Hey there!

It’s quite a long time ago, since we last posted some news here. But don’t worry…we are still there and are currently working on the first in-game region “Okasankaar”. As we are still in the concept phase at the moment, we decided to give you an artistic insight in the form of an “Artbook” on how Okasankaar looks in the minds of our concept artists.

The Artbook features drawings from all our concept artists and shows as well landscapes, flora & fauna and even some talan sketches directly out of Okasankaar. The artists were able to write a short comment to their pictures and in addition, the Artbook is being produced in high-quality to give you the possibility to print it out and enjoy it on real paper also

Use the link below to download the Artbook!

DOWNLOAD ARTBOOK

See you guys in the next news release!

The artists of ooc

Hey everybody!

We’ve just setup a newsletter. This (along with our RSS feed) is probably the best way to stay up to date with our progress, blogposts etc. without having to frequently visit our website and forum. To sign up just click on the link below and enter your name and email address in the fields.

Join our newsletter!

Besides if you’re browsing with Firefox you can now get our open Outcast “Personas”. Personas are easy-to-install, easy-to-use themes that change the look of your Firefox web browser. To learn more about them and get the needed plug-in visit the Personas website.

Get our oOC personas here:

• OpenOutcast Moons
• OpenOutcast Logo

We also added a new wallpaper to the gallery:

Running Outcast has been problematic ever since the game came out. Personally I’ve never complained about that. The thing is, I probably wouldn’t have played this wonderful game if it wasn’t for it’s bugginess. How come? Well, a friend of mine bought Outcast and after a month of futile efforts he finally gave up trying to install it and he gave it to me I was able to play it without any problems and for the next few days and night I was absorbed in a remarkable world, I was the hero of a great adventure…

But I digress.

Outcast was buggy, there is no doubt about it and changes in hardware and software made matters even worse. At some point certain version of OC would simply delete itself after installation. Several patches were released that fixed the installation problems but some gameplay issues remained and after the bankruptcy of Appeal there was no one to fix them.

Don’t worry though, since the release of Outcast I have personally installed and ran it on most Windows versions (at least on Win98, Win2000, WinXP and Win7) and I am here to tell you that it’s absolutely possible. In addition the problems have actually decreased on the newest OS versions (like XP and win7) – installing shouldn’t be a problem anymore and even if it is the patches will take care of that. The main problem that seem to remain are two bugs:  twonha riding and extreme slowdown when going through the mud in Shamazaar.

OK, enough babbling. Here is what you have to do.

Installation

As I said I haven’t had problems with installation since WinXP. If you do experience such problems you need Patch 1. This patch is used to install the game. If the Outcast CD1 is in your drive, first remove it, then start up the patch application and finally put the CD back in.

Patch 2
I’ve never needed Patch 2 to be honest. I even think it’s obsolete since Patch 3 seems to fix the same problems and some more. I am including it here just in case.

Patch 3
I highly recommend applying Patch 3 because it fixes some common bugs and is essential if you want to use the “Best Solution” to the “twonha” and the “mud” bugs described below. This patch is applied after installation.

Important note:  This patch is multi-language. When you fire it up you’ll be presented with language choice menu. Make sure you choose the language of your Outcast-version! There are slight differences between versions and if you pick the wrong language the patch won’t be applied correctly and the game won’t run!

DVD Patch
If you own the DVD version of OC you should get the DVD-Patch. I don’t have DVD version myself so I can’t say much about how to use it…and the instructions are in French According to the translation by google thought, you should apply the patch after installation.

Fixing the Twonha riding and Mud-slowdown bugs

Those two bugs are the main complaint that people seem to have these days – Twonha doesn’t move when you mount it and Cutter walks veeeery slowly through the mud in Shamazaar. There are three ways to fix these as far as I know.

The Best Solution
Hopefully you won’t need to try the other two solutions below. This one is the best solution, hands down.
You need to have Outcast installed (it shouldn’t matter whether you used Patch 1 or not. I didn’t.) and patched with Patch 3.
Next you’ll apply an unofficial Patch – get it here, then start it up and locate the OC3.exe file (should be in your …outcast/oc folder) and let the patch do its work. Again, you need to have applied Patch 3 before using the unofficial patch or you’ll get an error!
Once the patch have been successfully applied you’re done – twonha and mud should now behave normally.
NOTE: The unofficial patch was created by “terence_13“. He appeared unexpectedly on the planet-adelpha forums and later on the open outcast boards and said that the release of the Openoutcast-Demo Oasis has inspired him to sit down and try to find the cause of these two bug. And find them he did. If you experience any problems with the patch you should read this thread on the planet-adelpha forum.

Slowing down your system
(Note: You do not need this or any of the ideas further down if the “Best Solution” has worked for you!)

This is a solution that has been available for quite some time now. Basically the two bugs are somehow connected  with the speed of newer CPUs or more precisely with the higher frame-rate they produce. Don’t ask me how and why – I have no idea, but some smart people figured out that if you slow down your system these bugs would disappear. There are different ways to achieve this kind of artificial slowdown (e.g. starting several heavy applications) but the most “elegant” way seems to be using a CPU slowdown application like CPU Grabber, CPU Killer etc. I had better results with the former but I recommend you try both or even something else and see which works best for you. (I suspect that CPU Killer isn’t free BTW…)

Until a couple of years ago this used to be a fairly simple solution – you just had to start up the slowdown application, tell it how much load to put on your CPU and then start Outcast. If the bugs were still there you go back to your desktop (alt+tab) and slow down your system some more, then return to Outcast and test again. If the bugs are gone but the game is getting too slow you try a slightly lower value for the slowdown app and so on. Through some trial and error you should be able to find the right value.

