Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX
January 8th, 2010
Often, when we meet other game developers and say that we use OpenGL for our game Overgrowth, we're met with stares of disbelief -- why would anyone use OpenGL? DirectX is the future. When we tell graphics card representatives that we use OpenGL, the temperature of the room drops by ten degrees. This baffles us. It's common geek wisdom ...
Ragdoll Physics Update
December 27th, 2009
A while ago, David upgraded the old ragdoll system and linked it up to the rabbit guard mesh. So now when you push Alt-R (or Option-R on Mac) you can make ninja rabbits fall from the sky. By putting your mouse over a rabbit and holding right click, you can apply force and toss him around. I decided it was ...
Close-up and distant terrain lighting
December 23rd, 2009
Normal-mapped detail textures are effective at conveying close-up detail, but don't add too much in the distance. In Overgrowth, the players will spend most of their time looking at the terrain. We want to make it look as interesting as possible, even far away! Here's how the desert terrain looks with just detail textures: We still have the ...
Fading detail textures
December 20th, 2009
Here's a problem you can probably recognize from many games -- obvious tiling effects on terrain textures. The textures look good up close, but in the distance it's obvious that it's just the same image repeating over and over again. The easiest way to fix the tiling problem is to just fade out the detail maps as they ...
Detail texture color matching
December 16th, 2009
One common problem with detail textures is that they can change the overall color of the terrain. For example, let's say we have a patch of terrain that's supposed to be a light brown color like this: If we simply apply the closest detail maps, we can change the color substantially. For example, here the closest matches are ...
Detail textures
December 14th, 2009
The terrain in Overgrowth has looked nice in the distance, but many of you noticed that it looked a bit blurry close up. This is because it didn't have a real detail texture yet! Detail textures are tiled images that are used to provide close-up material definition. Here is the base color map for an Overgrowth terrain (lighting and ...
Fast object instancing
November 29th, 2009
When I was testing out character shadows on Hale's Riverhurst level, the framerate was not as smooth as I would like it to be. To remedy this, I'm taking a few days to make the engine handle complex scenes more efficiently. My first step was to create a system for fast object instancing (copy-drawing). Because of our modular ...