Terrain edge fading
February 17th, 2009
While the terrain in Overgrowth is quite large, the view distance can be even larger. On a clear day, you can see all the way from one corner of the terrain to the opposite corner. While this allows us to show impressive vistas (like those in our alpha trailer), it also means that you can often see the edge of ...
Overgrowth a14 released
February 16th, 2009
Continuing in the spirit of open development, it's been another week, so we are unleashing a brand new alpha! Here is what is new in Overgrowth this week... Starting with a much needed FAQ. As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked some stuff, and implemented some new features. Aubrey has created even more art. I am ...
Overgrowth Fighting System Design Doc, 1st Draft
February 16th, 2009
Hey guys, we've been talking a lot about our fighting system recently and I wanted to provide you with a first draft of what we're planning to do in Overgrowth. These are the ideas that materialized from discussions I had with David and Phillip a few days ago. Remember that what I mention here is not set in ...
File hosting for indie developers
February 14th, 2009
This question comes up every once in a while on various indie forums: How should I host my video game? What are some good mirror services? The cool thing about this question is that now there is pretty much one canonical answer: Amazon CloudFront. There are a few things to take into account for a file host: - Latency - Throughput - Reliability ...
How We Implement Undo
February 14th, 2009
Undo is one of the most important functions in any editor. It's one of those quintessential things that makes working with a computer qualitatively different from working with traditional tools. Sometimes when I'm sketching with pen and paper, I'll impulsively think "hmm, that last line is a bit off, time for ctrl-z!" And then I get a ...
Overgrowth FAQ
February 12th, 2009
Hey guys I've noticed on our live chat that a lot of people end up asking similar questions about Overgrowth. I am happy to answer them individually but I bet a lot of other people have these questions as well. - When will Overgrowth be released? - What are Overgrowth's system requirements? - How will Overgrowth be different from Lugaru? - What ...
Modular Tree Assets
February 11th, 2009
In case you haven't heard enough about trees, I have decided to talk a little bit about how our tree assets work in Overgrowth. Many games use the popular tree editing middleware called SpeedTree. Although SpeedTree does some cool things, it has the problem that because it creates tree models from scratch using procedural parameters, the trees tend to ...