impossible with voxels currently, especially if you want maps that are larger than roughly 0.25-0.5 km2 such as in Outcast. One particularly huge problem with voxels is collision, which almost always has to be done with 'normal' meshes anyway, unless you want to clip through the terrain all the time. Voxels also don't work with shaders (making something shiny for example), and create massive headaches with lighting.

And if you want to point to a certain company which claims to have invented a hardware accelerated voxel engine: They're pathological liars and have never actually shown a live demo. The only video they've shown so far used basic static meshes, not voxels.

3d pixels, voxels, whatever you want to call them: They're currently just not feasible for modern gaming use. Don't expect any tech to change that. Polygons are far easier to compute and dynamically adjust and will remain by far the best option for quite some time to come.

Also: Don't confuse lighting techniques with modelling techniques. Voxel-based raytracing has nothing to do with rendering voxel-based terrain: In fact, it's actually very similar to what i described before, the terrain rendering technique from games like NMS.

I would personally love a remake of Outcast with properly scaled terrain like in the screenshots i showed you. No fog, unlimited view distance, properly huge maps to explore. Shamazaar for example would benefit from this, as something like this is what it was supposed to look like:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_EZ16vWYvHHg/TJzR8ySlQ2I/AAAAAAAASUU/YF0x5NISRwU/s1600/www.BancodeImagenesGratuitas.com-Sh-4.jpg

Or, if you want to stick with the actual, real kind of place Shamazaar is based on:

https://lorneblumer.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/img_3364.jpg

Or this:

http://h2obrain.it/images/NEWS/city/guilin06.jpg

Both of which are impossible to do with voxels.

[DeadlyBGShadow]

While Khrome's Argument is Sound, Notabene's Question is Reasonable.
Can we just separate the Story/World of the game from the way it was implemented at the time?
Can we say that the charm the game had at the time was not based on it's building elements and innovations?

While i do hope for Voxel to Evolve and be Re-Used in the future more often,
The constraints of Life take their toll on such things.
The Developers try to risk less by taking the easy way.
Few Franchises are consistent with the Original Product.
"Second Contact" will cast a Second, Different look to the familiar world of Adelpha.

Let's hope by the time "Adelphi" comes, we will have Voxel.

[Tonkinese]

Originally posted by Notabene:

Probably the most remarkable thing that made the success of Outcast more than the game itself which was passable, was of course the very particular voxel based engine which gives it an unmistakable 90s feel.

What is even the point of remaking Outcast if it doesn't have voxel-based graphics?

are you on drugs?

[Eep²]

Khrome knows his stuff! I heavily critized Outcast's use of voxels in newsgroups and Outcast Central's forums and even made a webpage about it (hey, it was a big deal back then): http://www.tnlc.com/eep/voxels.html

Outcast, which uses a combined voxel-polygon 3D rendering engine, Appeal's Paradise, has an annoying aliasing problem when looking close to surfaces.

http://www.tnlc.com/eep/oc_aliasing.jpg

In trying to figure out why this happens (and not having any success with Outcast's developer, Appeal), I came across a paper about volume graphics (circa 1993--a tad old for the computing industry, eh?). Scroll down to "4. Disadvantages of Volume Graphics" (no direct link). The last sentence of the first paragraph and the second paragraph:

"Rotation of rasters by angles other than 90 degrees is especially problematic since a sequence of consecutive rotations will distort the image.

Since the continuous object is reconstructed by sampling the discrete data during rendering, a low resolution volume yields high aliasing artifacts (row 3 in Table 2). This becomes especially apparent when zooming in on the 3D raster. When naive rendering algorithms are used, the 3D discrete points may appear to be parted from each other, and may cause the appearance of holes. Nevertheless, this can be alleviated to some extent in ways similar to those adopted by 2D raster graphics, such as employing either reconstruction techniques (e.g. supersampling, filtering) or a high-resolution volume buffer."

I think that's why this "domino-stacking" effect happens when turning (also called rotation, part of transformation). Apparently, not enough "supersampling", "filtering" (bilinear texture filtering?), or "high-resolution volume buffers" aren't being used in Paradise.

I think voxels should only be used up to certain distances from the viewer, at which time polygons will replace voxels for more detailed, upclose objects like the ground (out to a certain distance to when voxels take over), stairs, etc--basically everything out to a certain distance, actually.

A lot of people are hyping about Outcast's graphics, despite its low resolutions (only up to 512x384 max) and severe aliasing. Now I'm not denying Outcast isn't impressive, but I still have problems with collision detection, character control, terrible dialog (obviously non-native English linguists wrote it), and slow dialog menu selection response times. See Outcast Central's forum (down) for some of my posts about these issues.

I feel polygons are better for closeup rendering than voxels. Voxels just look too alised in comparison. Voxels may be fine for medical scanners and scientific simulations, but they don't seem to work too well in games that simulate realistic environments up close like Outcast attempts to do.

Considering Appeal and Novalogic (Delta Force series) have announced dropping support for voxels in their upcoming sequels, I think it's safe to say voxels are dead (for now anyway) in the computer gaming industry. Perhaps if voxel accelerators become more practical and cheaper will voxels make a comeback but for now they just make games look like crap, in my opinion.

Seems Appeal finally wisened up and got rid of voxels. Only problem is it's 18 years too late and just a remake. Oops.

[Damnagic]

Originally posted by Khrome:

Originally posted by Notabene:

Making a remake without using it's most striking particularity which is voxel, especially knowing how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ugly modern polygonal/texture graphics look compared...to the future of video game which is going to be voxel-tracing based...is a terrible choice.

snip

A good read. Your effort to type that out didn't go to waste :)

[tarasis]

Originally posted by Damnagic:

Originally posted by Khrome:

snip

A good read. Your effort to type that out didn't go to waste :)

Agreed, a very good read.

[Luckvieh]

[nikescar]

Originally posted by Khrome:

You may want to go read up on the (rather extreme) limitations of voxels.

Yes there are limitations but look at this guy's channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/AtomontageEngine