Design Principles from Tufte
February 4th, 2009
Minoru Niijima's version of E.J. Marey's train schedule from Paris to Lyon. X-axis is time, Y-axis is space. Horizontal red lines are stations. Diagonal red lines chart out individual trains. Copied from cover graphic of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I have recently been reading some of Edward Tufte's books on information graphics. Tufte is ...
Overgrowth Alpha 12
February 2nd, 2009
Another week, another alpha. Here is what is new in Overgrowth this week. As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked some stuff, and implemented some new features. Aubrey has created even more art. Going through our svn the past week, here are a few highlights: - Better graphical feedback for editor - Improved feedback grid - Lighting changes on the ...
Designing Cultures
January 30th, 2009
We are going to have lots of different cultures in Overgrowth, not just for each different animal species, but for sub-groups within each species. In order to plan out the background of the game world, we have had a few discussions about the specifics of these cultures and their relationships to their environment. My job in all this is to ...
Map Editor Video
January 30th, 2009
A lot of people were asking how to use the editor in the latest Overgrowth alpha, so we decided to make a video to show off all the tools! It stars John as the narrator, and includes a tools tutorial, timelapse building construction, and exclusive footage of the elusive Rabbot. Be sure to watch it in HD! Press the triangle ...
Scaling images with alpha
January 27th, 2009
To put transparent images in games, we usually use images that contain an alpha channel specifying the transparency of each pixel. Here's an example of an image being composited onto a new background using an alpha channel: There are several reasons why we would need to downscale an image. In 3D games, the most common reason is to create ...
Overgrowth Alpha 11
January 27th, 2009
We've got some pretty cool stuff in Overgrowth this week. As mentioned yesterday, we now have fancy texture compression. This will let Overgrowth run on many more computers, because it will use a fraction of the VRAM it previously used. Starting up Overgrowth is also much, much faster now. As usual, we have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked ...
DXTC texture compression
January 26th, 2009
Why do we need compression? To achieve our target level of detail in Overgrowth, we have to use some very high-resolution textures. We would like the game to run smoothly on older graphics cards, which often have less than 128 MB of video RAM. This is a problem for texture storage: just one uncompressed 2048*2048 RGBA texture uses 16 ...