Game:

Outcast (1999)

Duration: 11:51

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2

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available!
This video attempts to show off the exquisite use of Bump Mapping in Outcast (1999, Appeal), a game programmed to render all of its graphics on the processor alone (software rendering). This hugely ambitious PC game, along with DreamWorks Interactive's Trespasser, pioneered the use of various real-time visual effects and animation technologies in video games. Along with things like depth of field and inverse kinematic animations, Outcast also went the extra mile and included a per-pixel Bump Mapping effect on almost every character model in the game.

Here is a cool fact: during Outcast's early development period in mid-1997, the game was originally shown off at E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) '97 with per-pixel Bump Mapping already being used on character models (just as James Blinn had defined it in the SIGGRAPH 1978 paper on 'Simulation Of Wrinkled Surfaces')! This was well before even Trespasser had implemented its take on Bump Mapping with pre-computed normals AND it was also before the first paper on Normal Mapping had been published (the 'Efficient Bump Mapping Hardware' paper was first published at SIGGRAPH '97 in August that year).

This leads me to wonder if the final retail version of Outcast still uses Blinn-style Bump Mapping (the partial derivatives are computed during run-time instead of being encoded into the bump-map) or if it modified its Bump Mapping code later on to "bake" the per-pixel normals into the texture files prior to being used in-game. If any person who worked on the game's Bump Mapping or managed to reverse-engineer it sees this video, it would mean a lot if an explanation was offered in the comment section!

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
- Compaq Deskpro EP 6400 case and motherboard (manufactured July 1998)
- Intel 440BX motherboard
- Intel Pentium III 500 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL365, manufactured week 10 1999)
- Creative Labs 3D Blaster Riva TNT (CT6710) video card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value (CT4670) sound card
- 128 MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM
- Windows 98 (FE) operating system

The capturing was done in VirtualDub2 using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed. A VGA cable is connected between the vintage computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 1024x768 (a nice multiple of Outcast's 512x384) capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.

Timestamp table:
0:00 - Cutter Slade
0:56 - Vendors
1:46 - Water (waves)
2:10 - Talan doing push-ups
2:39 - Ventilope (bird-like creature)
3:34 - Shamaz robe
4:12 - Guard armor
5:11 - Kroax and Fae Rhan
6:03 - Twon-ha
7:08 - Talan pacing around
7:39 - Oogoobar priest
8:44 - Gorgor
10:08 - Water (ripples)
11:16 - On/Off comparison (Marion)

#outcast #pentium3 #windows98 #appeal #fraps #rivatnt #periodcorrect #realhardware #softwarerendering #25thanniversary #vga #datapath #upscaling #bumpmapping #normalmapping #embm

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