Is it possible with light probes to capture shadows inside the volume of the scene? For example i’ve a room with sun light from a window. I calculate the shadows inside the room with global illumination or other methods, then in some way i store that in the XYZ position inside the room is shadowed, and in this other point is under the sun and so on. When i’ve a character inside the room between the shadow and the light, for example, his back is half shaded in shadow and half in light. This done using the grid of light probes calculated inside the enviroment. Is this possible or these kind of things can only be done using realtime shadows?

About “content” sadly also inside other kinds of software development there are companies who aren’t really interested in their products but just need to have something to sell. I’m working on a software for about 3 years and in this ammout of time people just don’t want to help me when i ask, nor they want to know how much is difficult to create a CAD-like 3D enviroment from scratch. They pressure me just to finish, paying very little (the same as working on not graphics software). Then, sometimes, they say they want to implement “this” or “that” because chatting with someone they heard about “this’ and “that” that bigger companies do.
It’s not surprising i’m rallying to finish a minimum ammount of things they need and quit to start doing better things myself ;)

Ahh I was just curious haha. Can’t wait to see the final game! I loved Braid and I just saw Indie Game and was browsing around looking for info on your new game. I ‘got’ Braid. There’s a lot of us out there that got it. We just don’t have blogs because we don’t think anyone gives a shit about how much a video game affected us.

… and the Source engine is pretty old these days. If we licensed it we’d have to rewrite a lot of things, it’d be hard to get it onto iOS, etc. Also, we just don’t want to license an engine.

I don’t have any idea how the Source engine works. We are just making decisions that we think are reasonable.

I thought super-small differences might indeed occur, especially in cases where you really didn’t expect any difference at all, but I guess it depends on the cause of the difference.

Not so simply, because you could have two lightmaps on neighboring objects, then rebake, and decide one is “similar enough” but the other isn’t, and you then start getting discontinuities between objects. Unless your criterion for “similar enough” is super-small. I dunno.

In a humorous way. Of course. :P

I think it’s interesting that often developers who are creating substantial and valuable changes to their games tend to refer to the DLC as “Expansions” just to avoid the negative connotation of frivolity that the word has come to mean. A good example being Bethesda with the Skyrim expansion, even though they were the original proponents of frivolous DLC. (The horse armor)

Users SHOULD have to generate their own lightmaps. If they can’t wait 24 hours more to play the game. They don’t deserve it. Think of it as the first puzzle in the game.

Sorry for being random and dumb. I just felt it really strongly.

Jiro struck me as pretty practical – so I don’t know if he’d really care very much about what he specifically called his sushi, as long as he was able to clearly communicate with the chefs that work under him. ;)

Thank you very much for clarifying (and also for the great movie recommendation)!

I do understand what you’re trying to say – but I believe there’s some semantic philosophical issues with your definitions and their use. Surely there’s a point where we move beyond the connotational limits of ‘games’, but cannot broadly define every such work as art – ‘title’ and ‘content’ are less jargon and more adoptions for concepts that people are having a hard time interpreting – Marshall McLuhan was concerned that “we cannot free ourselves of the delusion that it is how a medium is used that counts, rather than what it does to us and with us” and such terminology is surely an attempt to wean perceptions off of the later attitude toward a more progressive one. Perhaps I have misunderstood your usage though.

I’m curious if you think the use of these words harms game development in a way that wouldn’t happen anyway, or if it’s just something that points back to a bad way of thinking. I just ask because it seems like arguments about words on there own are kind of weird. I guess Jiro could refer to his Sushi as content if to him, content means something positive (yeah it would be a weird word to use for food). I’m really curious what the practical purpose of pointing this out is. I can’t word that in a non rude sounding way, sorry.

I suggest re-reading the posting; I say exactly why.

“Content” means “something goes here but it doesn’t really matter what”. It’s something that’s created with the goal of filling space. As for why it’s a irritating term, people who create things for their own sake aren’t in the same line of work as people who create things to fill space, and they don’t like being grouped in with the latter.

Content is the same thing as Lorem Ipsum. If you’re looking for a generic term for things that have a reason for being, try “works”.

