One of the perks of being a lecturer in Software Engineering with a specialty in Game Development is that once in a while you get the opportunity to visit large conferences. This year the Game Developers Conference is the one to attend. And it will be the first time I will have two hats on, one as a lecturer, and the other as an indie developer.
This is already my third time to visit the conference and the last two visits where so very inspiring. Actually on the last one (back in 2012) during one of the sessions the name ‘Jagaco’ was born!
I will be posting a summary of my adventures here every day, so check back often for cool insights and photo’s.
Day 0 – Arrival
After a nice but very cold (-7°C or 19°F) vacation in New York for a week, I’m back in San Francisco after three years! And my god have I missed this place.
The hotel is absolutely horrible, and the interior makes my eyes bleed. The included breakfast is a joke and the cake is a lie! But I’m not complaining (will do that when I’m back), since I will be at the conference all day and I try to be in my hotel as little as possible.
Today was a day to explore San Francisco again, and recognizing all the important places again feels nice. For my colleague (Nick) it is his first time here and it is nice to see his first-time enthusiasm about the city. He still loves the steep inclined roads, but I am sure he will have changed his mind after this week. ; ) At the end of the day we collected our GDC passes and explored the Moscone Center a little. I am so exited to see all the big stands from all the big players in the game development business. 26,000 professionals all gather here to talk and debate for a whole week about the future of gaming in the world. I feel humble walking around all these big-shots but I love to be among like-minded people.
Tomorrow morning at 10:00 the convention starts. In my schedule I have four different presentations I want to attend, all at 10:00. This is one of the problems of the GDC, there are too many cool presentations, and I can only attend one at the time… I still have the evening to choose one of the four, I can’t wait to start tomorrow!
Day 1 – And so it begins
The first day is always about summits (as is the second day). The main conference starts at Wednesday. But that doesn’t make the first two days less interesting. Because I still have some sort of a jet jag I was up way too early. This gave me some time to explore the conference in advance and show Nick around in both Moscone buildings.
The day began at 10:00 with a session called: “Building a better centaur: AI at a massive scale” and it was about the pluggable and extendable AI architecture of GuildWars2 and it’s upcoming expansion. I’ve learnt a lot about the architecture of large scale AI systems. Is that immediately useful? No, not really, but it gives insight in future opportunities.
I also went to a presentation about “Free-to-Play” (F2P). At the moment app-stores are in what they call the second phase right now. The first phase was: “All games cost 99 cents”, the second phase is “Free-to-play”, but the games are not really free, because of IAP’s (In App Purchases) or micro transactions. The speaker was a behavioral psychologist with a refreshing look at the Free-to-Play mechanism. Players will eventually start to turn against Free-to-play and the third phase of the app-stores should be more honest to players. This is in line of what Jagaco wants to do with their own games; to be honest to players and give a fun experience. And this is also what we need to teach the students when they build games.
Time really flies and the first day is already over. I saw so many inspiring presentations and learned a lot. I deliberately went to many different summits, from AI to Education to Monetization.
It’s cool to see where people work (those passes are perfect for that) and to hear so many different languages. It sure was an exhausting day, so I will turn in early because there are four more days to come!
The photos give a small impression of the scale of the GDC. The first photo shows all the presentations on Monday alone, the second one is made in a presentation room (only a quarter is showing), the third is one of the hallways of the Moscone West building (very high ceiling) and the last one is a slide of an education summit presentation.
Day 2 – The last day of summits
Today I started with a presentation about Physics in games titled: “Physics for game programmers: Numerical Methods”. That was kind of a though start of the day with a lot of higher calculus going on and only after 47 minutes he started to tie it to the game (Diablo 3), which made up for (almost) all of it.
After that talk I went to a presentation about Idle-games. They called it zero-player games (in line with single-player and multi-player games). It gave a ton of cool ideas for game jams. This genre is quite new and rather easy to churn out by a small group of people. Nick had never heard of idle-games before, and when I was trying to explain to him which idle-games I ‘play’ I understood that it is hard to explain why this kind of games is cool to ‘play’. You don’t really play the game, the game plays itself. Two big examples are “Cookie Clicker” and “Clicker Heroes”.
After a lunch break which Nick wanted to take outside (in the sun, no air conditioning and NO wifi!) I went to a cool talk about AI disasters, in which the five presenters showed examples of games they worked on and all the stuff that went wrong while building the AI for it. Very cool to see and you can even learn from those mistakes!
Tomorrow John Carmack will talk. His presentation is about the future of mobile VR (he speaks for Oculus), the subject itself is not that interesting (do I dare to say that?), but the opportunity to see John Carmack IRL is sooo cool. I wonder if I should ask if I could get a picture with him. 🙂
This time there are no photos, because photos of slides I saw are not very cool to look at. But I promise I’ll make up for it tomorrow, because then the expo begins! I will try to sneak something exclusive in a picture.
Day 3 – Main conference start
Today the main expo opened at 10:00. It is bigger than the last time I’ve been here, covering two entire halls instead of just one. I only had 45 minutes to walk around, but in that short time there was a definite trend to be found. There is A LOT of motion tracking going around. From full MoCap systems starting at $80,000, to tracking suits built in Enschede for only $12,000. All of them can be combined with facial tracking, too. There were at least six booths on facial tracking alone!
I went early to the room in which John Carmack was going to talk, and even though I was early, the room was already filled to the rim (easily 1000+ people in there) and I had to stand in the back. It didn’t matter much, as seeing him and hearing him talk was really cool. 🙂 He is one of my heroes from the industry. His talk was about the future of Mobile VR and how Oculus is cooperating with Samsung to develop the Gear VR system. He announced that THIS YEAR Oculus will go full consumer (finally!), coupled with a release of Samsung somewhere near the end of the year.
