Overgrowth Rock Song by Jonathan Lewis
March 27th, 2010
This is a guest post from Jonathan Lewis. He is a talented musician and an accomplished satirical video game song-writer. His most well known piece is probably the Half-Life themed "G-Man's Last Breath" which was featured on Kotaku. However, today it is my pleasure to present to you an awesome original tune he put together for our very own ...
Image-based ambient lighting
March 26th, 2010
Ambient light (or indirect light) is light that is not coming directly from a bright light source. For example, in an outdoor scene, the sun is a direct light, and the ambient light comes from the sky and the ground. Here's a picture of the shadowed side of an Overgrowth character, showing how it's lit by scattered light ...
From temporary to final textures
March 25th, 2010
Following up my post on making temporary textures, this post explains how to make the final textures using your temporary textures as a guide. The first thing I did was place the bricks and stones to match up with the original temporary texture. This was really easy since I already had the texure in 3DS Max. After I finished that ...
Comparing ODE and Bullet
March 24th, 2010
Last week, I switched the Overgrowth physics engine from ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) to Bullet. This prompted a few questions from blog readers. What are ODE and Bullet? Why did we switch? Why weren't we using Bullet from the start? What are ODE and Bullet? ODE and Bullet are both open-source physics engines. What are physics engines? To put ...
Overgrowth Alpha 71
March 23rd, 2010
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in the 71st 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 ...
Placeholder textures for refining layouts
March 22nd, 2010
If we want everything in the world to have a consistent level of detail, then we need a consistent texel resolution (the resolution of the texture image divided by the surface area of the model that it is wrapped around). Otherwise we get blurry objects which don't fit in with the detailed environment, or really detailed objects which make ...
Overgrowth Interviewed in Strana Igr (Gameland)
March 21st, 2010
You might have seen the interview on RPS that Alec Meer featured yesterday with Aubrey and me. That was totally awesome and we are very thankful to the RPS guys for giving indies like us a voice. However, I wanted to draw your attention to another interview that won't be as accessible because it's only going to be ...