GDCE03 Student Scholarship Reports

Each scholarship recipient was asked to report on their GDCE adventure. The reports describe favorites sessions and offer advice to GDCE first timers. Enjoy!

• Umran Ali - University Of Salford
• Ben Bradley - University of Abertay Dundee
• Paulo Gonçalves de Barros - Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
• Fernando Herrera - Helsinki University of Technology
• José Eduardo F. C. Lopes - University of Exeter
• Marina Miltiadou - Bournemouth University
• Kevin Murphy - Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland
• Oliver Pilarski - University of Stuttgart
• Jon Pledger - John Moores University, Liverpool
• Sebastien Schertenleib - Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

Umran Ali - University of Salford

GDCE...a place for developers to meet, share ideas, and discuss the future of the games industry. So where do students fit in? Well, the format is pretty much like University: wake up in the early hours, get dressed, grab a pen & paper and go read up on the lecture/talk you want to attend. But the few days you spend here will be the most exciting and enriching you've had in a long time. The GDCE experience is something I will never forget!

Each day is so jam-packed with sessions that you'll have a hard time choosing. I found the following sessions extremely insightful & enjoyable;

It's only a game? - Laura Fryer
This talk examined what it means to play a game, and how on a very basic level all humans have this innate need to play and explore. The speaker started off with a very personal story regarding the emotional impact something as simple as chess has between two individuals. Gmers have taken their newly emerging medium and expressed themselves emotionally in ways no one had thought possible. Laura used Everquest and a particularly hilarious Halo video (Warthog aerobatics!) to drive the message home. Educational, thought provoking and funny. Often games have been lowered to just a medial form of entertainment. Yet other much more basic game forms are acknowledged as more meaningful forms of expression. The wonderful thing about this talk was to hear and to see that other people shared the belief that all games, especially video games, fulfill that mental need we have to play & explore. By doing so, games are a worthy medium on par with traditional forms of expression.

Great Game Graphics… Who Cares? - Jason Rubin
This session looked at the decreasing impact of aesthetics with each new generation of games. The transitions from generation to generation over the years was very impressive, but now the medium has reached at point where visuals alone can no longer hold the players attention. The industry has two possible substitutes to give games a USP. Jason referred to worrying statistics regarding the two substitutes, innovation and attachment. Only 13 out of the top 100 games last year were not licensed/attached IP, and the lack of innovation is due to the risk associated with relying on original IP. A very insightful, well presented lecture by a great speaker. Over the last few years the industry has been hit by criticism regarding lack of originality and the downfall of fresh new ideas, it was interesting to hear that the industry has to take the stronger innovation route on board sooner or later.

The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege - Scott Bilas
A surprise hit for me personally, the speaker brought us the very impressive title, Dungeon Siege. Scott explained how the continuous world was designed and programmed, until the final 'no loading' engine was released. As an artist it was a little daunting to be introduced into a programmers' lecture. Scott expertly set out the lecture so even programming novices could grasp the technical achievements Gas Powered Games had managed to work into the DS engine. The talk provided a lot of insight into the difficulty of providing the continuous world and how it was eventually accomplished.

Advice for future scholarships winners:

• Get to know your fellow students! You'll never come across a more varied group of intelligent, funny and interesting people. It was fun trading stories, and thoughts with people from all over the world who share a similar passion in games.
• Don't be shy!! It can seem intimidating when you're sitting in a group of 30 fellow students and don't know anyone...and when you're surrounded by faces you've only ever seen in magazines/dev journals! And you'll find they are ever so willing to chat.
• Visit ECTS. Not only will you get a free GDCE lunch , but you get to see the latest games/hardware and some really innovative and fresh ideas.
• GDCE parties are a must! Free drinks, lots of mingling and the perfect opportunity to swap ideas and thoughts on the day's events, plus you'll bump into many speakers and familiar developers, and get to see them utterly drunk. You'll never see the human side of games development better anywhere else!
• Accommodation. Make sure you are as near to Earl's Court as possible. A tube power cut during the stay highlighted the point, plus you really don't want to spend 30 minutes getting back to your hotel after a GDCE party Plus research your activities, nothing worse than walking around London looking for something to do!

