Technology
The Technology track focuses on the challenges and opportunities presented by next and current generation development including: mature consoles, new handhelds, a highly competitive sales environment, and increased demand for very high production values in games.
Featured Sessions & Speakers
Creating a High-Performance Simulation: A Dynamic Natural World to Play With
Speakers: Eric Chahi (Ubisoft), Ronan Bel (Ubisoft)
Session Description:
Audience will be introduced to Galileo, a real-time simulator of flowing water, lava, erosion, sedimentation and vegetation and its use as foundation for a fully dynamic world based game. Players are given the ability to manipulate the entire environment from rock to soil to water, plants, trees. To reach a very high level of performance, all of the above is native implementation in SIMD 128 bits and fully multithreaded (entirely with SPU on PS3). Read more...
Living City in Mafia 2
Speaker: Jan Kratochvil (2K Czech)
Session Description:
The session will cover the technological aspects of creating a visually attractive city for computer games. We'll cover the algorithms for spawning and despawning pedestrians and cars. Then we'll discuss the AI for NPC, specifically for pedestrians, car drivers and police. Read more here...
Rigged to Blow: Powerplay Pipeline for SplitSecond
Speaker: Matthew Rubin (Black Rock Studio)
Session Description:
Authoring set pieces and destructible environments presents a unique set of challenges across code, art and design disciplines. This talk will describe the toolchain for producing the 'Powerplay' assets in SplitSecond. Read more here...
Drop-Out Bots: Who Needs A-Grade Multiplayer AI for Action Games?
Speaker: Alex Champandard (AiGameDev.com)
Session Description:
Recent titles including LEFT 4 DEAD 2, KILLZONE 2, or UNREAL TOURNAMENT 3 are just a few high-profile examples of games that include bots as an enhancement to their multiplayer experience. Creating the AI for such games can be quite a challenge, particularly if you allow players to play drop-in co-op! Bots are expected not only to fulfill high-level gameplay goals, such as capture the flag or kill zombies while reaching the end of the level, but they must also avoid frustrating the player any more than a human co-op partner would. Read more here...
Advanced DirectX 11: DirectCompute by Example
Speaker: Jason Yang (Advanced Micro Devices) & Lee Howes (AMD)
Session Description:
This talk will discuss some of the key DirectCompute capabilities of DirectX 11 features using two examples – order independent transparency and cloth simulation. The goal of our talk is not to teach all the details of DirectCompute and DirectX 11, but rather highlight some key features that could be useful to developers and how that could translate to existing game applications. Read more here...
Keep checking back for more session updates.
