Elegant Chaos

One little GDC note in passing - I noticed a surprisingly high number of folks with Apple laptops. I did an ad-hoc survey by walking from one end of the convention centre to the other, counting non-apple laptops and resetting to zero when I saw an Apple one. One average I got to about 6. A ratio of 6:1 isn’t bad - definitely larger than Apple’s alleged market share.

Bit of a delay in the reporting… caused not so much by the fantastic time that I was having, as by the gradual worsening of my flu :(

The hilight of these days for me was the “Best Practices” session by Grady Booch. I’d like to see more sessions like this at GDC - from mainstream computer science experts rather than just from games specialists.

Other interesting sessions included the next-generation animation panel, “crowds in a polygon soup”, and a session on how the God Of War programmers tried to arrange things so that they could spend the last month of the project on the beach! I’d recommend looking up the slides for these if you missed them.

Overall, I think I’d only give the conference a 3/5 mark. There were a few interesting sessions, but I didn’t feel that it was brilliant from the programmers perspective. The best sessions were about techniques - whether high-level planning, medium-level algorithms, or low-level implementations. These sessions explained how the authors had gone about doing something, and hence how we could do the same thing. Unfortunately, there were a few too many sessions which just told us what someone else had done, without explaining how/why, or in a context which wasn’t very useful for anyone else.

GDC: Day 3

Another day, another bagel… actually, I only remember the end of the day vaguely… something about a Sony party… I’m seeing lots of vodka…

This was the first day of the conference proper and the expo - all of a sudden the halls were swamped with people.

I got to a few good sessions - mostly pretty tecchy. C++ on Next Gen Consoles from Pete Isensee was quite useful - there wasn’t much that I hadn’t heard already but it’s good to have one’s assumptions confirmed. Phil Harrison gave a good speech (but then I would say that) - overall I thought that the strategy he described sounded pretty sensible. Some of the PS3 demos looked good, although some were a bit pants. I also went to a good Animation panel presented by some big-wigs in the field. Quite a bit of the detail went over my head, but they showed some great techniques and I think I got the key bits :)

For some bizarre reason, most of the next-gen coding sessions (the ones that everyone wants to attend) seemed to have been located in the smallest rooms, so were absolutely heaving. This is bloody frustrating, and meant that I missed some of the stuff that would have been most useful. Grrr… whoever did the room allocation this year should be shot.