Overgrowth Tutorial: Playing With BVH Animations
July 24th, 2010
David already teased everyone with the new animation tech in Overgrowth with his initial motion capture tests video. However, this week I had a chance to really go into the nitty gritty details of the new features. So without further ado, I humbly present to you a new Overgrowth tech demo. Be sure to check it out in HD! In ...
Blender as an animation editor
July 23rd, 2010
While working on some combat animations, I decided that the current Phoenix animation editor is too hard to use, and there are too many bottlenecks in the route to making it better. So, for now, I am looking into alternative approaches to editing animations. So far I am leaning towards integrating Blender animation, perhaps with custom import and export scripts ...
Linear algebra for game developers ~ part 3
July 21st, 2010
I introduced vectors in Part 1, and a toolset for working with them in Part 2. However, today I would like to talk about perhaps the most important concept for game developers. This is the concept of the transformation matrix. Let's start by looking at the building blocks of the transformation matrix: Basis Vectors Let's say we're ...
Initial motion capture tests
July 2nd, 2010
I recently stumbled across the CMU motion capture database, which is a collection of over 2500 free motion capture animations. I hadn't worked with motion capture before, so I thought I would try applying some of them to Robbert to see how they looked: Be sure to check it out in HD! There are some artifacts where the motion ...
Wall Run and Climbing Video
June 25th, 2010
If you've been following our alpha posts, you've probably seen that a lot of cool new features have appeared in the builds like wall running and climbing. However, if you have yet to preorder Overgrowth, you're probably curious about how these features work. Today it is my pleasure to reveal a demonstration of what we have so ...
Using profiling for optimization
June 6th, 2010
Most of game code optimization comes down to reducing the CPU cycles that you need for each frame. One way to do this is to just optimize every routine as you write it, and make sure it's as fast as possible. However, there is a common saying that 90% of the CPU cycles are spent in 10% of the ...
Pathfinding with Detour
May 27th, 2010
A few days ago I posted that we've added automatic navigation meshes using Recast, and now I'd like to show some navigation paths using its companion library, Detour. These libraries come with some really nice-looking debug visualization utilities, so I thought I would show them off here. Here are a few quick pathfinding tests to see how Detour ...