I just got terrain self-shadowing working! I also started optimizing rendering by automatically baking all of the sky and sun lighting into a single texture, so the real-time shader can be drastically simplified. The texture in this screenshot is low-resolution just to test out the technique, I will have some high-res shots soon.

It is my great honor to announce Wolfire’s first official Lugaru competition.

The rules are simple:

1. Submit your best Lugaru videos to WeGame. You can use the nifty WeGame widget mentioned in Jeff’s previous WeGame post (if you use Windows). Or you can use your favorite games recording software and then upload your vid to WeGame. Snapz Pro for Mac OS X or Fraps for Windows are great, but unfortunately not free.  Check the forum for more suggestions.

2. In two weeks time (Wednesday, the 3rd at 11:59 PM PST) we will close the contest and have a voting period for three days.  The player who has submitted the Lugaru video that has received the most WeGame “likes” wins!  We will have some runner up prizes as well.

3. Feel free to use debug mode (I recently saw a ridiculous wolf-on-fire video), your own custom levels, mods, or skins (I remember seeing Turner line dancing in a tux somewhere). A Lugaru trailer video would be particularly awesome, but again, anything goes!  Even a simple fight!

Note: when using debug mode, you should turn the debug HUD off (instructions are in the forums) to remove the various debug text from your awesome video.

The winner will receive a free copy of Overgrowth, a $50 gift certificate to the soon-to-be-announced Cafépress Wolfire T-Shirt Store, and mad respect from his fellow gamers. We will also be giving out copies of Overgrowth to select runner ups (or tshirts if they have already purchased Overgrowth) based on subjective feedback!

To help seed this competition I have uploaded my greatest recorded Lugaru fight of all time:

I know you guys can do much better than this anyway but rest assured all my videos (vids submitted to WeGame by spacemarine1) are automatically disqualified.

John’s Tips for Success:
- Show no fear: Fights tend to look best when you take on multiple enemies at the same. Even if you don’t win the whole fight, you will at least create some “Holy Crap I can’t believe I’m still fighting” moments. You can splice these into a highlight reel.
- Set the mood: Why not play some tunes in the background for your video capture program to record? A little music can add a lot to the drama of a fight.
- Post links to your vid in high traffic zones: How can you get people to like your video if no one is looking at it? A good start is in the official competition thread on the Wolfire Forum, in these comments, and in Wolfire IRC. WeGame makes it very easy to embed your video all over the place.

Everyone can claim to be a great fighter, but not everyone can prove it. I wish you brave warriors the best of luck in the battles to come. May your kicks be swift and your reversals true.

Mudbox recently released their 2009 edition in which performance was greatly improved. This allows me to put a level of detail into the textures that was difficult or impossible before. Instead of depending on texture overlays to provide small scale details, I can directly paint grainy or cracked surfaces. It is also faster then trying to do half in a sculpting app, and half in Photoshop or CrazyBump.

This is a terrain used to test view distance and work flows for high resolution textures. We now have a consistent way of creating 4096×4096 terrain textures. Some graphics cards will support this, and we’ll be able to downsample the textures for lower end computers

Here is a desert environment for Overgrowth. In addition to using real world data, we are using a program called World Machine 2 (WM2) to add erosion details and other small scale features. WM2 allow for fast, high quality results and lots of unique detail with less effort. The program is also free for non-commercial use, so people should be able to use it for their own mods once the game is out.

Hey guys,

WeGame.com and the WeGame client now supports Lugaru!

Check it out: http://www.wegame.com/games/lugaru/

WeGame is basically the awesome combination of video capturing software like Fraps and online video sites like YouTube. And the best part is that it’s free! There are a ton of threads on the Wolfire forums asking about how to record video in Lugaru and they often result in disappointment. Well, now Lugaru fans have access to the best video game recording solution and it’s totally free!

Unfortunately, it’s Windows only at the moment, so Mac and Linux fans are out of luck for now.

We are going to be working closely with WeGame for Overgrowth and will announce some really exciting stuff we are going to be doing soon.

Finally, we are going to announce a Lugaru video contest pretty soon, so get familiar with WeGame (or your favorite screen capturing alternative)!

It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction. Inspired by the presidential campaigns, John and I decided to do something similar. Simple: we asked our community for help via Overt Ops.

I’ll let the results speak for themselves. Within a week, we had our press page translated into 15 languages, with about 5 more in progress!

English

Croatian

Czech

Dutch

Finnish

French

German

Hungarian

Italian

Latvian

Norwegian

Polish

Russian

Spanish

Swedish

Tagalog

In the overt ops forum, we have compiled a list of virtually every video game magazine, website, blog, etc. in the world! Pretty soon, we are going to announce Overgrowth globally - all thanks to our fans!

I think this is a great way to get world class PR without spending a dime. Especially handy if you are an indie studio like us, which cannot begin to afford a professional PR team. Thanks guys! We are eternally grateful to our fans.

As always, if you are a native speaker of a non-english language, please join us in Overt Ops, and if you see any errors with our fan translations, please let us know! Even if you are not a native speaker, if you have any creative marketing ideas on a zero dollar budget, we would love to hear them in Overt Ops. As always, we love to hear from you.

See you guys in IRC and the forums.

We are starting on actually making our landscapes look like real landscapes! So far we have completed a lot of the macro detail, like the general shape and color; but we still have a lot of work to do on the details.

Well, the 500th fan has joined the Overgrowth Facebook page! That is truly amazing and we are pretty much stunned. That is quite an army of Wolfire fans! It’s crazy that about a week ago I was bothering my roommate to join to bump the fan number up from 5 people to 6 people. You guys are the best community ever!

As promised, we are going to begin alpha testing, which is what most of you guys have been waiting for! Alpha testing is limited to the secret preorder forum and is starting immediately. People have been playing around with it for the past 20 minutes in the IRC channel and things are getting pretty exciting!

Thanks and happy testing! See you guys on the forums and in IRC.

Edit: to clarify, this doesn’t mean that alpha testing is closed. Anyone else who preorders will still get in on the testing! In fact, John told me that now is the best time to preorder.

Aubrey carved this Wolfire pumpkin last night!

Phillip, John, and I set it on fire, in the spirit of the old school Wolfire logo.

See the full album on our Facebook page.

Add yourself to the page while you’re at it!