• There isn't a correlation between how famous a speaker is, and how useful their talk will be to you, or even how interesting it will be. While it's great to hear from your personal hero, make sure you attend some lectures which are relevant to your area.
• Get up in the morning, don't skip breakfast, and make it to the first lecture of the day on time.
• Try to do a bit of everything if you can - hear lectures, talk to developers, talk to other students, go downstairs and visit ECTS. Enjoy the whole experience.
• Don't go to GDCE looking for work! The people you see will probably have nothing to do with human resources, and even if they are, will not hire you just because you have turned up to the conference. Chat to people, and if you're lucky a job may come of it later on.
• And finally, make sure you note down the address of your hotel before you leave home, or you may find yourself lost, wandering around London for three hours with your bags - I speak from experience on this one! ;o)

• Save some time for ECTS. Despite all the interesting sessions you will attend in GDCE, ECTS is worth a look, especially for those interested in the commercial side of the game industry.
• Read a lot about the game industry before getting there. Although I am a game addict, I must admit that sometimes I was not fully aware of what people were really saying in some of the sessions I attended. It would be a good idea to buy a couple of game magazines in your area of interest.
• Do not miss GDCE parties! They are the perfect place to get close to the real big game developing monsters without annoying them much. And please, leave your introversion and shyness at home!
• Talk to other scholarship students. They are a good source of information and tips, as you are all in a similar situation. But more importantly, you can become very good friends!

• Plan ahead, both in terms of what you want to see at the conference as well as the practical details of your trip. Doing some research on where to stay can save you a bundle.
• Related to the previous point, sometimes there will be multiple interesting sessions happening at the same time but there is only one of you. When this happened I found it useful to rate the different overlapping sessions in terms of how interested I was in the topic. Then if the first choice does not live up to expectations I would switch to the next session on my list.
• The scholarship included a classic pass, which did not include any tutorials. Some tutorials are definitely worth it, so if you can manage to cover your expenses don't miss the opportunity.
• Do not miss out on visiting ECTS, there is plenty of time during the lunch breaks.
• Be open, talk to people, network and don't forget to attend the parties.

• Make the most of your classic pass by attending as many lectures as possible even if you think that there are not closely related to your subject area. There is always something to learn.
• Do visit ECTS! Spend time exploring and learn about the new trends and technologies.
• Go to the organized parties! It is not only fun (always welcome) but you will meet great people outside the 'formal' conference environment.
• Socialize with fellow students! They share the same interests and you can exchange good ideas.
• Try to have a good time!

• Planning is a vital part of conference attendance. Knowing what sessions you intend to attend in advance saves time and ensures you get the most from the conference.
• The conference is an excellent place to network and gather contacts but not contracts! However, networking may naturally lead to future job prospects.
• The conference pass does not include admission to the academic day. However, the academic day focuses on people involved in creating (and teaching) game development courses and is not focused on students as such. If you intend teaching or are interested in this topic you will have to pay for the pass.
• In the unlikely event that there are no lectures relevant to your chosen field during an hour attend a lecture in a different area. You will always learn something from the talks and it may even lead to branching your skills into a new area.
• There is ample time to visit ECTS during lunch and between lectures.
• In closing I'd like to thank the IGDA for the scholarship, giving me the opportunity to meet fellow enthusiasts and experience the gaming community first-hand. Roll on GDC 2004!

