Man, Outpost was so cool when I was a kid. Of course, back then I didn't understand a thing about it and had no idea it was only half of what as supposed to be there, but to this day I have fond memories of it.

But this is pretty neat too, though I've never had the chance to play Outcast.

I played the new version a bit.

- Music works for me.

- Intro video is stretched to fill the whole screen (from 4:3 to 16:9 aspect ratio). Booo! I prefer watching the videos and graphics in the correct aspect ratio, even if it means seeing black bars on the sides.

- Performance is ok on the 1920x1080 resolution (on ASUS G75VW gaming laptop). Severe stuttering in the very beginning (the first dialog), and when I saved the game and the screen flashed to white.

- Gamepad support is pretty neat, suitable for this game. I am not sure if the original supported e.g. older DirectInput gamepads, but it is good you can adjust your walking/running speed naturally with the analog gamepad. For some reason swimming and diving feels awkward with the gamepad, I sometimes opted to keyboard + mouse when in water.

- Occasional graphical glitches I don't recall in the original, e.g. during the first dialog, in couple of scenes background graphics were missing completely, only grey background. I didn't see the same during actual gameplay though.

- For some reason, when I exit the game, Windows screen brightness is all maxxed up. Not sure what that is all about.

- I think the game crashed once... but now I am unsure if it was the game, or some Firefox plug-in just crashing in the background (and I was merely thrown from the game to desktop, due to an error message)..

I just spoke to the devs - maybe there is a codec missing on my system. They are checking the issue and I will install the old game to see if this helps.

Yes I noticed this and already told the devs that the correct aspect ratio is 4:3. The compression also is absolutely terrible. A user here in the GOG forum has made a much better intro video wich even is smaller than the ones they are using now (90MB vs. 130MB in the new version and HQ).

Obviously there still are some problems when playing in Full HD. Playing in 720p should help and it helped me - the game does not look much better in 1080p.

As far as I remember the original did not support gamepad.

I'll test the original in a few minutes and check this.

I haven't experienced this problem on my Win Xp system - but then again I'd rather have this but music ;)

The game crashed several times so I think it is safe to say that it is not running stable yet. Maybe GOG should make THIS this the bonus version for now.

Have you tried the game in windowed mode by any chance? With Outcast 1.1, I can't get the mouse cursor to stay inside the game window. It just drifts off to the desktop, which makes it very difficult to play the game. Is there a way to get the game window to lock the cursor?

Running in windowed mode seems to fix the stutter / slowdown on the black screen fade / white flash effects. The game seems to run a little bit smoother in general as well.

I just downloaded it and gave it a try, and the way the starting movie plays is odd, it actually seems to bring up Windows Media player (you can see the UI), weird...

Apparently they're planning on fixing/changing that in a future update.

EDIT: and fixing the save stutter issue in fullscreen, yay

Do you play on a laptop or desktop PC? I don't know if this is related to laptops only because they usually have specific keyboard keys for screen brightness controls.

The screen brightness control is not really maxxed out, but the brightness is still as bright as possible when exiting the game. If I push the brightness + or - keys once after that (Fn + some function key on the keyboard), then the brightness goes to normal instantly, ie. merely adjusting the brightness a little reverts it back to the original value.

I have seen this same thing earlier when the NVidia Geforce drivers were quite unstable, and crashed every now and then. The brightness would be similarly maxxed out after the driver crash. But now there is no error about a driver crash (and the NVidia drivers have been quite stable lately I think); it is happening due to the game for some reason. I don't know why the game affects the screen brightness.

Especially the white flash effect during the game seems very bright.


By the way, when using the 16:9 resolutions (e.g. 1920x1080 or 1280x720 or so), does it show properly more of the scenery on the sides, or does it simply stretch the original 4:3 image to fit the 16:9 screen (like it does for the intro video)?

I presume and hope it displays 16:9 correctly, but just trying to confirm that. Maybe I need to play the game side by side on two laptops, old and new version. :)

It's vertical- - no stretching, but you see less on the top of the screen than you would at a 4:3 resolution at the same zoom level.
Examples (taken in the same spot at the same zoom level):

4:3 (1440x1080)

16:9 (1920x1080)

The 2D art for the visor appears to be horizontal+ and gets cut off slightly at 4:3 resolutions. The functional parts of the HUD seem to be fine, though.

When you save the game, does the screen turn black at all during the white flash? This happened to me a few times while I was running in fullscreen mode - it was my display driver crashing. Something about the white flash effect is dodgy in fullscreen mode.

No, I was trying to play it on my desktop PC. But maybe your problem does not appear for me because I am using Win XP?

I found out that the game does run better when setting the outcast 1.1.exe in compatibility mode for win95 or win95/Me - this fixed my crashes and my music :)

And another thing: deactivating bilinear filtering does help performance a lot. I compared the original (w/HD patch) and this version and the intro movie ran with the same speed and without stuttering (on a Core2Duo at 3GhZ!).

Last: The savegames of the old and nev version are compatible.

P.S.: Could please some mod change this thread title to Outcast 1.1?

I have a similar experience .... I think i didn't speak english as well as i do today, and i don't remember reading the manual(maybe i did, maybe i didn't), so i never got going with that game, i didn't quite know what to do and never really progressed. I think i still have the CD, but probably won't work

Did you ever got going ? You tried playing it recently ?

Has anyone figured out how to get the Outcast window to keep the cursor locked? Right now the cursor keeps moving outside of the window and it keeps clicking the desktop instead.

Don't know if this helps. But this is some of the postings from the devs on steam:

"Hi everyone !
In order to hide the mouse in windowed mode, we recommend to start in Full Screen, and then press Alt-Tab to get back to windowed mode.
Sorry for the inconvenience !"

That seems to help! Thanks! :) But the combo that worked for me was Alt+Enter.