Game Developers Conference 2004
Got back from the GDC this morning. LONG drive. 26 hours out there, about 33 back. Time zones and lack of pressure to arrive caused the discrepancy. I did a pretty large chunk of the driving.
So, how was the GDC… in no particular order:
Got to play Gran Turismo 4 “Prologue”. Awesome game! I got off of work on Friday and spent the rest of the time until the expo floor closed playing it.
Saw John Carmack’s programming keynote, from about the third row back. =D He is super smart, as I’m sure everyone knows. Talked about how id is somewhat stuck in their own success and pretty much has to remake the same types of games. New and indie developers can take much higher risks and create more innovative games.
Learned that I’m somewhat of a scripting languages guru. I went to a roundtable of people using Lua in the game industry, and it was so boring!
Being at the conference really made we want to drop out of graduate school and join the industry. It looks like so many people do so many cool things, and I’d really like to be a part of it. Oh well…
John Gaeta (visual fx dude for the Matrix) is a crackpot. I volunteered to work his keynote without realizing who he was, and that was a pretty big mistake. LOOOTS of people. ^^
Spent a lot of time at various shader demos and workshops. Made me realize that the old fixed-function graphics pipeline is now dead. I mean, why would anyone use the old-school shading and lighting models when they can specify the exact way light interacts with the surface? Superbuffers (effectively render-to-texture and render-to-vertex-buffer, with any other type of combination as well) and real-time shaders not only bring graphics into a new era of flexibilitily, they also enable all sorts of high-performance, vector computation on consumer-level hardware. For example, one guy showed how you can use the insanely pipelined GPUs to run fluid dynamics simulations 4 to 25 times faster than you can on a CPU. Another guy made a million-particle particle system that runs entirely on the GPU. Cool stuff. More info at gpgpu.org.
Went to a talk called “The Anatomy of a 2D Sidescroller.” It really helped clarify Empyrean for me. Basically talked about several design issues in designing a sidescroller for 2D platforms such as GBA and SNES, as well as going through ten of the best sidescrollers over the years.
Can’t really remember anything else at the moment.
Random tidbit I thought about in the car on the way home:
Energy consumption of average human per day: 2000 Calories = 2,000,000 kilocalories = 8,368,000 Joules
Energy consumption of Xeon per day: 70 Watts * 24 hours = 6,048,000 Joules
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March 28th, 2004 at 2:05 pm
I was told that you would question your life about every 7 months when you’re in grad school :O
Meanwhile I’m getting less and less interested in entertainment…I’m pretty sure I want to do something more er…normal for grad school.
March 28th, 2004 at 2:55 pm
So true… So you want to do something normal, but not computer science? What other things have you thought about?
March 28th, 2004 at 11:35 pm
Uh, just a question… I may be stupid or something today, but: Isn’t 2000 calories the same as 2 kilocalories? It would have made sense if you had 2000 kilocalories, and then multiplied it with 1000 (to get the amount of calories), but at the moment, it doesn’t… At least for me. :P
March 29th, 2004 at 12:33 am
Calorie = kilocalorie (notice the capitalization)
March 29th, 2004 at 2:33 am
Well I’ll still just finish my comp sci degree; I’m thinking seriously of going into Biotech for grad school – more useful for humans and a very exciting area to be in now :D
March 29th, 2004 at 2:34 am
oh and if I win the lottery I’d go to UK for medical school >D
March 29th, 2004 at 3:03 am
Cool choice.
March 29th, 2004 at 11:48 pm
I question my life every 6-8 hours.
March 30th, 2004 at 6:00 pm
I didn’t even know this was happening….
March 31st, 2004 at 5:38 am
Oh yeah, my bad. ;)
April 1st, 2004 at 1:39 am
“Being at the conference really made we want to drop out of graduate school and join the industry. It looks like so many people do so many cool things, and I’d really like to be a part of it. Oh well…”
Man I know how you feel! That is… you feel crappy. And I feel so too :| God for 2 years I want to quit school, but hell… without it I am good as dead. I feel like I have the chance to be someone bigger and I’d probably succeed, but I can’t do this because of that school. I’ve tried many ways to mix school and stuff that i like, but it seems I can only learn school stuff OR do computer stuff,but not both at the same time. And learning school things until the evening and after that programming until the morning and going to school with lack of sleep is really ugly especially if you have 3 test that day :| rrr… Oh and happy for ya ^_^ I hope someday I’ll also have the chance to go to a GameDev conference.
April 1st, 2004 at 10:54 am
but then doesn’t 1 Calorie = 1 kilocalories, rather than 2000 Calories = 2,000,000 kilocalories?
April 1st, 2004 at 2:29 pm
Er, right.