Oliver Pilarski - University of Stuttgart

First of all, I'd like to thank the IGDA for this scholarship. I had a wonderful time at the GDCE in London gaining a first touch to the game developing community. I especially liked the easy and courteous way developers deal with each other, that allowed many, many opportunities of talking with some really experienced people in the game industry. Furthermore, the conference gave me great insight into what professional game developers and graphics engineers are focusing on and the problems they face every day. The conference schedule itself offered a wide range of sessions including topics on game design, tools development, artificial intelligence, game production and marketing, graphics algorithms, graphics hardware effects (shader) and X-Box, PS2 and N-Gage plattform development.

Displacement Mapping For Games

Tom Forsyth (Muckyfoot Productions) presented Displacement Mapping for Games, an outstanding session providing lots of detailed information about displacement mapping. Tom gave a short introduction on what the whole concept is about, and continued with how to apply this technique to games. It was a very interesting talk, so here's a short summary:

Although hardware displacement mapping is currently available only on the newest ATI and Matrox cards, it's an elegant way of handling geometry and may be an option for future graphics engines. Essentially, a new vertex is generated for each texel in a 2D-displacement map on the graphics card. Each vertex is displaced from the interpolated surface position by the value of the texel in the normal direction of the surface. Tom compared this concept with the normal or bump mapping technique. But instead of the 8Bit grayscale texture used for bump mapping, 16Bit is good enough to model fine, geometric details for a displacement map. Displacement mapping on hardware offers new ways to optimize—only the vertices of the base mesh (approximately 200 vertices in the demo) need to be transferred over the AGP-bus to the graphics card. This saves valuable bandwidth (and the slow AGP-bus is often a bottleneck) and allows the developer to do complete mesh transformations on the CPU very efficiently (instead of setting up the GPU vertex program with the appropriate transformation matrices). Tom talked about the tools needed to adapt to displacement mapping in Muckyfoot's production environment. Muckyfoot wanted to approximate a high resolution model by using a base mesh with displacement maps for each surface. From an artist's point of view, a high resolution mesh is modelled first and used for creating the base mesh and the displacement maps. Tom explained the corresponding technical requirements—computing a raycast intersection with the high poly-mesh and storing the length of the ray segment in the texel value of the displacement map. Muckyfoot artists use displacement mapping to increase efficiency and optimize production cycle.

All in all, a really interesting talk with a passionate speaker.

Realtime Procedural Effects

John Spitzer (Nvidia) demonstrated ways to apply Realtime Procedural Effects to games. Possible applications included plant and terrain generation, spontaneous artificial intelligence, and animation of natural phenomena such as water, smoke or fire. One major topic was the generation of procedural textures using Perlin Noise, a type of gradient noise that is actually a function creating pseudo random data based on given parameters. Based on a cartesian grid, random vectors are created at each grid point using a pre-computed permutation table for randomness (repeatable). The current position, passed to the noise function as parameters, has a much finer range of definition than the coarser (often integer aligned) grid points. The nearest, surrounding grid points (four in 2D, eight in 3D) are used to compute a weight through application of the dot product of the relative current position with the appropriate grid point. A smoothing function (higher order interpolation scheme e.g. Hermite basis function) interpolates through all previously generated weights producing the noise value. As application, a geometry based explosion algorithm has been demonstrated by Tristan Lorach, using time varying noise for displacing vertices in the normal direction out of a spherical base shape using the programmable vertex processor of the GPU.

My advice to future students:

• Check out the session schedule and prepare your favourite ones, to be sure to get the most out of it.
• Research the speakers, who they are and what they are doing. This will help you decide which sessions to attend.
• Bring business cards. You'll definitely meet a lot of interesting people at the conference and you may want to keep in contact with other developers and scholarship students.
• Try to talk with peopla and network. Conversation and networking will reward you more than anything else at the conference.
• Go to the sponsored GDCE-parties after the conference. Parties are much more than free drinks and food—they are a great place to meet developers and get to know your scholarship colleagues.
• Don't forget your camera! There are many situations where you will want one. After the conference, everyone wants pictures to remember the great time you had with all your scholarship colleagues.

