Development Philosophies & Next Gen Graphics Programming...

Quite possibly our busiest night to date down in Guildford as we put on 3 presentations to a very packed crowd in "The 3 Tuns".
Lionhead Studios' Graphics Programmer Tak Fung kicked off the evening with his talk entitled "Some New Graphical Techniques to Make Games Look Pretty and Interesting", a summary of which can be seen here.
This then ran nicely into Autodesk's Nick Manning and Kevin Booth's presentation on some of the new advanced graphic techniques in 3DS Max 8. Nick briefly discussed the recent purchase of Alias by Autodesk before Kevin performed a live demo of techniques such as Pelt Mapping and Parallax Mapping. We also have Nick to thank for the use of the AV equipment, and Matt Allen from BlueGFX, cheers guys!
The evening was then topped off by an excellent talk by David Amor, Creative Director of Relentless Software, on "Making high quality games in a 40 hour week". David proved, using Relentless developed games as examples, that it can be done! He explained how they do things down at Relentless and how and why they came to be using these practices. David's notes on the talk can be seen here.
CLIMAX were sponsors of the evening and very generously bought the drinks, many thanks to them for doing that, and thanks to everyone for turning up on the night, especially in the cold and rain!