Debugging rotations
July 19th, 2009
Each week in our alpha post, we briefly list the latest changes to Overgrowth. Some weeks we have a bunch of cool new features to point out, but other weeks it's a bit harder to see what has changed. This is partly because adding new features is often just the icing on the cake. A lot goes on behind ...
Item browser progress
July 18th, 2009
This has been a long time coming, but this upcoming alpha will have the item browser hooked up! Hale, the man behind the Foothold map, among other contributions, created all of the thumbs for each object, decal, and made a couple of hotspot icons as well. Almost everything we have included so far in the alpha should be accessible via ...
Simple memory usage tracking
July 14th, 2009
There are many complicated and expensive products out there to help find memory leaks and optimize RAM usage, but I find that the built-in Task Manager on Windows (or Activity Monitor on Mac) is very easy to use, and powerful enough for most tasks. Here's what the task manager looks like (Overgrowth is still listed as Lugaru2.exe): You ...
A WebKit primer - part 1
July 12th, 2009
Normally when you are designing a public webpage, you have to be really careful to make sure that it works in a number of browsers. Namely, FireFox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE 8, IE 7, and IE 6. The various versions of Internet Explorer are the worst because they are the most popular, yet also the most varied and broken. This ...
Sky and lighting editing ~ part 1
July 11th, 2009
Lighting is a big part of what ties a scene together and gives it a distinct mood. Until recently, all our Overgrowth levels had, for the most part, the same lighting conditions. We had sandy deserts, rolling plains, and mountainous valleys, but they all had a similar tone: bright afternoon on a cool, cheery day. Now we can make things ...
Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 2
July 3rd, 2009
Now that I've introduced vectors in Part 1, we need to look at some of the fundamental tools for working with them. The most important tools to understand are length, normalization, distance, the dot product, and the cross product. Once you wrap your mind around these concepts, and write functions to use them, you can solve most vector problems ...
Starting Grass
July 2nd, 2009
We have started some very early groundwork for grass in Overgrowth. The first step is making a grass object so we can test out what things look like with basic object shading -- next, we can figure out how to improve it! Here is my first test asset for grass. It looks black because you are actually looking at the back ...