GDC 2010 report
Just returned from exciting (and exhausting) trip to Game Developers Conference 2010. Random notes:
Unity
It seems that everyone is talking about Unity this year. At GDC 2009 some people have heard about us, some others were “where the f*** this came from?!”, and some had no idea what Unity is. This year it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t heard about Unity. I was surprised by number of AAA developers who are playing around with Unity internally (for prototyping, mobile & whatnot) and/or are big fans of Unity. I like!
We had a cool booth that was very busy at all times. As a bonus, the Unity chairs could be used as weapons!
Awesome quote: CEO of censored (competing middleware company) said: “yeah, Unity is going up, we are going down”. This is taken completely out of context of course.
We were busy demoing upcoming Unity 3 which I think will be quite awesome. Three days before the conference were spent crunching on the demos for GDC :)
Cool Stuff
Only managed to go to two sessions :(
Stephen Hill‘s “Rendering Tools and Techniques of Splinter Cell: Conviction” had interesting bits & pieces of stuff. Nice work on hierarchical Z occlusion and ambient occlusion fields! (probably first time I see AO fields used in actual game production)
Mike Acton‘s “Three Big Lies: Typical Design Failures in Game Programming” was entertaining. Content wise I pretty much knew what to expect. If you aren’t following Mike – do it now! Talk slides are at Insomniac’s site.
RAD‘s Telemetry profiler looks totally sweet. I think they acquired this one and improved it. Some very good UI ideas in there. On a related note, Scaleform’s new profiler looks… kinda inspired by Unity’s (comparison: Scaleform on the left, Unity on the right).
Fun Stuff
Managed to sneak in some fun (dare I say “social”?) stuff.
Rendering folks dinner (thanks Johan!) was awesome, even if it made me feel kinda small & stupid among those super smart guys & gals. Shadow algorithms on receipts FTW! Middleware Meetup (thanks Dan!) was full of friendly competitors :) #gdcdrink tweetup (thanks Mike!) had lots of war stories, PS3 talk and how to do fluid simulation on 360′s pixel shaders.
Glad you could make it to the dinner Aras, was great!
AFAIK Motorstorm used AO-fields for their vehicles, and we used a stripped down 2d projection approximation for character and vehicle shadows in Mercenaries 2 (mostly because it was implemented late in the project and we couldn’t spare the memory). The artists even found a way to use ‘em for building shadows.
Well, there you are. Thanks for the heads up! Note to self: never claim “this is the first time something something…” :)