but besides that – you say that most algorithms are bad at handling open world scenarios… i suppose the following one should be fine though? at least they supposedly were able to render a football field with 627 million grass blades with a geforce 7800gtx – at decent framerates: http://www.kevinboulanger.net/grass.html

if you combine that with some distance-based culling, shouldn’t that work?
but… i know little about engine programming and i guess you’ve probably already seen this and it doesn’t fit in your pipeline. still, i figured i’d post it because one of the things that i loved about braid was the amazing art style, so it would be lovely to have grass like this in “the witness”. though i have faith you guys will work things out somehow, i thought maybe this can help :)

Deferred rendering also makes more sense on some architectures than it does on others. I could see us using it on some platforms if it makes sense there in the future, but it seems likely to me that our main renderer is going to stay mostly like it is now, which is a direct render (with a Z prepass, maybe).

hey, i had a question too! what kind of render… or shader? (i don’t know, render or is it shader?) are you using to out put the scene into the videogame? b/c the guys of battle field 3 were talking about *deferred*? rendering and lighting techniques that only modern games use to get the best results. you already mentioned you use terrain blend maps but to get the game looking so pretty what do you do to it?

i mean b/c when they talk about technology they mention things like this… and plus! you *are* a consultant, right? so you are wayyy better than these guys! so what are you using?

However, there aren’t 7 people working full-time on the game right now. There are just 3 (soon to be 4); other folks working on the game are in more of a part-time capacity.

checker: Speaking of gt.tv, Jonathan Blow, Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, and I are going to be on the Bonus Round in April sometime. It was taped at GDC.

hey, man! that’s cool! hope that guy geoff keighley wasn’t a fucking dick! make sure to post a link when its up though!

I’m not sure if this blog is only for technical discussion about the game and I don’t know much at all about the technical side of things, but I just thought I’d say that the game looks amazing & I love the concept. The indie scene is really starting to get a lot of attention lately & it’s great to see developers such as yourself taking charge. I really hope the increasing interest is a sign of things to come.

Anyway, keep up the great work. You already have a sale right here.

I’m glad you’re not placing grass nonsensically, but it’s your game’s trees, not the grass, that had me subconsciously subdued. If you make the grass as interesting I may never go inside (or outside, irl) again.

– Pritchard

So we are way more casual about data replication than they are. We do it just by having a server that runs our source control that is far away from everyone who is doing the work. So everyone individually has a copy of everything, and the server also has a copy.

But yeah ok maybe the example wasn’t that great but you get the point.

I just wanted to add that the high density lightmapping line is not exactly right. Unity uses Beast which is actually a really decent GI lightmapper.

For example both unity and udk have terrain features built-in that are worse (at least for a game like this)/different than the kriging method Blow used and it would be less straight forward to make a terrain that uses kriging in those engines.

Also, I’m assuming, coding the engine is something jonathan and the team do enjoy.

Although I do agree that for anyone else, unity/udk are great choices.

On top of this, one of the technical backbones of our visual style, high-density lightmapping, is not something that is typically done by existing engines. They tend to focus on dynamic lighting.

he started with the new “magika:vietnam”

Waiting impatiently to play The Witness :)

How can you not know? Do you not have a PS3 dev kit?

Yeah makes sense, otherwise people overwrite stuff, version clashes etc. I forget that generally im a one man army :)
Dont know how you are doing your lighting, but I ended up aligning the normals on my combined grass meshes with the planes the individual meshes were dropped on, otherwise I was gettting wierd harsh angular lighting on them when i had any source at a low angle.

taurus: I don’t know if there will be a PS3 version.

Robert: To detect buildings / rocks / etc right now I am raycasting, and it works all right. I just wrote that post before I added that part. It’s not a big deal.

The blend map detection happens in the editor; the shader doesn’t think about whether to place grass or not. It just gets told exactly where the grass is.

I’ve just been implementing grass scattering myself, on my procedural voxel terrain system, its amazing how much it helps to add scale and detail to low poly mesh terrain areas.

“the grass will probably stick up through the floor inside the building! Fixing that is next on my to-do list, but it involves a lot of raycasting, so hopefully it doesn’t make grass placement too slow.”

Could you just write into the terrain blend map in the footprint of buildings, so the grass placement will read exclusion zones from there too :) is it on a windy shader yet too?

Oh, and does the grass blow in the wind? Same for the trees, the clouds, and of course, that windmill.

Anyway, the project looks amazing so far (LOVE THE LIGHTING MODEL), and It’s been a real inspiration for me!. Thank you so much!