Actually, my old version of the shadows, which Ignacio replaced, was rotating the disc each sample by a noise texture (it was a 3D texture with one scalar value, because the rotation value was based on the worldspace position, and I didn’t want streaks to happen at weird angles due to projection onto the plane of the noise texture).

It did not look great, though in talking about it later we thought that maybe I had missed something or made some fundamental error that caused the shadows to look worse than they maybe should. But we never figured out exactly what that was.

What about stochastic sampling? Rotate your poisson-disc each pixel by a random 2D direction (using a tiled vector2 [normalized] noise texture is what I have seen before). If done in light space when sampling the light depth map it won’t jitter when the camera moves. It should trade jaggies for noise. It’s kind of heavy duty, but the xbox360 could handle it just fine. I don’t know if the gaussian filter would fit with this though. Is it a screen-space gaussian filter? like render the shadows with the 4-tap disc, gaussian blur them, then apply them?

as i said a few comments ago the animation is going to be done soon. its looking… pretty ugly but i just copied the place-holder graphics and tried to go by Totilo’s video and i was just adding more stuff, but my animation is bad and first person looks very clunky and jerky and slow.

but when im done i’ll post i link and also make sure you post a link too, to your UC Berkly lecture and the upcoming UC Santa Cruz panel when they are up!
also congrats for being #3 developer (soon to be #1 amirite?) your like a hero to indies ;_;

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-05-19-dev-poll-molyneux-is-1-industry-hero

your # 3

I should write a short article about the shadows. What we have now is not perfect, but I think it’s a good compromise. To eliminate the jaggies entirely we would need a wider filter, but that is much more prone to light leaks and acne artifacts, and would impose more constrains over the geometry.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3236655/square.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3236655/perturbed.jpg

The 2048 looks good in a certain way but it is blurry. My eyes keep trying to want to focus to sharpen the image and that causes eye strain! These things aren’t good, so we will be working to improve them. But as a basic underlying color layout it works great.