The GDCE is a big chance for every student to contact professionals. If you are serious about a career in game development, you will learn useful information and gain insight into what the game industry really expects from you.

Visit my website to see more GDCE pictures of students and the parties.

Jon Pledger - John Moores University, Liverpool

It was hard to believe that I was actually there, after the journey from Liverpool, it was a little surreal being in London. I arrived with Rita who also got the scholarship and we were both starving because we'd been travelling all day. However once we got to the venue at Earls court all thoughts of food were forgotten as we just had enough time to get to the orientation get at 4pm.

This was well worth going to as we had to introduce ourselves to our fellow students. And what a lot of them there were too. People from the USA, Europe and as far away as Hong Kong and Brazil. There were too many people to get to know them all, but over the next two days I would do my best. The orientation was a good idea as at least I could familiarise myself with some faces before we attended the conference proper. So far so good, everything was really easy to get into. Registering, getting our passes and goody bags etc could not have been easier.

Overall the conference was extremely well organised. Having the Playstation experience and ECTS running along side gave a real buzz to the proceedings. I was struck by how friendly people were at the conference, and how willing they appeared to divulge how they approach particular issues in their games. There was no keeping back knowledge due to competition that I was aware of.

My fellow students were a really good bunch of people to meet, some of whom I am staying in contact. One of them was a big fan of Matt Southern (one of my lecturers) which just shows it's a small world out there.

The Best lectures:

The key note speech from Jason Rubin, Great Game Graphics…Who Cares? hit the nail on the head as he described the quest for realistic graphics in games reaching a plateau in achievement and thus no longer making the game, requiring a new hook in order to retain interest. I found I could relate to this, as my MA project was about looking at alternatives in visual aesthetics for game art and also recognising the fact that the photo realistic look can only go so far before it becomes commonplace.

The round table discussion about Building Massive 3d Environments that Work in Real-Time was quite informative, mainly because the contributors, a mixture of artists and programmers, were quite candid in discussing the issues in building a large scale environment. Although not all contributed and it would have been nice to hear other views, those that did provided a unique insight into the problems that 3d environments can present.

Jaks Makeover for Jak II: Why the Dramatic New Look for a Sequel? was another stunning lecture. As a fan of the original Jak and Daxter I was curious about what was being done for the sequel. The emphasis of this lecture was mainly on the characters and how they had changed for the sequel. I was amazed by the quality of the concept art on show. You really felt inspired by what you were seeing. Without seeing any of the game we were shown how much work that had gone into the development. You could tell these guys had really thought about their subject. I found Bob really approachable and you felt that he was happy to answer questions all afternoon.

Drawbacks:

• There were plenty of game design and programming lectures, but there did not seem to be enough specific content for artists.
• Proceedings sometimes got a little too technical at times during the question and answer sessions, due to attendees' interest in this area. Although absorbing, this was probably best suited to the roundtable discussions and so keeping broader strokes for the lectures. I noticed this happening also with some of the game design lectures, where surely the focus should be on what makes a game good rather than discussing technical innovations.

Advice:

• If you are going next year, be sure to get accommodation as near to the venue as you can. There is nothing worse than having to rely on the tube to travel across London. I had to travel from Hackney in the East end, which would take over an hour. Ok my accommodation was free as I stayed with my sister, but if I did it again I would try to stay a bit nearer. It is worth it in the long run.
• Be wary of the time when you are at an aftershow party, if you have a distance to travel make sure you can get home in time. Tubes close at 12pm, the overland railway even earlier. The bus keeps going for sometime, but you need to know where things are.
• Don't worry too much about food as sandwiches are provided which were very good. Also plenty of coffee and tea available during the whole conference. In fact in order to get your food you had to walk across the floor of ECTS, which was good reason to have a quick look round while you are there.
• Check out the playstation experience if you have time. It costs some to enter, but it's a nice way to end your time there and you get to see some of the new games that have been discussed.
  

