What really draws you into Outcast is how realistic the world is. We're not talking about the physics, which happen to be excellent. We're talking about the way characters interact as if Adelpha were a real world. People go about their jobs and live their lives as you play. They talk about you in foreign languages, they discuss things together, they get tired, they get hurt and they all add an immense amount to the game. The best way we can put it is to say that, after you play the game for awhile, you really do think of the characters as thinking things. Sure, they're not the brightest people around. But between the excellent dialogue performed by good voice talent, and the process of a realistic world which goes on around you, you feel like you're surrounded by people. The AI is very good by current standards, Appeal did a lot of good work and it shows. Today's secret word is fun, and Outcast has a lot of it.
Ok, so now we'll get into some technical details. Let's start with the most deviant feature of Outcast. Appeal decided to use voxels for the terrain engine. So what are voxels? Voxels are points in space defined by x, y, and z coordinates as well as color and density variables. Density is usually used to determine transparency. The voxels are analyzed by software from whatever viewing angle is desired, and a 2D representation is made which then shows up on the screen.
Historically voxels have been used in medical imaging devices and military simulators. For medicine, voxels give the advantage of being able to go into an object and view its internals. With polygons, you can look at the outside of an object, but it's actually hollow. If you've ever seen clipping before, you know what we mean. If your point of view somehow gets inside an object, you see that it's really just a shell. Voxel images map the entire object. So, if a doctor had a voxel image of a brain made from a MRI scan, they could view any slice of the brain on their screen. The object is not hollow, all of the points inside it are mapped with voxels.
The advantage for military simulators is how much better voxels represent terrain. It takes an awful lot of polygons to show terrain realistically, more than even the Hercules Dynamite Ultra TNT2 wants to give. But voxels can render more realistic terrain with much less hardware. Voxel terrain, unlike polygon terrain, disappears into the background fog smoothly and evenly. When polygons get just close enough to see, they usually just pop into existence. You can end up seeing one wall of a building, but not another wall which is just slightly out of the rendering engine's cutoff range.
