Good luck with the project anyways.

But why act like that is a good thing? To me it just says something kind-of negative about human nature.

All things being equal, it is best to launch on all platforms at once, but all things are never equal. There are always big issues. And ultimately, I care more about making the best possible game than I care about selling the most copies. So I prefer to put most of my thought into how to make the game, rather than what platform it is going to be on, and when, and why.

Whereas I do think that games coming out on different platforms at different times is not ideal, that is just how it is sometimes. There are always different reasons. Why was it “a real problem”? If a game is really good, then isn’t it just as good 6-8 months later? If you aren’t interested in playing something a year after its release, then what intrinsic value can that thing really have?

From where I am sitting, it is kind of lucky that Braid got finished at all, on any platform, so when someone comes up to me and says “such-and-such is a real problem,” I am like, what??

Cos obviously if they are large the world might look smaller overall but if they are smaller the world will be larger to explore

Also, i finshed Braid, and you and your team are just great, makes me wanna try my hand at indie game developing lol!

You have way more interactivity with a sculpture in real-life than you do with a 3D object in a game world. That does not sabotage the delivery tools of the medium of the sculpture. You as an individual, if you want to, can refuse to look at the sculpture, or smash it or something, but so what? If you want to experience it, you can do so just fine.

This is different from the situation with games, where, even under the best of conditions, even with ideal audiences, I do not think we can come anywhere near a novel or a film insofar as storytelling is concerned.

Looking at this island an old question arises in my mind (might seem really offtopic, brace yourself :) )

On November 19th, 2008 at the Montreal International Game Summit you gave a speech about story and game design. You talked about story games being inherently conflicted. Most notably:
1) Interactivity sabotages structure and delivery
2) That conflict is unsolvable , we cannot use:
Foreshadowing
Justification
Pacing
Poetic Adjustment
Tone Adjustment
Vocal Emphasis
Body Language
with the full potency movies do

That was an eye-opening speech for me at that time, got me thinking for long.

Now I look at this island and I think “It is an art, it is sculpture, people used marble before, now we use Maya and 3DS, but it is sculpture nonetheless”

But sculpture has structure and delivery technicues too. For that mater, all arts do. Visual arts have dos and donts about colours, composition, etc. Narrative, music, lyrics, concerns about rhythm and length and hormony, structure rules all around.

And Interactivity sabotage those too !

So basically every single tool that we use to present the system / meaning / importance of our games, inevitably leads to conflicts, that you stated are unsolvable.

Now I may suck at drawing conclusions but … how do I avoid that in my games ? How do YOU avoid that ? And I don’t mean in problem by problem basis, I mean generally, scalable rules ?

Is there any yet ?

I will appreciate any additional reads on the topic btw :)

I’ve had my headaches too toying with VSM, ESM and whatnot, however, there have been certain developments exposing shortcuts for use in PCF that enable faster filtering, which, if I’m not mistaken, numerically exploit the interpolators of the texture units to reduce the required samples, and, combined with the fetch4 or grab4 texture samplers, are able to provide fast, good-looking shadows.

There’s also the smoothie method that I haven’t explored.

We are baking skylight into the precomputed lighting. However, almost everything you see in that scene has not had the precomputed lighting run on it. So, there is that.

As far as I can tell, the shadows are still unfiltered and presumably produced by a single jittered sample. If so, what technique are you guys planning to use to reduce the aliasing?

By the angle in which the sun is hitting, I’d expect warmer light, are you using a skylight model for this particular render?… A proper skylight lighting model can really succeed in bringing realism and deep visual association to a natural scene.

I’m really digging this development blog. Keep up the awesome work, I’m already looking forward to the final game.