Decals editor ~ part three
June 17th, 2009
Why are decals important? The decal is one of my favorite 3D graphics tools. It serves so many purposes: covering seams, spicing up tiling textures, adding unique details, and allowing dynamic cosmetic environmental changes. Here is a naked 'land chunk' model, with no decals: Here is the same model again after adding a rock decal and a moss decal: As ...
Wolfire webcomic viewer
June 14th, 2009
Since launching the Overgrowth webcomic a few days ago, a lot of people have been asking about our custom viewer. Here's a brief outline of all of its features and some insight on how each of them work. Preloading and AJAX When you navigate in the comic viewer, it doesn't actually load a new page, it simply loads ...
New cursors
June 7th, 2009
We have some new cursors for Overgrowth courtesy of the awesome Iiro Jppinen. These will show up in Monday's alpha build and will nicely replace the existing cursors. Our cursors have gone through a few iterations, from the original programmer art, to a few from Phillip, to some from AJS, and one from Silverfish. I am pretty happy with ...
OffTheGrid revisited
June 2nd, 2009
What is OffTheGrid terrain? OffTheGrid is a terrain technology we developed to bring detailed terrain data to in-game resolution without losing much detail. Below you can see a comparison between heightmap terrain (left), and OTG terrain (right). The OTG terrain is actually using fewer polygons. How does it work? We start with a high-polygon terrain, and iteratively discard the least ...
Overgrowth animation editor UI
May 30th, 2009
The animation editor in Overgrowth is one of the last pieces of the puzzle that will let us transform the Phoenix Engine from cool tech into a sweet ninja rabbit fighting game. This (combined with the upcoming physics editor) will let us rig character models to a physics based skeleton and start creating all of the running animations, combat moves ...
Detailed physics effects
May 26th, 2009
Physics libraries like ODE help simulate large-scale rigid body interactions, but they are only a small part of a complete game physics system. For detailed physics effects, it is usually more efficient to write unique subsystems. This is because all physics engines are necessarily based on vastly simplified model of reality, using assumptions known to be false. By writing new ...
New object palette window
May 23rd, 2009
Happy memorial day weekend! Per Wolfire tradition, we try not to observe weekends, holidays, or combinations of the two until Overgrowth is finished, so here's another update! I was talking with Phillip and we decided that it was kind of lame having three separate browsers for hotspots, objects, and decals (plus we have two more planned in the future ...