In Overgrowth we are trying to make the world feel like it has a real history. The different animal races have been around for a long time and there is a lot of litter left from past groups that have died out or moved on. In addition to abandoned habitations, we have some more mysterious ruins, such as these monoliths. The idea for the monoliths came from the blocks in Lugaru which were used to make huge structures that were really epic.

In updating the blocks we had to make them a bit more realistic-- not just perfect cubes. One of the ways I did this is to make broken variations of the objects. These were designed to be able to be combined to make a lot of unique-looking structures, like the parts used for buildings.

We didn't have to keep these large cube-things for Overgrowth, but for me it was an important part of what made the world unique and interesting. As the artist on Overgrowth I want people to be able to know exactly what game they are looking at from a single screenshot, even if they are not very familiar with video games.

The other great thing about the monoliths is that they follow their own rules, and so they can be placed in a level in ways that wouldn't make sense with other objects. This opens up a lot of gameplay options. I posted some concept art with some level ideas, but now I am actually making them in the engine.

There are a lot of possibilities for different categories of monoliths that offer up new types of gameplay. This is just scratching the surface.

Ragdolls are in Overgrowth now! For those who have pre-ordered, you can summon any number of ragdolls by pressing 'r', and you can throw them around with right-click. They have some pretty cool features, such as smooth sleep transitions, static and dynamic joint friction, aggregated impact detection, and efficient subspace hashing. I can talk about these in a technical post later -- for now I would like to just show you a cool video I made while stress testing ragdolls. Click here to watch it in HD!

We haven't created the physics editor yet, so I had to manually code all of the body parts and constraints. Once we have the editor, I can make these ragdolls a lot more realistic, and attach them to our character models! For now I've also started working on ways to create 'active' ragdolls -- characters that are physically simulated, but not totally passive.

Do you guys have any other ideas on how we can improve our passive ragdoll simulation? Physics objects in games often feel floaty and insubstantial, and I would like to do whatever I can to make Overgrowth physics feel heavy and substantial.

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!

Aubrey has committed a bunch of new art this week, and I've included all of that in the alpha.

Here's a few highlights from the source repository:
- Better ragdolls
- Initial inspector UI
- Sound scripting
- Better ambient occlusion
- WebKitten now has a Trac bug report button (thanks to Jo-Shadow for the patch)
- Slow motion sound shifting
- Decal editor
- Rabbot is back
- Alpha menu key entering improvements
- Bug fixes

Also, on a meta note, I've noticed that these alpha posts are pretty lame. They get like 1/10 as many comments as our other daily posts. Does anyone have any suggestions to make them better? I am thinking of maybe portraying some screenshots of the best user created content of the week. Would that be interesting? Suggestions are welcome.

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

Below is one of the first pieces of concept art I did when I first started working with David. I decided to show it now because we have been talking again about the scale of the characters in game, and maybe making the height differences even more extreme.

My first concept artwork for Lugaru 2 made many years ago

Sorry to get your hopes up about the other critters. There won't be any fox, tiger or panther characters in Overgrowth. Those races were all eaten by the Whaleman.

We still haven't finalized the height of the races, what do you guys think?

We decided that it was high time for Overgrowth to get an inspector palette. The inspector will let you get extra info and edit all types of objects in the map editor. If you click on an object, this will be how you change its material, reorder the decals on it, toggle its visibility, or whatever else turns out to be useful.

What's more exciting to me though, is that this will provide a standardized way to modify scriptable hotspots. For instance, remember when we were placing race start, checkpoint, and finish line hotspots? With the inspector, you will be able to click on a hot spot and change whatever parameters the modder decides to expose to you. That is, a checkpoint hotspot would let you change how much extra time it gives you. Modders will be able to expose any kind of variable they want and choose the appropriate UI to change it. If your script uses colors, you can bind that to the color picker, or if you need one line of text, you can tell it to show an editfield.

So let me introduce it, so far. Thanks to our decision to use web technologies for our UI (WebKit embedded via Awesomium) this sleek inspector represents about a day of work.

All the controls function exactly as you would expect, all the way down to being able to tab between them. I especially like how the muli-line text area can be resized by dragging the little corner on the bottom right. What happens when you click the color picker? This pops up next to it:

All of these controls (the checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.) were just off the top of my head. What UI elements would you guys like to see added here?