A few weeks ago, David overhauled our decal engine. Leveraging off this, I've recently started implementing our decals editor, and I can now show off some fancy (but very preliminary) screenshots. I think decals will add a lot to the immersiveness and liveliness of our environments.

Rock garden without decals and with decals. Zoom in to see the lichen!

How the editor sees the decals. Here I just switched into decal mode and pressed ctrl-a. It's a bit messy. I'm still sorting out how it will be presented.

In Overgrowth, decals will serve at least three purpose. First, they will add variety and detail to our textures. This will, effectively, explode the number of assets we have at our disposal. Each model will be reworkable in countless distinct ways just by mixing and matching decals on its surface. For example, in the screenshots above, all the rocks are derived from the same model. I rotated and scaled them to make them seem varied, but, I think it's only with the lichen that they really come to life as individual entities.

Second, we will use decals to blend across abrupt intersections, such as between objects and the terrain. So far, we've been relying on models that tend to mesh well together, and on ambient occlusion to soften the seams. Decals will add a lot to this effort. Decals are like graphical glue. They make everything gel together.

Third, and lastly, we will use decals for slapping Wolfire logos all over the place. Here's how my rock garden turned out after I sent it down to our corporate branding division:

What do you guys think of the decal system so far?

This topic spawned out of a conversation the Wolfire team had at dinner last night and I wanted to share it with you guys to see if we could get some feedback that will help us as we craft Overgrowth. First ask yourself "When have I really cared about a character in a video game that wasn't playable?" (I take it for granted that all players at some base level tend to care about their own character.)

Now ask yourself "When have I really cared about a character in a book or movie?" In books and movies we can't control anyone at all so everyone is arguably a non-player character (NPC). However, based on discussions I've had, I have the impression that movie and book characters tend to pull on our heartstrings more than NPCs. Personally, I know that I respected Obi-Wan Kenobi more than Deckard Cain and worried more about Valentine Wiggin than Alyx Vance. So what's going on here? What stops us from taking NPCs seriously?

Graphical Limitations

Perhaps the uncanny valley hurts the credibility of game characters. Why take something seriously when it looks jarringly unreal? Movies get to use real people and books render characters with the reader's own imagination so these media get to completely avoid the uncanny valley. At the same time, if this explained the whole issue how could movies like WALL-E make us feel so attached to CGI robots?

Limited Interactivity

Interacting with a world should make it more immersive. However, perhaps because player interactions are limited to a finite set of pre-programmed activities, every action is in some ways a reminder that the player is only playing a game. There's no reason to get too worked up about the well-being of the pawns on your chessboard (unless maybe the pawns make you laugh).

Lack of Consequences

Modern games are full of quicksaves, checkpoints, regenerating health and other devices that make it OK for the player to do things wrong and rewind like nothing ever happened. If we could live our lives this way we'd probably be inclined to take the real world much less seriously. Part of what makes a book or a movie so suspenseful is that every new development is meaningful. There are no do-overs.

Give and Take

The easiest way I've seen games motivate players to have feelings towards NPCs is to have them directly affect the player's character. If an NPC regularly gives your character better items or stats, you're probably going to like him and make some efforts to keep him alive. If an NPC takes things away from you, you'll probably dislike him and want to get even. Of course, such NPC relationships are very shallow.

Do you think it's fair to hold video game characters to the same standards as book and movie characters? What NPCs have had the deepest impact on you and why?

I am often asked about the tools I use to make art. I use a lot of tools on a day to day basis for Overgrowth depending on what job I am doing. Some of these have taken me years to learn:

• 3DS Max 9 for 3D modeling
• Mudbox 2009 for 3D sculpting
• xNormal for baking normal maps and ambient occlusion
• Crazybump for making tangent space normal maps from heightmaps
• Photoshop CS2 for making 2D art and color textures for 3D objects
• Wacom Cintiq 12WX tablet for drawing input into Photoshop

All of them are pretty critical, but the most important tools I have used as an artist are a lot cheaper and easier to use:

• Paper
• Pen

The fact is that the basics of art are the same no matter what tools you are using, so if you are just starting out you may as well use what is available. I still like to sketch in my notebook now and then. Even with all those fancy programs, the amount of control and immediacy I get with pen and paper beats anything with the computer.

Here are some sketches I made the other day after I took the train into San Francisco:

I used to draw in pencil, but these days I like the pen more. Since there is no way to erase mistakes it forces me to pay closer attention to what I am doing. Are there any other artists here? What tools do you use? Feel free to post links to your own sketches!

After watching a lot of swordfights in movies, I've noticed that many of the most memorable ones are not 'to the death', despite the use of deadly weapons. Many, if not most, movie duels end with the winner disarming his opponent, or stopping just short of a lethal strike. Non-lethal endings allow for a wider range of motivations than just wanting to kill one another, and adds drama to the scene by adding a new choice - should the victor murder his opponent in cold blood, or try to find an alternative?

In this scene from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a young girl (Jen) has stolen a legendary sword, and challenged a more experienced swordswoman (Shu-lien) to a fight. Although she uses a whole arsenal of deadly weapons, Shu-lien has no intention of actually hurting Jen - she just wants to convince her that she is not disciplined enough to wield such a dangerous weapon. On the other hand, Jen is young and angry, and is not above taking advantage of Shu-lien's hesitation.

This classic scene from The Empire Strikes Back shows even more lopsided intentions. Darth Vader could easily kill Luke Skywalker, but his goal is to capture him and convince him to join the Empire. On the other hand, Luke's goal is to kill Vader and escape with his friends.

The Princess Bride has an unusually cordial duel between the masked hero Westley and professional swordsman Inigo Montoya. Westley just wants to get past to save his true love from a forced marriage, and has no intention of hurting anyone who doesn't deserve it. On the other hand, Inigo half-heartedly tries to do his job (killing Westley).

None of these scenarios are really possible using traditional fighting game mechanics. There have been some attempts - usually triggering a cutscene as soon as one fighter's health drops below a certain threshold, but that is pretty clunky and unsatisfying. We have some ideas about how to represent a broader range of lethality and honour in our fight scenes, but first I would like to hear your ideas. How can we represent different kinds of fight scenes in Overgrowth without resorting to cut scenes?

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:
- WebKitten tweaks
- Added placeholder 'fail whale' models and textures for when files are missing
- Hotspots can now be moved, transformed, and deleted
- Added graphical hotspot browser
- Starting work on decals editor
- Improved ragdolls
- Started hooking up ragdolls to Rabbot
- Bug fixes

Matto1990 has teamed up with Jo-shadow and has made an Adobe Air downloader app that automatically installs and manages all of the mods (view thread). This is really hot and we be posting about this soon. There are rumors of a new version coming very soon.

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