{"id":1100,"date":"2011-06-28T10:10:40","date_gmt":"2011-06-28T17:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/?p=1100"},"modified":"2011-06-28T10:10:40","modified_gmt":"2011-06-28T17:10:40","slug":"a-few-new-graphical-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/2011\/06\/a-few-new-graphical-effects\/","title":{"rendered":"A few new graphical effects."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Lately we started thinking about making the game look better, finally.  Ignacio has been working on some graphical effects to this end (though he's been putting forth a lot of effort on performance as well).  Here are a few things he's been working on:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/shot_2011.06.28__time_09_25_n02.png\"><img src=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/shot_2011.06.28__time_09_25_n02-300x168.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"shot_2011.06.28__time_09_25_n02\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1102\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Sun beams.  These are accomplished with a radial blur centered on the sun, during postprocessing.  The nice thing about this effect is how dynamic it is -- as you walk beneath the trees, the shape and intensity of the beams are changing all the time.<\/p>\n<p>Due to the way the effect works, sometimes beams are drawn that are a little bit unphysical.  You probably have to be looking closely to see that, but I am a little bit uncomfortable with it given that the game is all about the opposite of that.  We'll see how this evolves.  We've been talking about augmenting this with other effects.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/shot_2011.06.28__time_09_28_n03.png\"><img src=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/shot_2011.06.28__time_09_28_n03-300x168.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"shot_2011.06.28__time_09_28_n03\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1103\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A revised water reflection effect.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/shot_2011.06.28__time_09_28_n05.png\"><img src=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/shot_2011.06.28__time_09_28_n05-300x168.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"shot_2011.06.28__time_09_28_n05\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1104\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Softening of the shoreline, so that it doesn't look like one big alpha-blended water polygon intersecting the ground.<\/p>\n<p>Here's what the island looks like now:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/shot_2011.06.28__time_09_24_n01.png\"><img src=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/shot_2011.06.28__time_09_24_n01-300x168.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"shot_2011.06.28__time_09_24_n01\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-1101\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It's fun to look at this compared to another shot of the island, say, from about a year ago:<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"shutterset_\" href='http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/gallery\/area_summaries\/shot_2010-07-11__time_18_02_n05.jpg' title=''><img src='http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-content\/gallery\/area_summaries\/thumbs\/thumbs_shot_2010-07-11__time_18_02_n05.jpg' alt='Island Snapshot' class='ngg-singlepic ngg-center' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The current puzzle count is 328.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lately we started thinking about making the game look better, finally. Ignacio has been working on some graphical effects to this end (though he&#8217;s been putting forth a lot of effort on performance as well). Here are a few things he&#8217;s been working on: Sun beams. These are accomplished with \u2026<\/p>\n<p class=\"continue-reading-button\"> <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/2011\/06\/a-few-new-graphical-effects\/\">Continue reading<i class=\"crycon-right-dir\"><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1100"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1251,"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions\/1251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/the-witness.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}