However with multicore CPUs nowadays it’s a bit trickier. You have to do it as explained in this article

-start your slowdown app (e.g. CPU Grabber) as administrator – right-click on it and choose “Run as administrator”
-open up Task Manager (ctrl+shift+esc), under Processes find the slowdown application, right-click on it and choose “Set Affinity…”. Then set the affinity for that process to just one CPU core. It doesn’t matter which one but remember it since it will be important in the next step
-start Outcast as administrator. Once the actual game is running go back to Task Manager(alt+tab), find the process called OC3.exe and again set its affinity to the same CPU core you chose in the previous step.
-return to game and see if the bugs are gone. Do some trial and error as described above until you get good game-speed with no bugs.

-have fun

Run a screen capturing software and set FPS to 30
That’s a weird and not very practical solution but I decided to include it because of a funny coincidence. Just as I was writing this I stumbled upon a youtube video of a guy making a “speedrun” on Outcast (a speedrun is the art of going through a game as quickly as possible without cheating by planing your route, using glitches and bugs to your advantage, skipping all “unessential” quests, movie sequences etc.). In the comments to that video the same guy explains that recording with FRAPS at 30 frames has solved the slowdown issues.

EDIT: seems like FPS would depend on your version of Outcast. For more info read the very first comment by AWE just below this blog post.

I hope this article has been helpful. One last tip in case you still have some problems is playing around with the compitabiliy mode of  the executable files, especially OC1.exe, OC2.exe and OC3.exe. Persoanally that never helped me much but a lot of people recommend it so I guess it’s worth a try.

Resources:
Patch1 Patch2 Patch3 DVD-Patch

Unofficial Patch

More info about the unofficial patch

CPU Grabber

Another article on running Outcast

The myth about gamedesign

If you ask 100 gamers about gamedevelopment and what position they would like to have if they would work in gamedevelopment, 99 of them will say:”Gamedesigner”. What is the reason about that? I personally think it is still the common prejudice that being a gamedesigner means that you can play games the whole day and only have to do with the funny parts of gamedesign.

“Coding? No, let the coder-gnomes do that. 3D Art? Yeah…sure…Sound? No way…! I’m now going to write some fancy ideas and do some brainstormings about cool features in the game and afterwards I play other games to have a reference…”

I’m really sorry to destroy all your dreams, guys. But the reality looks somewhat different. Gamedesign is hard work. Gamedesign is about trying to think, how the player will react. Gamedesign is about psychology. About the human thinking and about predicting, what the player is now going to do if you give him that particular quest. As a gamedesigner, you will WRITE a lot. Word processors  and applications like Excel will be your best friends. Oh, did I mentioned the writing? You are the responsible guy for keeping the game together. To make sure, that everything fits. And not that you have some “Beaming”-features in a mediaval role playing game. Know what I mean?

But how does that look in oOC? What are the tasks of a gamedesigner there?

In oOC, I’m the responsible guy for the gamedesign document. The bible of the game. This is where all the features are described. How stuff works. Or how it is intended to work. It’s more from a player’s perspective and not from a technical one. That’s the job of the coders after I wrote my stuff. They take all my spacey features and try to put it into something useable. Also my job is to hold the guys back from having too much ideas. Often it happens, that during the design process, the feature fixing, a thousand ideas come to your mind. And you want to tell the team ALL of them. This is okay, since no idea is bad and could at least give some inspiration for other ideas. BUT, the big issue in a lot of mod project out there is, that they start to have too much features.

To be honest, everyone can think of some nice features and ideas. The point is, that writing those ideas down in the gamedesign doc is not the whole work. It’s not even 50% of it. The real work has to be done afterwards. Assets need to be created, logic has to be coded and levels have to be designed. Making a game is not writing the gamedesign document. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the whole work.

To go more into the oOC project now, currently we are in the feature finding and fixing process. We are discussing about features, that we think have to be in the game. During this process, a lot of really hard discussions happen because everybody has different views on certain things. And that’s a very good thing. This way, you are able to see a problem from ten different perspectives and that gives you the possibility to decide the right thing. We are doing this in our boards and the process looks like this…

1. Having an idea
2. Discuss about it
3. Vote about the decision
4. Include it in the feature catalogue

All in all it’s quite a creative process. But in the end, it’s a whole bunch of administrative work to do. Moderate the whole discussions, keep the concept together, kick unwanted ideas out and in the end decide about the features and document them in the design doc. Huhh…

To finish this article now…I want to make clear, that I don’t want to complain about my job. I’m in a team of really talented guys here and it’s a pleasure to work with all of them. My job is fun! Gamedesign is fun! And hey, I wanted to be a gamedesigner since I played my first game. Just like the other 98. So you want to be a gamedesigner? Then go out and try it!

Write me an eMail or comment this article below…

madcybi@openoutcast.org

Best regards,
madcybi

Hi oOcommunity ,

i´d like to present you our new Wallpaper. I decided to make it that time a little bit more colorful and less sterile. Hope you guys like it.

• 1680×1050
• 1920×1200