We still have some under the hood work to do before we can start implementing the Overgrowth combat system. However, one thing we think about frequently is what features make a fight epic?

Fighters in the real world must obey the laws of physics. They get tired easily, can't jump very high to do ridiculous acrobatics and one or two clean hits usually puts someone on the ground. Real fights are ugly, awkward and over quickly.

As such, Hollywood action movies often decide that perfect realism limits a fight's entertainment value. Here is a list of techniques that seem to correlate to the epic awesomeness of a fight:

1. Characters are damage resistant and/or great at dodging attacks
2. Characters are super strong and can send enemies flying with attacks
3. Characters are able to dispatch multiple enemy minions in quick succession
4. Special moves happen in slow motion
5. Characters can perform epic jumps and/or acrobatic attacks

Here is an example of a scene that follows these rules of epicness:

Here's another:

For me Lugaru's appeal was that it not only incorporated all of these epic techniques, but David mapped these features to a learning curve. Thus I started Lugaru consistently getting my face punched in, but over time felt like the action hero of my own interactive Lugaru movie (click here for one of my favorite in-game action sequences).

You guys have done a great job of giving us reference links for fighting moves in the forums but we'd also like to hear your thoughts on fighting presentation style. What are your favorite fight scenes (from games, movies, tv, etc.)? What features make fighting epic but not cheesy? According to visitors on our Meebo widget, slow motion KO's and deathblows are a must for Overgrowth.

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Yesterday's Contest Results: The time for Aubrey's concept art was a speedy 44 minutes and 45 seconds. The closest guess to this time was 45 minutes and because Bluesmudge declared it first, he is the winner and will be added to our next tech demo.

I have been working on fleshing out the ideas behind the dogs and their culture in Overgrowth. I am pretty excited about it so I made some new concept art!

Be sure to check it out in HD.

Addition by John: Guess how long it took Aubrey to draw this in the comments! We'll add the winner to our next tech demo video.

Inspired by recent blog comments about bloom, I added a post-processing step to the rendering pipeline in Overgrowth. Post processing effects are image filters that are applied as a final step before each rendered frame is drawn to the screen -- much like Photoshop filters. One of the more interesting effects I tested is edge detection: setting the value of each pixel to its original value minus the average of its neighbors. Here is the pseudocode for the GLSL shader:

vec3 color = tex2D( tex, tex_coords.st ).rgb +
tex2D( tex, tex_coords.st + vec2( 1, 0) ).rgb * -0.25 +
tex2D( tex, tex_coords.st + vec2(-1, 0) ).rgb * -0.25 +
tex2D( tex, tex_coords.st + vec2( 0, 1) ).rgb * -0.25 +
tex2D( tex, tex_coords.st + vec2( 0,-1) ).rgb * -0.25;

Normally, this looks kind of like this:

However, in some circumstances it looks a lot more like some kind of modern art. We see a lot of strange things working on shaders, so I thought I would share these with you:

Soon I'll do a video on some common 'next-gen' post-processing shaders like bloom and depth-of-field.

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 added a bunch of art assets. We've reorganized it a little bit too, so some maps will need to be modified. Jo-shadow is on it ;) so I am sure all the maps will be fine.

In addition to the new art assets, here's a few highlights from the source repository:
- Hotspot and scriping improvements
- Wolfire WebKitten
- Various UI to fine tune shadows
- Shadow saving / loading
- Restructured math stuff
- Ambient Occlusion can now be enabled
- New Awesomium (ajs' WebKit library)
- Bug fixes

What is WebKitten? Stay tuned for an expos later this week!

Jo-shadow is in charge of organizing the community maps and has done a great job in his thread in the Secret Preorder Forum.

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 will definitely be posting about this soon.

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

This is a post from Mikko Tarmia who is the composer for all of Overgrowth's music.

In this post, I want to talk a little about the evolution of music in Overgrowth. You might have heard some of the original music tracks which were produced when Overgrowth was still in the shape of Lugaru 2 (well, I guess that was only a working title for the project at the time). Over time, Overgrowth has developed a lot -- the game mechanics, graphics and other elements are all being updated, and so will the music get a new frosting and a cherry on the top of it.

With a selection of new sound libraries and improved music production skills, it was obvious for me to update every track made for L2. One of the decisions was to drop every brass instrument from the arrangements and bring in more ethnic instruments. Thanks to Anton Riehl, we will have some live ethnic flute playing included in the soundtrack.

I made two audio examples for comparing the differences between old and new. The first example shows how one of the ambient tracks has changed. It first plays the original version and in the middle of the clip it crossfades into updated version.

In another example you will first hear the original version of a combat track, and lastly an updated version also playing the same spot.

Neither of these updated versions are final versions for the tracks, but they should give a picture how they will sound like in the game.