I wonder what is that hole on the right…
BTW, I see so many graphical artifacts (Depth buffer related mostly). Did you take the screenshot from this angle to show them?
(Ehm, I’m not being rude, just *really* curious. :))
I really like the train station looking area, looks like a quarry.
I’m curious if the river will have realtime reflection. I remember you mentioned that turning the lake into a bay removed the need to render the scene another time and if a river is an irregular surface it seems like rendering the reflection would be really difficult. I heard there are now realtime reflections with DirectX, are you planning to try anything like this?
I guess with a lot of refraction you could even just use a cube map reflection and it could still look nice.
I like the colour pallet. The trees exude a feeling of warmth, looking forward to exploring your island.
Would be grateful if you could include controller support, not being a native PC gamer.
Supporting DirectInput controllers isn’t that terrible, but providing some reasonable default setup with no user configuration… yeah, I can see how that could get a bit messy. On my gamepad, the right analog stick maps to the third and sixth axis (which is also inverted, compared to XInput coordinates). Fun stuff.
Anyway, I think you’re reasonably safe as long as you don’t go out of your way to make X360CE not work or something.
The question is how you visually prompt different buttons and stuff. This is why I only supported the 360 controller for Braid, because you can’t tell people visually what button to push when you don’t know what that button looks like or where it is relative to other buttons.
Perhaps develop something that is more universal than the Xbox 360 controller’s default scheme…most PC controllers, including the Xbox controller itself, tend to be pretty similar (although I confess to not knowing much if at all about this subject.) A quick Google Image search (though this may not be the most valuable metric to work with) reveals that a lot of modern PC controllers are pretty much based around either the PS3 or 360 controllers, which themselves are pretty similar in layout. For example, while I don’t know how The Witness handles communicating button information to the player, most controllers have four face buttons on the right side of the controller (the A, B, X, and Y of the Xbox controller) in a standard or at least very similar layout, of the course the two analog sticks for movement, at least two shoulder buttons per side (if not more), a directional pad, and some sort of start/pause and back/select buttons. But then again, this may be useless information to you, as I don’t know anything about programming gamepad support in C++!
I wish I had something more constructive to ask, but I’m very intrigued by the desert. Is that a Bristlecone Pine on the precipice near the Joshua trees?
Beautiful screenshot as always.
Good work
Oh hey, things look like they’re really coming along now – you sure know how to keep your audience appropriately intrigued and excited, Jonathan.
How much of the game do I risk spoiling by studying these images to much?
Reminds me of those snapshots from the game Myst! Definitely looks exciting!
Beautiful, looking forward so much to getting my paws on your new game.
Oh wow. Things are really looking interesting, I seriously can’t wait to explore it. I also spy a windmill, which looks strangely intriguing.
Funny enough, that windmill has been in the pics for ages (over two years).
http://the-witness.net/news/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/island.jpg
There’s probably something central about it to the gameplay, since it was even in the early concept art.
http://the-witness.net/news/2010/02/concept-art/
I wonder what is that hole on the right…
BTW, I see so many graphical artifacts (Depth buffer related mostly). Did you take the screenshot from this angle to show them?
(Ehm, I’m not being rude, just *really* curious. :))
Yeah, I see some artifacts on the shed near the water (maybe because the screenshot is taken from so far away?), and a seam in the water.
Overall looks great though. I really like the way the trees look.
Guys .. OF COURSE there are big visual artifacts. The game is not done yet.
It is just annoying when people point this stuff out.
We do love you, really!
And i’ve got my kick for the month! Been checking back every day at least 3 times.. That is starting to look very refined!
Nice!
I really like the train station looking area, looks like a quarry.
I’m curious if the river will have realtime reflection. I remember you mentioned that turning the lake into a bay removed the need to render the scene another time and if a river is an irregular surface it seems like rendering the reflection would be really difficult. I heard there are now realtime reflections with DirectX, are you planning to try anything like this?
I guess with a lot of refraction you could even just use a cube map reflection and it could still look nice.
I like the colour pallet. The trees exude a feeling of warmth, looking forward to exploring your island.
Would be grateful if you could include controller support, not being a native PC gamer.
Controller support is already there… for the 360 gamepad.
We’ll see about supporting other controllers (it is kind of a mess on the PC).
Speaking of control, is there a change we’ll see a purely point-and-click option for PC/Mac?
Unlikely. We’ll see.
Supporting DirectInput controllers isn’t that terrible, but providing some reasonable default setup with no user configuration… yeah, I can see how that could get a bit messy. On my gamepad, the right analog stick maps to the third and sixth axis (which is also inverted, compared to XInput coordinates). Fun stuff.
Anyway, I think you’re reasonably safe as long as you don’t go out of your way to make X360CE not work or something.
The question is how you visually prompt different buttons and stuff. This is why I only supported the 360 controller for Braid, because you can’t tell people visually what button to push when you don’t know what that button looks like or where it is relative to other buttons.
Perhaps develop something that is more universal than the Xbox 360 controller’s default scheme…most PC controllers, including the Xbox controller itself, tend to be pretty similar (although I confess to not knowing much if at all about this subject.) A quick Google Image search (though this may not be the most valuable metric to work with) reveals that a lot of modern PC controllers are pretty much based around either the PS3 or 360 controllers, which themselves are pretty similar in layout. For example, while I don’t know how The Witness handles communicating button information to the player, most controllers have four face buttons on the right side of the controller (the A, B, X, and Y of the Xbox controller) in a standard or at least very similar layout, of the course the two analog sticks for movement, at least two shoulder buttons per side (if not more), a directional pad, and some sort of start/pause and back/select buttons. But then again, this may be useless information to you, as I don’t know anything about programming gamepad support in C++!
I wish I had something more constructive to ask, but I’m very intrigued by the desert. Is that a Bristlecone Pine on the precipice near the Joshua trees?