Post processing - part one
April 22nd, 2009
Inspired by recent blog comments about bloom, I added a post-processing step to the rendering pipeline in Overgrowth. Post processing effects are image filters that are applied as a final step before each rendered frame is drawn to the screen -- much like Photoshop filters. One of the more interesting effects I tested is edge detection: setting the value of each ...
Preliminary Hotspots
April 18th, 2009
One of the technologies we've been focusing on recently is game scripting. As part of this effort, I've been working on hotspots. Hotspots allow us to assign a physical location to scripts. We will be using them to initiate dialogues, trigger special effects, incite AI reactions, and much more. And, of course, they will be fully moddable. Here ...
Object Browser
April 13th, 2009
Up until now, Overgrowth has been using the default Windows and Mac file browsers to load objects. This is functional enough, but it's slow, ugly, and no fun. One of my favorite things to do in games is to scan through all the cool items and upgrades one can get. At their best, these inventories have the same appeal ...
Environment shadows - step 4
April 10th, 2009
I just started working on baking ambient occlusion into the lightmaps. This is currently performed by accumulating the shadows from 64 random light sources in the sky, and using the resulting ambient occlusion map to modulate the indirect lighting contribution. Here is what the Foothold map looks like with ambient occlusion enabled (above) and without (below): It's a fairly ...
Environment shadows - step 3
April 7th, 2009
Our biggest design goal for the Overgrowth editor is to achieve high-quality graphics with a minimum production time. This not only includes the time to create the level, but also any preprocessing steps we might have, such as lightmap calculation. To keep the lightmap calculation fast, we're using a hybrid system of traditional texture baking and modern depth-map shadows ...
Environment shadows - step 2
April 3rd, 2009
The shadows in Overgrowth are now being rendered directly to lightmap textures, which are then read by the object pixel shaders to modulate the direct lighting. The shadows are starting to look pretty decent, but there is a lot left to do to improve efficiency and reduce errors! I can go into detail about how the shadows work when they ...
Environment shadows - step 1
March 29th, 2009
In Overgrowth we are going to use baked lightmap shadows, but it is still important that the algorithm is very fast. First, I would like the shadows to update in real-time in the editor as objects are transformed. Second, to calculate ambient occlusion we have to accumulate shadows from hundreds of different virtual light sources, which is impractical if the ...