Basic Map Editing Controls
February 27th, 2010
You may remember our post about Silverfish's animation and scripting tutorial. Well, it appears he's still after my job as he recenly released another awesome tutorial explaining the basic functionality of the Overgrowth map editing system. It is in the same vein as the silly map editor tutorial we officially released some time ago. However, instead of including ...
Great game development books
February 21st, 2010
When John saw my bookshelf filled with game development books, he suggested that I write a blog post about them. At first, this seemed like a daunting task -- there are a lot of books, and different books are useful for different people. Which ones should I talk about first? However, after looking through them some more, I realized that I ...
Initial Animation and Scripting
February 10th, 2010
David has been using AngelScript to tie the Phoenix Engine technologies together in a tidy framework which will lead to the birth of Overgrowth gameplay. Right now the scripting system can call on animation files based on real-time context and those animations can instantly surrender to the physics system to create realistic ragdoll effects. Without further ado, here's a ...
Scripting and Custom Animations
February 4th, 2010
David has been working on an AngelScript scripting layer which will contain much of Overgrowth's gameplay code. What recently killed Rabbot is the fact that scripting can now call on animations created from the animation editor. The rigged rabbit guard model, who we've been able to ragdoll and throw around, is now a scripted and animated character. Silverfish ...
Gamma-correct lighting
February 3rd, 2010
I have been trying to avoid working on graphics recently in order to work on gameplay, but there was one feature I just had to implement. It has no performance cost, and makes a big difference in how the game looks! This feature is gamma-correct lighting. You can see the new lighting on the right side of this picture. You ...
DirectX vs. OpenGL revisited
January 27th, 2010
My post about reasons to use OpenGL instead of Direct3D got a much greater response than I expected, making the front page of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, and even the OpenGL website! The vast majority of reactions were positive, but there were a few Direct3D users who posted negative comments which I will address in this post. It's clear that ...
Choosing a scripting language
January 20th, 2010
For the last week or two I've been working on choosing a scripting language for Overgrowth. I haven't worked with scripting before, so I hooked up Lua, V8 and AngelScript in order to give them each a fair trial and see which is most appropriate for us. What is a scripting language? In general, scripting languages are programming ...