Overgrowth 1.1 (on sale for 40% off)

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December 22nd, 2017

Happy Holidays! We're pleased to announce Overgrowth 1.1, on sale for 40% off until January 4th. Along with many performance improvements and bug fixes, it features an officially-remastered version of Therium 2, a total conversion by Constance P.


Be sure to watch it in HD!

Constance has worked on this story over the course of two or three years, and created more than 40 levels, including branching paths, multiple endings, an entirely new story, and deep background lore. Since the launch of the Overgrowth story in October, the Wolfire team has been working with Constance to improve Therium 2 and make it easier and better for players to access.

Constance added several new levels to the beginning to introduce the story more smoothly, and completely remade or revised a number of others. Together we built a new menu and save system that makes it easy to keep track of progress through the branching campaign. We also went through most of the levels to overhaul the lighting and visuals, so that they look as good or even better than the original Overgrowth levels, while keeping performance and framerate in mind.

Therium2 gives the player a lot of freedom, and doesn't hold their hand much with hints and checkpoints, so I would recommend playing through the original Overgrowth story first to make sure you have mastered the controls and mechanics.

Like the Overgrowth story, Therium-2 was made with moddability in mind, so it'll also include new assets made by Rolands and Jackie, made available in the editor. There are also several new hotspots and scripts that anyone can use for their own levels.

Here's a summary of all the changes in the 1.1 release. You can find the full change log in this document.

Therium 2 story

  • Now comes with base game, no need to install a mod
  • New branching story progress menu (and progress saving!)
  • New levels at beginning to give more back story
  • Many graphics updates (improved shadows and lighting, new models, decal and detail work, FOV in dialogues, fixed some broken assets, a couple new shader effects)
  • Prompts for reading lore notes, and added a few more lore tidbits (dialogues, notes)
  • Improved level load times from mod version

Overgrowth story

  • Improvements to wall-run, platforming, collision issues in several levels
  • Added invisible level boundaries to many levels, so player less likely to get lost

Gameplay

  • Added ability to drop weapon by pressing grab and drop (right click + Q by default)
  • Made "hardcore" difficulty 100% speed to make it feel less "floaty"/"unresponsive"
  • Improved the difficulty selection menu (added "auto ledge grab" and "tutorials" checkboxes, added descriptions of difficulty changes)

Graphics/Settings

  • Improved full screen modes, added multi-monitor and high-DPI support

Performance

  • Added shader preload and caching support, which will reduce in-level hitches, and improve load times for loaded levels (after the first level is loaded)
  • Added detail object dropdown to graphics settings (now different detail levels, to help ease performance on medium/low end machines, without sacrificing visual quality nearly as much)
  • Added simple fog setting to graphics settings (for better rendering performance)
  • Small optimizations to rendering performance

Reliability

  • Added 64 bit windows build, made it default in Steam for 64 bit machines (should significantly reduce out of memory issues on long runs)
  • Did some work on fixing memory allocation issues
  • Worked on making Linux/OSX less case sensitive in asset file path fields (for compatibility with Windows-sourced content)
  • Fixed many crash bugs, especially when working with mods

Modding/Editor

  • Added color history to color picker in editor
  • New in-game, filterable, dockable log window
  • Added "Replace mesh..." to "select" top menu bar
  • Several other editor improvements
  • Added better support for branching mod campaigns
  • Fixes to "deactivate all mods" button

Scripting

  • Editor enhancements for manually sending messages to scripts
  • Better documentation dump
  • Better error messages for missing script functions
  • Several new functions in angelscript
  • Performance improvements on live update

These are just a few of the changes in this update; you can find the full changelog here.

Thanks as always for all the support! See you guys in Discord and the forums.

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If you'd like to see real-time news about Overgrowth, you can follow us on Twitter at @wolfire.

Also, feel free to support us by purchasing Overgrowth, Receiver, or Lugaru HD, all on sale now!