I then went to a talk by Microsoft about developing games for Windows 10, getting a sneak peak at the new Windows system and the hybrid apps (running on every device running Windows 10) called officially: “Windows apps”. It was very cool to see the steps they are making to make it easier to develop for so many different platforms. I’m sure this will give a great boost to Windows Phone and Indie XBox developers.
Other presentations I attended were about 2D visual effects and Parallelizing the Naughty Dog Engine. The first was nothing new (only some neat tools) but the second one was much more interesting. It was very nice to see the internal details of such a large engine. Especially how they went from <10 FPS to 65 FPS in only two months before the release of the latest “The Last of Us” game.
Today I also met two guys from Epic Games (one speaking Dutch) and had a nice talk about the new Unreal Engine, how it is free now (except for 5% of royalties) and why every University should use the Unreal Engine (their opinion). We’re going to try meeting up with the European Manager of Education of Epic Games later this week to see the possibilities and arranging a cool demo/presentation in the game lab given by Epic open to all our students and teachers.
Like I promised: new photos today. They all give an impression of the sheer size of the expo and the individual stands. Unfortunately nothing exclusive this time, but I will keep my eyes open!
On a side note, what’s up with all the colors of hair here? I’ve seen all the colors of the rainbow, yellow (really bright yellow!), lots of blue, red, pink, purple and green. I know there are alot of artsy-dudes and dudettes here, but the hair is something new (might consider it for the next time…)
Now I’m signing off for today, it was very exhausting and I’m turning in early again to be able to survive the last two days of awesomeness.
Day 4 – The longest day
This was the longest day of the conference. Every day starts at 10:00 (which is the perfect time to start working!) and today the last presentation ended at 18:30.
The day started with a very cool presentation about edge detection based post processing in Warlords of Dreanor. This is a new technique in the World of Warcraft engine, which they added in the latest expansion. The talk was sponsored by Intel, meaning you had a chance to win the newest SSD of Intel. I entered in the drawing with only a handful of other people, but unfortunately I didn’t win. 🙁
I then went to “Frostbite: Implementing a scripting solution for your editor” which is in direct line with my thesis project at Utrecht University. Their editor FrostEd is fully written in C# and they use IronPython as a scripting language. The coupling is done in a particular way which is much like what I’ve thought up for my thesis. I got the contact information of the scripting guy at Frostbite and I will try to get in contact with him after the GDC.
I also saw two presentations (about the new game Destiny from Bungy) about multi-threading their entire engine and their renderpipeline. Together with yesterdays presentation, I’m getting a clear view of the latest techniques in multi-threading in a performance critical way. Apperently “fibers” are used alot on consoles now, with an Intel counterpart called TBB’s (Thread Building Blocks). As processors are coming out with more and more cores, multi-threading cannot be ignored any longer! The design will be complex (atomizing the code in jobs running on those fibers which in turn are linked to a worker-core) but when the framework is done right it can scale infinitely among as many cores as you want. It will be very cool to try this out!
And I’ve leaned something else today.
On my way from the hotel to the GDC conference I walk past a game store every day. Today during my lunchbreak I thought I would check the store out. Lesson: Do NOT walk into a game store with your GDC-badge around your neck! Everybody wants to talk to you, especially the kids, and they treat you like some celebrity. They want to know everything: Which is better PS4 of XBox One? What new games are coming out this year? Which games I made? for what company I work? etc. (like I know everything 🙂 ). My half hour break was over in a flash, and I didn’t even have time to eat..
In the pictures today: The first one is the Nvidia Shield, I thought that was the name of their gaming tablet, but as it turns out, it is a very powerful and small computer. The second picture shows the VR goggles from Razer. The third is yet another motion tracking technique and the last picture is a debug wireframe shot from one of the levels in NeedForSpeed – The Run.
Writing these blogposts every day is cool to do. I like to share my experiences and it also gives me a broad overview of my own day. But I would like to hear from you in the comments to see if it is also being read by anyone 🙂 So feel free to leave a comment.
Day 5 – The last day
Today was the last day and is traditionally the shortest day. After 16:00 there would be no further presentations (the expo closed at 15:00 already). In the evening were several parties. Nick and I still have to decide on which to attend (only for networking reasons of course!)
Today was also a versatile day, with presentations about Visual Arts, Design and (still most of them) Programming.
At 10:00 I started off with a presentation about the new DirectX12 called: “Better power, better performance: Your game on DirectX12”. It gave cool insights in the new optimizations they made in the Direct3D API. No new features this time, but more performance.
I also went to a presentation from Microsoft about the difficulties in User Interface rendering on different platforms. The screen on the phone may have the same resolution as the monitor of your PC, but the pixel density and view distance to the screen is radically different. Because Windows 10 will also run on a TV (larger viewing area, but also further away) Microsoft did a lot of research to find the best way to make the user interface scale among all those different screens and platforms. They even gave a formula which you can use to calculate the optimal size of the “hit target” on the screen.
My last presentation of the day, and automatically of this whole GDC was “Rendering the world of Far Cry 4”. It was a presentation in the design track and it was nice to see how the world of Far Cry 4 is set up. The focus was on the global lighting and vegitation in the scene.
I have mixed feelings, the week flew by and it’s a shame it’s over already, but on the positive side I can almost check out of this godforsaken hotel! I am still in doubt if I should take my clothes back with me to the Netherlands, or just burn them right here, because I don’t think I will ever get them clean again.
I only took four photo’s today, so I’ve uploaded them all. Three of them show the introduction slide of three different tracks (visual arts, programming and design) and the second photo is of a t-shirt of one of the Unreal developers sitting in front of me. I liked the quote, so I made the picture.
