I could be misremembering, but I thought I read a long time ago that it was somewhat related to the short story The Witness by Jorge Luis Borges. Even if that’s not the case, that is a fantastic single-page story to read!

Those twenty spaces I added auto condensed themselves to one… haha

SPOILER WARNING:

Is there going to be a patch on the PS4 that addresses/fixes that one of the flowers is missing on the lake? It may seem like a small thing, but I’m really a bad OCD completionist with my games and just want everything I do to count. According to the reddit community this has already been patched and fixed on PCs…

Thanks, that gives me plenty to go off of

It is evident that a whole team of extremely skillful people have worked for years to produce a great piece of art, and for that, I am very thankful. Every brushstroke was carefully and deliberately placed, the systems are robust and bug-free, the world has a sense of place that I had not until this point seen. The work is a beautiful synthesis.

Well done!

1) You have mentioned in interviews that you have a file with many different game ideas in it and that The Witness was the idea you chose. What was the line/paragraph that you had written that grew into the idea for this game?

2) I remember many, many years ago a preview of this game on Kotaku where there was a very bare bones island with a handful of puzzles. There was a maze, a windmill and a mountain. How much of what the final game became was present in that initial idea and what developed over time?

Also, for other people reading this, if you have not done so already I highly recommend checking out Luis Antonio’s blog as he has been writing some fantastic blog posts on the work he did on The Witness:

http://www.artofluis.com/3d-work/the-art-of-the-witness/

It is very interesting to see how the world changed over time and some of the thought that went into creating the art and architectural style and how little details can pass unnoticed because they feel so natural. If you loved the game I think that you will enjoy it.

If you haven’t done so, take an hour or two and visit http://www.reddit.com/r/thewitness. There are a lot of fun and curious theories about extra secrets or easter eggs. It’d be awesome if you were to join the discussion there as well.

There’s a lot of misnomers around to describe this effect, because there are two separate operations in play here – Tone Mapping and Automatic Exposure.

First of all, we render our scene to a high dynamic range buffer – which as far as games rendering is concerned means it can store values (usually much) higher than the 0->1 range for each color channel (depending on the platform/gpu, The Witness uses fp32, fp16, or fp 11_11_10) Once all the rendering is done, we apply a tone mapping operation to convert back to the low dynamic range image (i.e. fixed 8 bits per channel) that we need for display. The Witness uses an operation similar to the “filmic tonemapping” John Hable devised for Uncharted 2 – he covers it, and a lot of the other “standrd” tone mappings on his blog: http://filmicgames.com/archives/75

Tone mapping operators require an exposure value as input, and it’s there that we apply the automatic exposure. It uses the average luminance of the current scene (calculated on the gpu by literally down sampling the hdr buffer and averaging the pixel luminances over and over until we have a 1×1 single channel hdr image) as a target value and drives the luminance that we use to calculate our exposure towards that value over the course of a few seconds – which is how you get the nice eye-adaption effect as you move between bright and dark areas.

…ok, so that was a very high level description and there’re a lot of smaller details involved, but these two methods are pretty much boilerplate standard in games nowadays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-dynamic-range_rendering This is what you want.
Here is a tutorial for implementation HDR in OpenGL: http://learnopengl.com/#!Advanced-Lighting/HDR

In case Jon doesn’t have time to respond, I believe that is called Eye Adaptation or Automatic Exposure (or at least that is what Epic calls it in Unreal Engine: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/PostProcessEffects/AutomaticExposure/index.html).

A quick google search turned up a paper on an eye adaptation technique: http://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/17831/1/ledda_afrigraph.pdf

That is called HDR (High Dynamic Range).

In general, what’s it called (in computer graphics) when the screen’s brightness adjusts to compensate for travelling between outdoors and indoors (or rather, bright areas and dark areas)?

And what shader algorithm did The Witness use for this purpose?
In some games (e.g. Halflife 2 (heh, I’m a decade out of date)) the screen as a whole adjusted, but I noticed The Witness seemed to do something that had more “volume” to it, and that shadows seemed to fill in the more distance polygons first.

You can see what I am talking about in this Let’s Play (which is not my video) at 28 mins and 20 seconds into the video; looking at the rocks in the chute and how the darkness fades in/out the crags of the rocks before the rocks themselves.
https://youtu.be/eRKXtNnXR8g?t=28m20s

Basically, what should I google to research how to implement similar features?