There are disadvantages to voxels. There is currently no video card hardware acceleration for them, so if you just spent two hundred on a G400, you're not going to be doing any better than someone who bought a Savage 4. It's all CPU power. And if you change the opacity of a voxel in the image, you end up having to do major reprocessing of the image; more than even a Pentium III probably can handle. That being said, voxels are certainly an interesting technology and they do have their uses. But what about in Outcast?
Appeal ended up using voxels only for the terrain engine. All characters and moving objects are rendered with polygons. Outcast's terrain is, bar none, the best we've seen. The only games that approach Outcast for terrain quality are Tribes II and Treadmarks, two games that are also not out yet. The ground disappears smoothly into the fog in the distance, and you get no abrupt pop-up effect. It is rough and detailed just like reality. And then there is the water. We have never seen water this good in a game, ever. Nothing comes close. Even the bump-mapped water of Expendable does not look as good as Outcast's, which is bump mapped in software. Water and reflections ripple as you pass through. Visibility through the water depends on what angle you're looking at. It's all very realistic and impressive.
The disadvantage brought on by lack of 3D acceleration is that the resolutions in the pre-release version are all very low. 512x384 with full detail, the highest setting possible, is playable but slow on a Celeron 450. Because Outcast has MMX and SSE support, we expect it to be smooth on a PIII 550. What the extra 100mhz doesn't get, the SSE support should.
The polygon graphics of Outcast are also quite good, though not ground breaking. The characters are nice to look at, but not as detailed as can be done with an all polygon engine with 3D acceleration. A combination of excellent motion capture and superb texture artistry makes the best of the situation, and characters end up looking as good as many other games do at 800x600 if not higher. Overall, things do look a bit blocky on large screens.
