Here is what is new in Overgrowth in this weekly alpha. If you are confused what a weekly alpha is, or even what Overgrowth is, please read our fancy FAQ. Basically, we are developing a massive video game from the ground up -- we are able to do this completely independently by accepting preorders for the game before it's done!

Here are a few highlights from the source repository:

- New decal tools (see this video for details)
- A ton of decal bug fixes
- A number of decal improvements
- New chat UI
- More animation editor UI stuff
- Editor transparency rendering bugs fixed
- Glowing rabbot fixed
- Turned off rabbot ai in editor mode
- Black triangles fixed
- Other misc fixes

Here is a screenshot of a neat scene:

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

This is a post from Iiro Jppinen. He is responsible for most of our GUI design -- the parts that look good.

Hello everyone!

Some of you might have seen me mentioned on the blog before, but for those who haven't, let me introduce myself briefly: I'm the lead GUI designer for Overgrowth (a nice title I just made up).

Jeff has already blogged about some of the interfaces I've been working on with him. It's been a real pleasure working with him, as he really knows what he wants. That timeline for the Animation editor is probably the most time-consuming single element we've made together, and that was still just in three days.

So then, to get to my point, I'd like to introduce to you the chat interface for Overgrowth. Pictured below is a rainbow-like example of it.

As Overgrowth utilises WebKit via Awesomium, it's really easy (this of course being what Jeff told me I'm completely inexperienced in that department) to make the chat bubbles work exactly as you'd imagine them to, with new content scrolling from the bottom, all the while previous messages fade upwards. The player can start typing simply by pressing the T key which will fade in the typing area (in the very bottom of the screenshot). As there probably won't be a mouse cursor in-game, we will utilise the scroll wheel while typing to browse through older messages.

That's the chat interface in a nutshell. Jeff really is a machine making my puny designs live with WebKit: I can basically just throw anything at him. It will for example be possible to select your chat bubble colour with total freedom and to let WebKit handle the hard work.

One last thing for the fellow Mac OS X user. As the chat interface is done with WebKit, it would be really easy to convert it to a working Adium Message Style. You can expect that to arrive at AdiumXtras at some point; I'll let you know.

As with every design, it should be really transparent an experience for the user and because of that, I hope you share any ideas you have on how to improve the experience with us in the comments area.

We've been gradually improving our decals over the past few weeks (blogged in parts 1, 2, and 3). Now we're ready to show off the whole system in a video.

Since my last decal update, I've added a few new specialized tools. In the video, you'll get to see how we can now manipulate and shuffle decal layers, and how we've improved control over exactly which objects each decal projects onto.

John's back with a few new voices, the Whaleman makes a crafty appearance, and it all takes place on a sublime new terrain by Aubrey, with select scenes set on his sweet new rock.

Click here to watch it in HD!

What other decal tools would you like to see in Overgrowth?

It's been our policy to leap on every interview opportunity that comes our way. We've already had a smattering of interviews (including a feature in Igromania magazine and a Developer Banter Podcast on ModDB). However, it dawned on us today that there's a major interview opportunity we haven't taken advantage of yet. We decided it's time to let you directly ask us any questions you have about Wolfire or Overgrowth. Just post them in the comments. We'll let them sit for about a week and then we'll address the top 10 or so questions that have the most "likes" (we also reserve the right to pick out a few bonus questions that may not have the most likes but really appeal to us).

photo taken from a rabbit diary

It would be best to come up with questions that haven't been the subject of blog posts already. Definitely check out the Overgrowth FAQ because that will cover a lot of the basics. We probably won't have time to answer all of the questions so please remember to click the like button on your favorites.

What questions do you have for us?

When I am designing levels, I always seem to need more big rocks. The tricky thing about making really massive rocks is that they require equally massive textures, which can use up too much texture memory. We can use tiling textures to use less memory, but they usually look bad because they don't match the geometry. However, a tiling texture seemed like my best bet, so I made a tiling rock texture from a photo I found at cgtextures.com using Photoshop (offset filter FTW!) The photo is on the left, and the tiling texture is on the right:

I was trying to think of better ways to make my huge rock when I remembered that I can use CrazyBump, the tool I use to make tangent space normal maps, to make decent displacement maps as well. Here is the displacement map that CrazyBump generated from my rock texture:

I tried using 3DS Max to subdivide my rock mesh and apply the displacement map to it, to see what would happen. Here is what that looked like:

The displaced model looked really cool, but it had way too many polygons for the game. 3DS Max has a simplification algorithm built-in, but it doesn't preserve UV texture coordinates. Here is the simplified rock mesh wireframe:

I needed some way to preserve the UV texture coordinates as well. Our OffTheGrid technology can do that, but we don't yet have a good interface for using it on non-terrain models. I looked around a bit, and found a plugin for 3DS Max called Polygon Cruncher. I was pretty happy with the results. Here is the simplified rock in the engine with its color and normal maps intact:

Now the final model has the best of both worlds -- the memory efficiency of tiling textures, and the geometric accuracy of unique textures. That is not even considering all the time saved with this technique.

Since I have my big rocks now, do you guys have any other ideas for assets that would be useful for Overgrowth level design?