From this morning:

A lot of you who have been hanging around the Wolfire site already know how the Whale Man was created. However, those of you newer to the community probably know only a small piece of the story. Today I thought it might be fun to tell the story of how the whale man came to be.

October 16th, 2008

Mike_Cuzins starts an epic thread about water in SPF. The Wolfire dev team voices worries about having to perfect water to the detriment of other aspects of Overgrowth like fighting. Fans reject this argument and Jeff is forced to reveal the real reason why the team is hesitant to add water: water is where the whale men live and "you really don't want to meet the whale men" he warns. Few fans take the Whale Man warning seriously.

October 31st, 2008

Aubrey's official whale man concept art is released to the public. Fans begin wondering if the whale man may actually exist in the Overgrowth universe.

January 30th, 2009

The whale man offers brief commentary in the map editor tutorial video but months pass with only a few occasional discussions referring to the Whale Man. But the question on everyone's mind is still "Is the whale man really exist?"

April 2nd, 2009

OpethRockr55 takes matters into his own hands and creates an amazing whale man statue. The mesh is loaded into the engine and the Whale Man's enormous shadow is cast across the landscape and is featured as the finish line for the Overgrowth Race Course video.

April 3rd, 2009

Nimai reports the whale man has been slain.

Closer inspection reveals the photograph to be a hoax and the whale is seen alive and well elsewhere pursuing his favorite hobbies like mountain climbing (photo courtesy of Jo-Shadow):

and breaking stuff(photo courtesy of TheBigCheese):

May 22nd, 2009:

Tim Soret announces that the whale man has shed his stone skin in favor of something more whale like. He releases a video showing the new and improved Whale Man from many angles.

What's next?

Only time will tell what the future holds for the Whale Man. Originally we weren't sure we were actually going to put him into Overgrowth, but now it appears he's already been built. God help us if the Whale Man gets rigged to our animation editor.

Hopefully this post will be useful to the meeboguest921835's out there. Can you guys recall any important facts of the whale man story that I missed?

You are probably familiar with this image from Alpha 27. It is missing a lot of things we would like to have in the final game. Sometimes it is useful to make what is called a "target render". A target render shows what a screen shot from the final game would look like once it's done. This is a great way to get the whole team on the same page about what new technology we need. I went and added a few things in Photoshop to the above image to show what I would like it to look like when it's done.

Here are some of the things I painted in:

- Decals (which are almost totally finished and ready to be added in-engine)
- Grass
- Whispy clouds and smoke
- More foliage
- Enemies
- Campfires
- Post effects adjustments (to the brightness and colors)

Here is the target render!

Is there anything I forgot to add that you would like to see in Overgrowth?

Physics libraries like ODE help simulate large-scale rigid body interactions, but they are only a small part of a complete game physics system. For detailed physics effects, it is usually more efficient to write unique subsystems. This is because all physics engines are necessarily based on vastly simplified model of reality, using assumptions known to be false. By writing new sub-systems, we can use different sets of assumptions for different situations, and achieve more realistic results with less computation. For example, check out this destroyable wall I created while working on a cover-based shooter (using simple cube chunks for clarity, instead of real jagged wall chunks).

This works by treating the wall as a 2-dimensional grid that propagates stress fractures in a manner resembling a cellular automaton. Each particle that breaks off is then treated as a Newtonian particle, with random spin and bounce vectors to simulate rigid body physics. This ran smoothly and was easy to implement -- it would be difficult and inefficient to create a general-purpose physics engine that supported the same kind of destruction. Here is another fast special-case glass-shattering effect I wrote for a robot combat game:

In Lugaru, I used many special-case effects to try and make materials more believable. Blood dripped down characters' bodies from cuts. Trees shook from impacts and dropped leaves. Bodies falling on snow left imprints. Here is a picture of Turner after blocking a claw swipe with his face, showcasing the blood physics.

For Overgrowth, I would like to continue to focus on special physics effects, leaving our general rigid body solver to handle ragdolls, weapons and other large objects. Can you think of any physics effects we can work on that are often neglected in games? Some ideas we are considering include dripping blood, weapon and armor damage, and air turbulence.

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:
- Lots of decal fixes and improvements
- Displays key presses to debug foreign keyboards
- Cleaning up and formalizing creation and removal of entities, grouping, and undo/redo
- Combining various editor modes into an omni editor
- Some decal editor and billboard improvements
- Text editor UI
- Item browser UI
- Initial, janky animation editor UI
- Optimized console a bit
- Bug fixes

Here is a scene from Aubrey's DogTomb.xml that I added in a27.

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

We've already given you a sampling of the kinds of melee weapons that will be included in Overgrowth but a lot of people have been asking me about ranged weapons. This is a tough design problem -- we would like to include ranged attacks, but we also want to maintain the focus on close-quarters combat. Many fighting games that include ranged weapons end up having severe balance problems, with strictly dominant strategies, like the dual pistols in Zeno Clash or the throwing knives in Assassin's Creed.

Above is an example of a strictly dominant ranged weapon.

Case study: Lugaru knife

The throwing knife is the only ranged weapon in Lugaru. It is very powerful - killing unarmored rabbits in one hit. However, it is somewhat balanced out in several ways:

Easy to dodge - Any enemy that is alerted to your presence will dodge or catch thrown knives about 90% of the time, and then they will have the knife and you will be unarmed.

Melee finisher - You can throw the knife into wolves and armored rabbits, but they won't die. To finish them off, you have to knock them over, roll over their body, and twist out the knife.

Limited range - The knife can only be thrown about twenty feet -- any farther than that and Turner won't even try to throw it.

Other balancing techniques

Here are some of the ideas we were thinking of to extend and refine ranged weapon balance in Overgrowth:

Weak attacks - We could use ranged weapons mostly for distracting and slowing opponents, rather than killing them. For example, enemies could throw rocks at you if you are on a ledge that they can't reach, or you could throw shuriken at pursuers to slow them down and force them to move more cautiously.

Sloppy attacks - Melee weapons could be thrown to inflict severe damage, but with less precision than a close-up attack. For example, if you are close to an enemy, you could perform a silent stealth kill with your knife. On the other hand, if you are far away, you could throw the knife into his back and kill him, but not before he cries out and wriggles around a bit.

Flashy attacks - Thrown attacks could be effective against weak enemies, but much less effective against stronger ones. You could throw a knife and kill a random untrained thug, but a skilled opponent could dodge it or catch it out of the air.

Above is a trailer for a whole movie about flashy ranged attacks.

Please let us know if you have any ideas for new ways to balance the ranged weapons in Overgrowth. We would also like to hear what you think about the Lugaru throwing knife -- is it a good example of balanced range weaponry?