An update from the development team over at Wolfire share some new details about their upcoming PC and Mac title, Overgrowth.

Wolfire News Updates (more info at: http://blog.wolfire.com/)

Wolfire Releases a new Alpha
- New sky
- Sweet terrain shadows
- Higher detail terrain
- Ambient occlusion
- More objects, including new rocks, a “Joshua tree”, and a small bush.
- Instead of a single floating cube, there is now a nice little scene Aubrey whipped up using Phillip’s editor.

Also updates with the following...

Because Overgrowth’s gameplay will occur almost entirely in outdoor settings, the Wolfire team has made terrain their recent priority.  After achieving realistic terrain coloring in the Phoenix Engine, Wolfire decided to put the same care into terrain lighting effects.  In addition to adding high-detail terrain shadows from direct sunlight (http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/11/high-detail-terrain-shadows/), the engine now also accounts for ambient lighting and occlusion (http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/11/ambient-occlusion/). Combined these effects have resulted in surprisingly realistic environments.

Check out more below...

Aware that Overgrowth fans can not be satisfied by terrain alone, Wolfire lead programmer, David Rosen, also made time to demonstrate his initial work on Overgrowth’s procedural animation system (http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/11/procedural-animation-redux/

). Though the animation system is still in early development, fans were glad to finally see a character model hopping around on the terrain.