Staying Current with Graphics Research
February 8th, 2009
One of our favorite things to do is to find cool graphics research videos and to share them with each other on AIM. We're trying to stay current with the latest graphics techniques in hopes that we may find useful technologies for Overgrowth and for our future games. Here are five of the coolest research videos we have been ...
Wolfire Graphic Converter Utility
February 7th, 2009
One cool feature in Overgrowth is that it automatically and intelligently converts your image files when you run it. For example, Aubrey can be designing a level and working on textures in the raw TGA format. Aubrey likes TGA because it has a separate channel for alpha transparency so in Photoshop you can draw directly onto its transparency mask seamlessly ...
Scaling images with alpha
January 27th, 2009
To put transparent images in games, we usually use images that contain an alpha channel specifying the transparency of each pixel. Here's an example of an image being composited onto a new background using an alpha channel: There are several reasons why we would need to downscale an image. In 3D games, the most common reason is to create ...
DXTC texture compression
January 26th, 2009
Why do we need compression? To achieve our target level of detail in Overgrowth, we have to use some very high-resolution textures. We would like the game to run smoothly on older graphics cards, which often have less than 128 MB of video RAM. This is a problem for texture storage: just one uncompressed 2048*2048 RGBA texture uses 16 ...
Audio interview with ModDB
January 17th, 2009
After witnessing the magic of modding in Lugaru (from the 3rd party campaigns Empire and Temple to Lotus Wolf's Weapon Shop), Wolfire has been steadfastedly committed to getting players as many mod tools as possible for Overgrowth. You guys are simply too creative and too talented for us to do otherwise. After we made our commitment to modding clear ...
Step-wise Creation of Modular Buildings
January 13th, 2009
I have worked on a few commercial games and I am pretty familiar with the methods used to make cities or towns. Usually you start off with a detailed picture of what you want. An image of some cool building. Then you plan out the fewest modular pieces you will need to make that building. After that, you plan out ...
Map Editor
January 12th, 2009
The map editor in action. I'm scaling a bunch of blocks on my lovely house. Here at Wolfire, we're a small team but we want Overgrowth to have lots and lots of content. So, it's really important for us to have powerful tools to speed up asset creation. One of the main things I've been working ...