Google App Engine for indie developers
March 1st, 2009
As promised, here's the second part of my post about web hosting. I thought I would highlight the technology that we use for the main Wolfire site, Google App Engine, and explain why we chose it. Before I explain what App Engine is exactly, let me talk about what I look for in a web host. - Scalability and reliability ...
Editor Paintbrush
February 28th, 2009
To create natural environments in Overgrowth, we will need to be able to quickly populate the landscape with lots of semi-randomized rocks and vegetation. Doing this is pretty tedious with the current editor toolset. So, I've begun work on a 'paintbrush' tool for quick object placement. It's still in its early stages, but I've found it fun ...
Creating Our Own Skydomes
February 19th, 2009
For Overgrowth, we are photo-sourcing all our skydomes. So far, we've been searching sites like cgtextures.com to find these images. This means we are limited to the same small set of decent skydomes that countless other game developers are looking at. We don't want to be limited, and we've noticed that the skies here in Berkeley ...
File hosting for indie developers
February 14th, 2009
This question comes up every once in a while on various indie forums: How should I host my video game? What are some good mirror services? The cool thing about this question is that now there is pretty much one canonical answer: Amazon CloudFront. There are a few things to take into account for a file host: - Latency - Throughput - Reliability ...
How We Implement Undo
February 14th, 2009
Undo is one of the most important functions in any editor. It's one of those quintessential things that makes working with a computer qualitatively different from working with traditional tools. Sometimes when I'm sketching with pen and paper, I'll impulsively think "hmm, that last line is a bit off, time for ctrl-z!" And then I get a ...
Modular Tree Assets
February 11th, 2009
In case you haven't heard enough about trees, I have decided to talk a little bit about how our tree assets work in Overgrowth. Many games use the popular tree editing middleware called SpeedTree. Although SpeedTree does some cool things, it has the problem that because it creates tree models from scratch using procedural parameters, the trees tend to ...
Rendering Plants with Smooth Edges
February 11th, 2009
When we are rendering many objects on screen at the same time, we only have a few hundred polygons to allocate to each individual plant. We use intersecting alpha-mapped planes to give the impression of much greater detail. Here is a picture of what our desert tree looks like with the alpha channel used for color instead of transparency: If ...