Overgrowth FAQ
February 12th, 2009
Hey guys I've noticed on our live chat that a lot of people end up asking similar questions about Overgrowth. I am happy to answer them individually but I bet a lot of other people have these questions as well. - When will Overgrowth be released? - What are Overgrowth's system requirements? - How will Overgrowth be different from Lugaru? - What ...
Modular Tree Assets
February 11th, 2009
In case you haven't heard enough about trees, I have decided to talk a little bit about how our tree assets work in Overgrowth. Many games use the popular tree editing middleware called SpeedTree. Although SpeedTree does some cool things, it has the problem that because it creates tree models from scratch using procedural parameters, the trees tend to ...
Rendering Plants with Smooth Edges
February 11th, 2009
When we are rendering many objects on screen at the same time, we only have a few hundred polygons to allocate to each individual plant. We use intersecting alpha-mapped planes to give the impression of much greater detail. Here is a picture of what our desert tree looks like with the alpha channel used for color instead of transparency: If ...
Overgrowth alpha 13
February 9th, 2009
Another week, another alpha! Here is what is new in Overgrowth this week. As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked some stuff, and implemented some new features. Aubrey has created even more art. Going through our svn code logs the past week, here are a few highlights: - A few optimizations - New transparency stuff - Fixed widescreen FOV - Hooked ...
Trees
February 8th, 2009
I finished up some trees and a few smaller bushes recently. Some of this stuff is still a work in progress, but I was happy enough with how the tree came out to show it off a bit. Here is our new tree in action! This is still using our standard material shader. Soon we will have a special leaf ...
Staying Current with Graphics Research
February 8th, 2009
One of our favorite things to do is to find cool graphics research videos and to share them with each other on AIM. We're trying to stay current with the latest graphics techniques in hopes that we may find useful technologies for Overgrowth and for our future games. Here are five of the coolest research videos we have been ...
Wolfire Graphic Converter Utility
February 7th, 2009
One cool feature in Overgrowth is that it automatically and intelligently converts your image files when you run it. For example, Aubrey can be designing a level and working on textures in the raw TGA format. Aubrey likes TGA because it has a separate channel for alpha transparency so in Photoshop you can draw directly onto its transparency mask seamlessly ...