SE: What changes are being made between the June beta (the one we previewed) and the projected final product?

Franck Sauer: Major improvements have been made in the camera management and the overall performance. We really listened to focus groups for indications of how we could make the game better. We worked on the game to give it a balanced difficulty level on each world and a more intuitive control. We also worked on the technical side of the game to improve the game with minimizing configuration, a better frame rate, etc...

SE: What will the maximum resolution be in the final version?

Franck Sauer: 512*384 with edges anti-aliasing.

SE: How was the decision made to go with an all software engine?

Franck Sauer: Our vision was to create an exotic adventure in large outdoor environments. Only voxels could be used to create the amount of details needed to simulate an outdoor landscape. As an added bonus, having our own rendering engine enabled us to create special effects like the realistic motion of water in the game.

SE: What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of the software engine?

Franck Sauer: The main advantage is that you control the rendering pipeline. It's not just sending things to the hardware and hoping it will render it efficiently or correctly. You can do complex things that hardware tries to avoid, like edges anti-aliasing. You can also control the final image you render by doing post processes like depth of field, shadows and glows. You can have a richer image; computer graphics for film can be rendered in software. Of course, you have to use the main CPU and memory for rendering. Since they are not optimized for these tasks, this is slower than custom hardware. You have to be very careful to get the right balance between rendering speed and quality.

SE: In what ways does the software use MMX and SSE?

Franck Sauer: MMX instructions are great for integer calculations but they don't help floating points. Polygons require a lot of floating point calculations, both for transform and perspective-correct rasterisation, which is why MMX is not normally used. However, voxels only use integer calculations. The MMX technology is very useful, and damn fast, for drawing voxels in Outcast.

The new SSE instructions help us in two ways. First, they enhance the transformation calculations for the polygons. Second, there are instructions in the SSE extension to provide manual cache pre-fetching. Outcast uses a software-only engine, with the frame buffer is in main memory. Many of the post-treatments are done in this frame buffer (like the volumetric fog, or the water effect). The new cache management instructions enable those post treatments to occur at a faster rate.