Item browser progress
July 18th, 2009
This has been a long time coming, but this upcoming alpha will have the item browser hooked up! Hale, the man behind the Foothold map, among other contributions, created all of the thumbs for each object, decal, and made a couple of hotspot icons as well. Almost everything we have included so far in the alpha should be accessible via ...
Overgrowth Soundtrack on YouTube
July 17th, 2009
We've been getting a lot of positive comments about Overgrowth soundtrack songs we use in our tech demos. As many people know the songs are original works composed by the amazing Mikko Tarmia. Unfortunately we tend to only use portions of the songs in our videos and there's usually a crazy man talking or beatboxing on top of ...
Pine tree asset
July 16th, 2009
I made a new Pine tree today! We already discussed our modular tree system, but we didn't have any conifers yet. Here are some pictures of the new tree: The tree trunk uses the tiling technique I learned from those failed experiments I talked about last week, as well as a new trick: the bark texture is tiled twice ...
Simple memory usage tracking
July 14th, 2009
There are many complicated and expensive products out there to help find memory leaks and optimize RAM usage, but I find that the built-in Task Manager on Windows (or Activity Monitor on Mac) is very easy to use, and powerful enough for most tasks. Here's what the task manager looks like (Overgrowth is still listed as Lugaru2.exe): You ...
Overgrowth alpha 35
July 13th, 2009
Here is what is new in Overgrowth in this weekly alpha. If you are confused what a weekly alpha is, or even what Overgrowth is, please read our fancy FAQ. Basically, we are developing a massive video game from the ground up -- we are able to do this completely independently by accepting preorders for the game before it's done ...
Slow-motion video reference
July 13th, 2009
Whenever I am animating a movement or coding a new special effect, I like to find out as much as possible about what is actually going on. It is easy to capture the basic essence of any effect: lightning makes a forking flash in the sky, big water splashes are white and foamy, a gymnast rotates 360 degrees when she ...
A WebKit primer - part 1
July 12th, 2009
Normally when you are designing a public webpage, you have to be really careful to make sure that it works in a number of browsers. Namely, FireFox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE 8, IE 7, and IE 6. The various versions of Internet Explorer are the worst because they are the most popular, yet also the most varied and broken. This ...