July 31 2005

A lot of water passed under the bridge since Outcast and Commanche appeared, drawing us a picture of what seemed the future of graphics. Their engine featured a voxel terrain, a 2.5D representation that made detailed landscape possible on machines that were still struggling with polygons.

But soon after that, the first 3D accelerators made their way on console and PC, pushing the voxel revolution out of the public mind, replacing them with triangles and 2D textures everywhere.

When I saw the screenshots of Outcast for the same time, I kind of imagined the maths would be easy. Of course the devil is in the detail but you can check my less than optimized implementation of a voxel engine.