the cutting room mirror

The Witness (Windows, Mac OS X)

Hidden Text#

The game includes several files appearing to list settings for the game inside the data-pc folder, though it's unclear whether these files are actually used by the release version of the game.

There is also a significant amount of text in the game's executable describing what are presumably console commands used during development.

Profiling Information#

To do:
Upload a screenshot of this.

Pressing ] (close square bracket) will toggle display of profiling information in the top-right corner of the screen.

Noclip Mode#

Early builds of the game shipped with a noclip mode. The mode is enabled by pressing shift-., and can then be toggled on and off by pressing m. This was removed in the version released on Steam on February 4, 2016 (manifest ID 4228623888217393697). All versions of the game with noclip included contain the strings "Version 0.944M" and "Built 2016/01/23 14:35:20 from 131468", though some later versions are still labelled as 0.944M despite having noclip mode removed.

Command-Line Arguments#

To do:
Test the remaining arguments.

The game appears to support several command-line arguments.

Flag

Notes

-windowed

-fullscreen

-vr

-hdr

-no_log

-no_sound

-no_entities

Appears to crash the game shortly after startup.

-new_game

-demo

Appears to start the endgame flyover after 10 seconds of inactivity.

-language

-load_assets_from_network

Potentially requires an argument (the IP address to load assets from).

-use_file_server

-use_synergy_server

-non_interactive

-no_hud

-no_svn

-map

-centered

Begins the game centered on the screen.

-no_vsync

-skip_config_dialog

Skips the graphics configuration dialog that usually appears when the game is launched.

-command

No immediately obvious effect.

-profile

Potentially requires an argument ("medium", "high", or "ultra").

-width

-height

-profiling

-skip_concurrent_resource_creation_check

Suppresses a warning about missing GPU functionality (documented in the support FAQ).

-ignore_all_gamepads

References#


  1. http://the-witness.net/news/2016/01/the-game-is-doing-great-on-steam/↩︎