Sebastien Schertenleib - Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

GDCE was a great experience for me. It gave me the opportunity to talk to other students and game developers. I was surprised to discover that everyone was really involved and smart. Even well-known developers made time to talk to unknown guys like me. Unlike an academic conference on Virtual Reality I attended, people at GDCE deliver talks on real stuff instead of discussing things that could work. Also, the presenters knew the topics very well because they were directly involved in the development process.

I would also like to mention the IGDA team at GDCE. I really appreciated the kindness of the IGDA, taking time to introduce us to the conference and answer students' questions about the conference and the industry.

Finally go around the ECTS and take a few days to visit London. The weather is not that good but they have many beers, so the equation is fair

Top Three Lectures:

Great Game Graphics… Who Cares? - Jason Rubin

Jason Rubin's talk was the best I attended during the GDCE. Jason gave several examples of graphics improving immersion in video games through several iterations of hardware, from the old 8bits to the current and upcoming hardware. From a selection of a couple of pixels to high polygon 3D mesh with Shaders effects, game characters have changed completely. These modifications have helped players identify characters and become more attached. However, if the increased immersion and sensation of presence provide by 3D Mesh over animated sprite is obvious; it becomes more difficult to rely only on graphics to make the character more believable for the end-user. So the games must also improve in other components, like behaviors. But what made this lecture really valuable was that all Jason's games were guided by graphical improvement. In a sense, this is like the chaos theory. The first time we hear it, we don't believe it and then with time, it make more and more sense to make you a preacher. Great!

The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege - Scott Bilas

Before going to GCDE, I had read Scott's previous talks and game programming gem books. I had looked at some of his source code and liked his work. I also work in a similar academic field so his lecture was a must-see. I wasn't disappointed at all. Scott showed concrete examples and demos of his work. He is a skilled teacher who gives you the feeling that he enjoys lecturing at GDCE. As the lecture relied on architecture design and usability (through component based approach), he explained problems in the testing phase: a beta-tester using an over clocked PC crashing the system due to bus error that was almost impossible to track. In conclusion, Scott gave a good overview of the concept and design involved and gave solutions to issues that arose during the development cycle of the title.

Efficient High-Level Shader Development - Natasha Tatarchuk

As a programmer looking toward the graphic area, I was vert interested in some of the lectures focusing on Shaders. Natasha's was one of my favorite. She explained how Shader development can be done through HLSL and RenderMonkey IDE application. She is the lead programmer behind this IDE and has developed many Shaders coming from the different ATI demo or RenderMonkey example. She explained how to create Shader within the tools and how to optimize HLSL Shaders by describing how to work the hardware. The explanation was very clear and concrete (if only my teacher could have the same approach…). I learned very interesting information that I was able to apply to my own development. Of course, this kind of lecture is geared toward graphics programmers, so if you are not involved in the specific area, you should maybe attend others sessions. Otherwise go for it! Lastly, it was really pleasant to see a programming session presented by a woman.

Drawbacks:

• Several lectures you want to attend will be scheduled at the same time. The abstracts are not long enough to help you decide which session would be the most beneficial for you.
• Multi-speaker sessions are more dynamic, but are generally quite confused. They are not as well planned as single speaker sessions.

Advice:

• Go to ECTS, play some games and have fun!
• Try to know which session you want to attend in advance.
• Meet insiders, they are very smart people.
• Go to the party for free beer and try to beat famous developers on the final quiz session. (I am proud to have been able beat some of them )
• Observe and record every frame from the place.
• Check to see if companies give extra lectures. In my case, the day after the main session, Intel invited any GDCE attendee to a full day lecture on optimizing code for Intel Platform. I learned a lot about specific architecture like Hyper-Threading and SSE2 which I have already used since the GDCE.

To all people from IGDA: Thank you very much, I really appreciated and enjoyed my GDCE journey!