Last call for Overgrowth orchestra
March 20th, 2010
This is a post from Mikko Tarmia, who composed all of the music for Overgrowth. As we mentioned earlier, we are recruiting musically-talented Overgrowth fans to play a special arrangement of the Overgrowth theme. So far we have over 80 volunteers, but we are still missing certain instrument players. We have plenty of piano/keyboard players and guitarists, but we ...
Using texture atlases
March 19th, 2010
So a texture is an image that is wrapped around a 3D model to add apparent detail -- but what's a texture atlas? A texture atlas is an image that contains multiple textures. For example, below you can see a character texture on the left, and a texture atlas on the right (with four character textures). Why use a texture ...
Enough about you, let's talk about Meebo
March 18th, 2010
I was temporarily separated from my Wolfire live chat duties this past week while I was at GDC. However, the visitors continue to stream in. If you've seen all the silly Meebo posts, you might be skeptical of the fact that useful stuff does indeed happen on live chat. However, since productivity is another way of saying boring here ...
Two-part shadow maps
March 17th, 2010
The shadow maps we use in Overgrowth are unusual in that they contain two parts: direct shadows and ambient occlusion. These correspond to the two light sources in outdoor scenes, the sun and the sky. To explain how this works, let's consider this scene with a house in the desert: The first part of the shadow map consists of ...
Overgrowth Alpha 70
March 16th, 2010
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in the 70th 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 ...
A Brief Summary of Wolfire At GDC 2010
March 15th, 2010
Some of you probably noticed that I have been neglecting my live chat duties on Wolfire's contact page. The reason was that while the rest of the team spent most of their week fighting the good fight on Overgrowth, I was hanging out at GDC 2010 in San Francisco. The Independent Games Summit Tuesday marked the start of the ...
Obscure Visual C++ features
March 14th, 2010
A couple days ago I wrote about solutions to some common Visual C++ problems (click here to read it). Today I would like to share some obscure features of VC++ that are actually very useful. Local optimization flags When writing computer programs, it's common to have two build targets: one with full optimization and one with no optimization. The ...