“Title” was just put in place by suits who didn’t want to go around saying “game” all the time because they wanted to be taken more seriously, and it is hard to put up a serious image when you are saying “game” all the time. (“Title” does have some technical usage in the retail game world, where “title” refers to the game in all its incarnations and “SKU” refers to one specific over-the-counter release e.g. for one platform, but this is not how “title” is generally used these days. It is generally used to mean “game”.)

“Content” is just a generic word that lets people say nothings about nothing. It comes from the software application world where you had “code” that makes things happen and “content” that the code moves around without knowing what it is. I have always taken it as a bad sign when people use the word “content” very much because it means they aren’t thinking about the actual things being operated on by the code, which probably means the code is not doing a good job.

(It then took a more sinister meaning in the web world, where “content” is what draws users to a web site and “ads” are the real purpose of the site.)

In general, calling things “content” is ugly. Go watch the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Do you think that Jiro refers to the food he serves as “content”? If not, then why is it better for us to do so?

In the case of “DLC”, what does “DLC” mean? It just means “something generic you can get for yoru game”. As the player, don’t you care what it is — whether it is an expansion pack, some new character skins, or horse armor, or whatever? More informative terms would help, there. But in reality the term DLC was made up by people who sell software, and its meaning is: “Things we can sell to players for money after the original purchase, or else give away for free in order to maintain engagement with our game / get a news boost / etc”. This is what I mean about shifting the conversation. If the point were really to give players something valuable, then it would not be called DLC, it would be called something that tells you what you are actually getting.

Lightmaps take a long time (more than 24 hours right now). Light probes are much faster, just because there are many fewer sample points.

Even if the processing time were low enough, you would essentially be turning an in-house tool into a shipping product. Thus, the test burden goes up.

How about just generating the lightmaps and/or probes on the users machine when a new patch is downloaded? Shouldn’t add too much complexity since you would be using the same tools, just on the users computer instead.

Or is the processing time too long for this to be viable?

Best regards

Pars pro toto. The Witness is the title of the game, but The Witness is not a title! Unless you are publisher and the game is just a row in a spreadsheet. It’s a sad evolution of the language…

Right now we only have 72 light probes in the world and we process them in 5 minutes. However, I expect to have around 300 by the time we ship the game. Even with GPU optimizations, I think it will be hard to process them in less than that.

This of course raises the question: “What is your stance on DLC?” but I understand that’s a difficult subject to detail in a comment.

Your development principles are fascinating!

I apologise for adding my voice to all these suggestions – you have likely thought of all this already.

By the way, I can sort of understand why you wouldn’t like using the word “content” for games, but what’s wrong with “title”?

We have a similar problem in Path of Exile. We render sheets of tiles in an isometric perspective that are used at run time for our mini-map. This is done during our build process automatically. Unfortunately we have found that there are very slight differences in the output so when doing patches we would get an extra 50-80 or so meg of data.

Our solution so far has just been to run a script that strips out minimap tile changes in patches that no real changes have occurred in. It’s not a great solution, but it’s working out okay for us so far.

Although now that I think about it a little more, it doesn’t seem hard at all to do a good blur on a cube map. Maybe the problem is something else. I didn’t program it so I am not sure!

In principle there is nothing preventing this, but at present generating light probes is a little bit slow. I think it mostly has to do with the blur step, which I would guess is done on the CPU (if Ignacio is reading these comments then maybe he can say something about it).

My understanding is, if you want to do a perfect blur across a cube map, it is kind of a pain in the butt to do that in hardware. (If anyone out there knows how to do it very well, let me know!) Right now our shadow-casting point lights are limited to one hemisphere for a similar reason (that way we can project the shadow onto a plane, rather than 5-6 cube map faces).

Fair enough. I also value simplicity, not only from standpoint of implementing features but even moreso for the programmers who will have to maintain those features in the future. As someone working on an online game, issues like this are of higher importance and thus earn a larger portion of the time/complexity/person power budget.

Ehh, no, this is just a level of complexity that we would be unwilling to engage in. Complexity management is how you ship quality games in a reasonable period of time.

If it comes down to doing something like this, or having people download 500MB patches, then it is going to be the latter.

(The situation would be different if it were an online game that patches all the time; in that case such a technology investment would be focused on the typical user experience. But that is not the case here.)