Adam Brennecke

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking - we use shadow mapping which is an industry standard technique, and will not be changing this for release. We rolled our own shadow system because Unity's shadow solution does not work with our rendering pipeline. I would like to improve the quality of the shadows, and I agree that things can look better, but it's low on my list of things to do.

This has been fixed! Thanks for the report.

We don't have any current plans to make this optional.

I don't think the area loot got into the Backer Beta build on time. But it will make it for release. The new BB is a few days old at this point (and not today's build), thus the confusion.

you have no idea shipping a game is an insane adventure.

The files are there - we cleaned up the asset bundles for memory optimizations so the game would run without crashing because it's out of memory (this is pretty important). Look at the common_vfx, common_audio asset bundles. You will find the audio and texture files that were removed from Zealous Focus in both those asset bundles. Please don't jump to conclusions so quickly and make assumptions! We aren't trying to sabotage anything or have crazy agendas. Incline is our top priority - all of the time. If you want to see how awesome the programming team is, I'll show you a little something. I'm looking at the asset bundle build size from the first backer beta to the latest one (hopefully shipping soon). In 301 it was at 3.79GB, and now it's down to 1.06GB in the current build 481. We do a lot of things that go unnoticed in the final product.

we are still in the office working - we leave for PAX on Friday.

I agree about the feedback. It could be something we can fit in before release or in a patch.

There's more to it. The functionality is disabled in the beta.

I'm trying to get a go-pro helmet cam set up before the end of the project. I think it would be fun to show what I see on a regular day.

There is a cheat console command to unlock hidden commands that we decided would be considered cheating. It unlocks some other things that the devs use for testing, like fast travel to any area, and some other things. I decided to ship with cheats to allow for ease of access to script commands and other useful features that might help modders. Cheats will deactivate achievements for that entire play through, so don't use them if you want to get achievements.

What else would you like to see? What did you like? What didn't you understand? I can make more of these, but they do take me down for a few hours to edit them. The documentary should have plenty of discussions like this.

Note: It will take us about 8 hours to sign all of those collector's editions. That stack is like 1 of 10 or so. (Additional Note: Those are just the sleeves for the boxes)

It's a known issue that capes are not working properly on Macs right now. Thanks for the bug posts!

We plan on letting the game preload on Steam.

There should have been a place to fill out your address in the backer portal when you were selecting all of your options (even if all you are getting is the thank you card). You have a silver badge, so I assume you did it. If you need help, contact support on the backer site to check with us about your address on file.

Looks cool! The next challenge and suggestion would do a mockup at 1280x720 and 2560x1440 to see what it looks at low/high resolution. (We also do a 4:3 low res, but I forget the dimensions Kaz uses.) You might encounter some interesting problems. We won't be doing anything this substantial for our solid UI. It could be a couple of weeks of programming to implement this. Thanks for sharing!

"He's on fire!"

Josh and I discussed doing area loot in a patch. We had this feature initially (way before the backer beta), but was causing too many issues and was removed. It may make a comeback at some point. Loot all works fine now.

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Has anyone seen the disappearing/invisible companion bug in the current beta build (435)? The screenshot posted in the article is from build 301. I want to make sure that we don't have nasty bugs like that.

afaik, there was no height information on IE maps. Everything was completely 2D.

If you're not skimping on triangles, how come the terrain is so flat and regular in many outdoors places? Take Dyrford for example... On a dirt road / dirt town square like that where people, horses, wagons, etc. move through all day, one would expect the ground to be extremely uneven, with both gently sloping hillocks and hollows on a larger scale, and localized surface irregularities like bumps/ridges on a smaller scale all over the place. Yet you've made it look like an artificially flat surface with a dirt texture. Same with the grass-covered wilderness areas... it's like the grass grows on a perfect artificial plate, rather than on soil. Isn't this something where you could have easily achieved more realism, seeing as you're not constrained by the poly count and rendering technique limitations that real-time 3D games suffer from? We did experiments with varied terrain, and it doesn't work out too well because how the navmesh works and how it gets optimized by Unity. Subtle variations in terrain are lost on the navmesh, and characters will float above the ground (moreso than they do already on sloped/uneven terrain). Flat terrain works well for character animation too. We found the flatter the better. Sometimes too much detail on the ground makes everything look very "noisy" and "crunchy" in the render. It can be a detractor for how the scene looks.