As the company grows with projects beyond The Witness, we thought it’d be nice to show progress on something not too secretive. For those folks into technical posts, I’ll discuss how we used our new programming language to create an automated framework to test the language itself. — Jon wanted …
We built a DirectX11 rendering backend for our engine, which is likely to be the default when running on Windows. Up until now we had been running on DirectX9, which made sense when we thought the game was going to be done a while ago. But these days, DX9 is …
We just finished porting The Witness to D3D11. It took a little longer than I was hoping and one of the unexpected difficulties was getting our D3D9 HLSL shaders to work in D3D11. The D3D shader compiler provides a backward compatibility flag (D3DCOMPILE_ENABLE_BACKWARDS_COMPATIBILITY) that I was hoping would allow us …
… … Ignacio has posted the conclusion of his series on irradiance caching — at long last! — and released the source code. This code is a significant chunk of what makes lighting in The Witness as nice as it is.
He’s put up another very informative blog post, leaving the specific topic of grass planting, venturing into more general territory regarding interpolation. And there’s a video, from which it is possible to learn a lot of this is a new subject. Here’s the blog post. Here’s the video:
Casey Muratori is back, with more details about planting grass when you really care about how good the results are. Update: And here’s another post, complete with a video showing in detail how the grass planting works in the actual game.
Casey Muratori has made new postings about the work he has done on The Witness: Working on The Witness, Part 5 Working on The Witness, Part 6 In this one he talks about how to distribute grass. Legally. As well as the different colors of noise one might want to …
During the last several weeks I’ve been polishing and optimizing the shadowing system and I think that at this point it won’t undergo any more significant changes. In the process I’ve been reading a bit and looking up references and I’m appalled by how inaccessible is all the shadow mapping …
Despite not even being finished, The Witness is already one of my all-time favorite games. I’ve been playing it since Jon started developing it several years ago, and I could not be more excited about its upcoming release. Unlike Jon’s previous game Braid, the asset and programming scale for The …
In The Witness, when progress in your game is saved, we also save a thumbnail that shows you where you were. This makes it easier to load a particular game later if you had multiple saves. Here is our current, very unpolished load screen: Right now, we save the thumbnail …