Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement | Hacker News Reader

Overgrowth: Open-Source Announcement

blog.wolfire.com

209 pointskjeetgill31 comments

Of historical interest, this game was created by David Rosen, who started the Humble Bundle with his brother. I had no idea it was still in development. In the early days of the project it was pretty impressive to see the engine evolving under the work of a single teenage developer, including features like ragdoll physics which were novel at the time.

Right, I think a lot of people will look at this through modern eyes and wonder what the big deal is, but back in the 2000s when this was an indie darling we were all blown away by the engine.

I went to college with David, and I remember him showing people drafts of Lugaru in at the student computer club. He was very nice, but also very quiet, and despite being in several CS classes together (there were only ~20 CS majors our year) I never got much of a sense for him.

Link to the actual repo: https://github.com/WolfireGames/overgrowth

Game engine development is so ridiculously hard. The industry has plenty of little libraries that do some significant upfront lifting, but there's just plenty out there that isn't done for you. Stuff you wouldn't even think about until you realize you want a feature that isn't there. And the further you progress, and the more you learn, the fewer references and prior art you can turn to, because the combinatorics of finding someone who has built up all of those areas of discipline becomes exponentially harder to find.

There are still proprietary technologies today that are decades old that the free and open source community has not recreated simply because for all of the people that work in this space, open source and commercial, there are just not many people at the high end of the scale working on those interesting problems. Those problems are the ones that generally become commercial solutions because no one else is doing it.

After over 14 years of development, I would love to hear what little big problems like this the authors came across.

The game industry has little open source libraries because most games cannot profit off the library being open source. It doesn't increase the marketing reach of the game (it might make good PR for the studio, but the studio doesn't need good PR, it needs revenue from sales of their game!).

And the high-end libraries are worth money, so unless there's an altruist contributing the code, it's not going to get open sourced. Things like speedtree, low-latency video play back (within the engine, like bink vidoes), etc, are all commercial solutions to common problems in games development, and none of these would be given away for free if they could charge for it!

To me, the reason why the game industry has little open source libraries is because games are usually a once-and-done approach to software. So open sourcing part of your game has little benefits because you're not going to go back update the open source libraries. Whereas other software is a constantly updating behemoth, so open sourcing your software can get small beneficial increases from external changes to your open source code.

The profit motive doesn't really seem like the main reason, since most open source software makes no money. Facebook doesn't get money from open sourcing React for instance, but they do get functional improvements to React that comes from it being open source and having more people help work on it.

> games are usually a once-and-done approach to software

This is just false.

The most obvious example of this is live service games - these have been commonplace for over a decade, and have existed for 20 years (WoW in 2004 in my mind is the turning point for that). Slightly less obvious are PC multiplyer games that predate this - as an example Counter Strike was released in 2000 and was "patched" a few times before steam existed.

Even going way back, one shot single player games have been built iteratively since the 90s at least, if not earlier. The idea of a game "engine" is reusing code between games - The LucasFilm games all used similar engines to speed up development from the late 80s. Even today, modern games like Call of Duty have their roots in Quake's game code from the late 90s.

Wolfire's other open source games or maintained forks:

https://gitlab.com/osslugaru/lugaru

https://github.com/AquariaOSE/Aquaria

https://github.com/freegish/freegish

And a blog entry: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/06/Early-Gish-hacking

Oh wow, i think i had Gish on my phone or something back in the day, that's quite the nostalgia trip!

Here's a random screenshot i found online: https://nokia-ms.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/51114514.jpg

Actually also reminds me of Gravity Defied, another old good game from back in the day.

Here's a video I've enjoyed of David Rosen giving a presentation at Game Developers Conference 2014 going over procedural animation used in Overgrowth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNidsMesxSE

Such fond memories of this game. The fighting mechanics were amazing. I hope that this has the intended effect, allow other developers to learn how it was done, what mistakes look like, and for case studies of how things are done.

I only played a tiny bit of it a few years back but my impression was that the biggest flaw of the game was that it had all these cool mechanics and systems, but then no real direction as to where the overall game would go. very cool tech though, neat to see it open-sourced now

Agreed. I loved watching their dev logs back in high school because they were doing things in physics and combat that no one else was. But it never got over that hump that separates "cool physics engine" from "interesting game concept".

But my optimistic hope is that David Rosen walked for someone else to fly. Like Infiniminer -> Minecraft.

For me the game always was playing other user levels and a sandbox for me to set up fights with the AI; see how many I could juggle.

Essentially recreate some action movie fight scenes, but with rabbits...

There was a total conversion mod to Overgrowth called "Dark Forest" which inspired something called "Undergrowth"; a really buggy but oddly satisfying roguelike. It was a little glimpse into what might have been possible.

I watched this around its early days, even bought into the kickstarter. I guess I got old cause I didn't even know it was released haha.

The animation techniques were pretty impressive at the time because Unity / Unreal didn't have anything like it yet.

It's strange how much this game has affected me over the years (just by following its development) even though I've never even played it.

considering these guys made the humble bundle in between bouts of making this game... (plus a bunch of other projects I personally love)

it's weirdly common for successful game studios to have also been involved in a store of some sort - valve's steam came from trying to sell online, cdprojekt's witcher and GOG, epic's fortnite success -> epic store.

when game devs break out of games they can leave quite a mark. the glitch folks -> slack. or discord.

I would imagine it's actually more likely that a game being successful is such a lottery that they cannot replicate subsequent successes, where as using the profits from previous success to venture out into a different but profitable domain is more, well , profitable.

I remember a friend in my dorm playing Lugaru back in 2008, it was such a fantastic game back for the time! I still vividly remember the looping soundtrack and the fight effects. Thanks to the team for making sure this little piece of digital history is remembered!

oh man! I remember buying this game years ago when it was a beta! The fighting techniques were amazing fun!

whoops no that was lugaru

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