Island Snapshot
The addition of the recently-discussed terrain editing code means that we can start giving the island more shape and character, in a natural way. This is early yet…
Kriging is cool.
In The Witness we decided that it’s a good idea to have a heightfield terrain making up the bulk of the island surface. The advantages of this are in rendering performance and in ease of texturing (it is relatively easy, with one continuously-parameterized terrain block, to get rid of seams; …
The island this week.
The island so far…
I figured it would be fun to post occasional screenshots of the island so people can see it gradually come together over time. Here’s the first one. Keep in mind that this is all a rough draft for gameplay purposes, and none of this is supposed to look remotely like …
Graphics Tech: Shadow Maps (part 2): Save 25% texture memory, and possibly much more.
In the previous part, I talked about my reasons for wanting to use Cascading Shadow Maps (one of the biggest: image stability), then said that we had implemented Michal Valient’s version of the algorithm, and mostly liked it, but wanted to reduce the memory usage. This time I’ll show how to …
Graphics Tech: Multi-lightmaps
Ignacio has implemented the first version of the handling for light sources that change (doors that open or close, lights that can be switched on or off, etc). The idea is that we just precompute different lightmaps for each of these cases and blend between them at runtime. In the …
Graphics Tech: Lighting Comparison
It seems like time to post some images from the in-progress precoputed lighting tech that Ignacio is working on. See here for a description of the basics behind what we are doing for lighting. The lightmaps are now 16-bit and these shots use a simple exponential tone mapper. First, I’ve …
Graphics Tech: Shadow Maps (part 1)
The Witness contains a mixture of indoor and outdoor scenes, but much of the game takes place outdoors with a very long view distance (you can see the entire island at once if you have a good vantage point). So I wanted to implement a shadow system that would work …
Announcing Indie Fund
Today we are announcing a fund that provides very good terms for talented indie developers working on high-quality games. Our terms are much friendlier than what publishers offer. Our goal is to help indies become stronger while retaining their independence. The past couple of years have been good for independent …
Twitter and Facebook pages are now live.
You can now be notified of new blog postings via RSS, Twitter or Facebook. See the icons in the upper-right corner! At the moment of writing this post, The Witness has no Twitter followers and no Facebook fans, so you could be the first!