FUUU! i hate the random folk. I played Team objective today. There was a chance to get in both Stockpile matches the achievement. But no... I'll never get you. NEVER!
Maybe some of you guys are interested into game development. There will be 4 presentation about the Tech of Reach by the Bungieguys at this year GDC:
The Animation of HALO REACH: Raising the Bar
Speaker/s: Joe Spataro (Bungie) and Tam Armstrong (Bungie)
Day / Time / Location: TBD
Track / Format: Visual Arts , Production / Lecture
Description: The animation quality bar for HALO: REACH was much higher than HALO 3 and needed to maintain the feel of a HALO game. We discuss the challenges we overcame and the concessions we made to ship on time and on budget with better quality.
Takeaway: The attendee will gain perspective on the production, animation, design, and engineering techniques we employed to overcome the challenges of shipping animation in our last HALO game. They will also gain insight into general techniques that can improve any animation pipeline.
Intended Audience: Attendees who are interested in animation, and animation engineering, or who are simply interested in hearing about the challenges related to these disciplines that we faced during the production of HALO: REACH are our target audience. No prerequisite knowledge is required.
I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of HALO: REACH
Speaker/s: David Aldridge (Bungie LLC)
Day / Time / Location: TBD
Track / Format: Programming / Lecture
Description: Gameplay networking is easy once you have a socket open! Find out all the things that are wrong with that statement in this gripping tale of the perilous minefield that lies between sockets and game code. This talk describes in detail the patterns and processes that have allowed Bungie to repeatedly set new standards for gameplay networking quality. Come see how we develop competitive game mechanics that are fun over the internet, learn what kinds of network introspection tools you need to build into your next online game, and marvel at the low-tech way we measure lag.
Takeaway: Attendees will learn to recognize opportunities for optimization and lag compensation in their own gameplay networking logic, and will be familiar with the techniques Bungie uses to build great online action games, which can be applied to optimize any networking architecture. Attendees will never again refer to game networking as sockets programming.
Intended Audience: Aspiring or current engineers and designers on titles that include online gameplay. Some game development experience is recommended, but not required. There will be no math or code.
HALO: REACH Effects Tech
Speaker/s: Chris Tchou (Bungie LLC)
Day / Time / Location: TBD
Track / Format: Programming , Visual Arts / Lecture
Description: The goal of effects in HALO: REACH was to provide a more atmospheric, dense and visceral experience. We found a number of graphical techniques to be particularly useful and effective. A greater density of small transient particles was handled by a custom colliding particle system run entirely on the GPU. This system handled 24,000 colliding particles in the shipping game in less than 0.3 ms per frame. A greater presence of atmospheric and smoke effects was enabled through a low-res transparent rendering system that could effectively sort with high-res transparents through dynamic layer grouping. Finally, the depth buffer proved to be an effective way to cheaply create the illusion of world interaction on a number of effects, most prominently used in character shields, boundary markers and electrical effects. Lots of video and details provided!
Takeaway: Attendees will learn some practical, effective and cheap methods for enhancing effects on the Xbox 360 platform, including cheap colliding GPU particles, low-res sorted transparents and depth-sourced shading effects.
Intended Audience: This presentation is geared primarily towards graphics engineers and technical artists. Although there is something for everyone, full understanding of some parts may require knowledge of rendering and shading techniques.
Automated Level of Detail Generation for HALO: REACH
Speaker/s: Xi Wang (Bungie LLC)
Day / Time / Location: TBD
Track / Format: Programming , Visual Arts / Lecture
Description: This presentation introduces the LoD system created for HALO: REACH. The basic idea is to use a low-res vertex-shaded model to render far away objects. It starts with a voxel-based geometry decimation which can robustly simplify the geometry of game objects. We also designed a BRDF-fitting module, which can fit the many complicated material models used in our game to a simplified general material model. Both geometry and material simplification are farm-based. It is a fully automated LoD pipeline for content production, which massively reduced the workload of the content team, and boosted runtime performance significantly.
Takeaway: Attendees will learn some practical algorithms and ideas about LoD, like robust mesh decimation and an automatic shader/material simplification method. They can incorporate those techniques into their own LoD solutions. Also, the overall design of the farm pipeline will provide some general knowledge about how to design an automated LoD system to make it work with the real game production pipeline.
Intended Audience: Graphics engineers, tool engineers and tech artistes.
And Seth Gibson from 343 will be part of a presentation, too:
Technical Artist Boot Camp: Lessons in How to Create and Be an Effective TA
Speaker/s: Scott Goffman (Blizzard), Steve Theodore (Undead Labs), Adam Pletcher (Volition/THQ), Keith Self-Ballard (Volition, Inc.), Jeff Hanna (Volition, Inc), Bryan Moss (THQ Digital Phoenix), Bronwen Grimes (Valve), Rob Galanakis (Bioware) and Seth Gibson (343)
Day / Time / Location: Tuesday 10:00- 6:00
Track / Format: Visual Arts , Programming / Tutorial
Description: Over the past decade Technical Art has become an increasingly important discipline in game development. The number of TAs in the industry has grown tremendously and every year they take on more responsibilities, devise new innovative solutions to problems, and create bigger and more powerful tools. Still, though, most Technical Artists are home grown. Many are transplants from other disciplines. While some are coming in to the industry with specific TA educations most are not. This means that the skill sets between TAs are often quite varied. The self-invented TA culture makes it difficult for studios without TAs to truly see the benefit. Hard for studios with TAs to expand their ranks by hiring great candidates, and frustrating for technical artists themselves as their valued skillset at one company may be worth nothing at another.
To help the alleviate this problem well known and well respected Technical Artists from across the industry would like to invite you to sit with them for a day and learn their views on what it takes to be an effective TA. Their hope is that by exposing academia, studio management, and displaced industry professionals to Technical Art that they will foster discussion and expand educational and professional boundaries.
Topics for the day will include: How a technical art discipline can expand and enhance the both the artist and programmer culture at a studio. What different types of programming technologies are used by technical artists How to extend content creation applications with powerful scripts How to to visualize, create, and maintain art creation pipelines How database knowledge can empower TAs to make tools and pipelines that are self policing and expose a wealth of data that can be invested new workflows and methodologies. Shader creation techniques that can enhance visuals without impacting rendering performance How TAs can push the visual limits of a game by using known art techniques in unconventional ways.
