Best of GDC 2011 — Talks and Lectures and Cheese*

Just got back from GDC 2011 and had an amazing time.

As always I have come back from GDC feeling inspired. Talking to people at the top of their game, pushing the envelope on game development always starts a fire in me to do the same. At no time do am I more excited about coming into work every day than the weeks after the GDC.

My favorite lectures this year come from the excellent engineering team at Bungie. Their lectures were both interesting and very practical, their engineering team is extremely open with the game development community, which leads to better engineers and better games for everyone, which is only a good thing for our industry.

On to my top 5.

1. Networking the gameplay of Halo: Reach

by David Aldridge of Bungie

http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12126

David took us through his journey of updating and optimizing the network code for Halo: Reach. We got some cool videos of their profiling tools, which allows you to visually inspect any object in the gameworld to see exactly when and how the engine  sends packets over the network. This allowed Bungie to do a ton of fine tuning on a per-object basis. For example, this visualization caused them to notice an anomaly in dropped weapons and they reduced their entire network bandwidth by 10% simply by adjusting the rate at which weapons slid down hills!!

One of the most interesting innovations was the addition of a “lag button” in playtests. They instructed their testers to press this button whenever the game felt laggy. They could then take the replay and fast forward to these points in order to debug the networking. What they found was that players were pressing this anytime something confusing happened to them in the game. If they got killed from behind quickly and the deathcam didnt show the killer, they would press the “I Lagged” button. From this they were able to fix game design issues they had never noticed before. I love this idea and I am definitely stealing it!

Unfortunately, he only spoke briefly about how to predict bullet-based insta-hit weapons which is a really interesting talk I hope he covers in detail at a future GDC. However, there is a great article on how Valve tackled this problem from 2001 available here: http://tinyurl.com/coljwf

2. Halo:Reach Special Effects

by Chris Tchou of Bungie

http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12127

Only 25 minutes long! Yet packed to the brim with awesome stuff. A highly technical lecture that Chris made easily understandable. A particle system that runs completely on the GPU packing basic particle state into a texture. Using the depthbuffer to handle particle collision allowing for completely GPU-based bouncing rains and sparks! 

3. Iterating on a Dynamic Camera System

by Phil Wilkins of Sony Santa Monica

http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12364

Another lecture that just had a ton of practical, useable techniques. Phil took us through the history of the God of War camera from its first iteration in God of War 1 to the final version that shipped in God of War 3. The camera system starts by taking designer placed nodes around the map that are near the action, and blends them together to get a final camera. The combat system then puts in its two cents and modifies the camera to perfectly frame the action taking place in the scene.

Usually defining the rules for a camera system is the easy part, its all the little edge cases and gotchas that really make it difficult, and Phil walks you through several of these edge cases that they ran into, making this talk especially valuable.

Phil’s original lecture is available here: http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd4000-d10/lectures/camera.pdf His updated lecture for God of War3 is not available yet.

4. Forensic Debugging

by Elan Ruskin of Valve

http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12129

This one really opened my eyes to a lot of interesting debugging techniques. Taking us deep into what the compiler actually does with your code, Elan stressed the importance of understanding some basic assembly in order to track what was actually happening in your release executable. At one point the audience gasped when Chris revealed a stack trace in which the callstack was completely corrupted, that the pattern of the corruption formed the letter “A” if you looked at the memory just right, revealing a problem in the font code! Unfortunately, Chris moved a bit too fast for me and left me in the dust a bit. But thankfully, he posted his slides up (http://tinyurl.com/624efkf). This is one of those lectures that I’m going to be spending a lot of time going back through and reading on to try and fully grasp.

And the one that surpised me the most:

5. Industry Lessons Learned

by Cliff Bleszinski of Epic

http://schedule.gdconf.com/session/12352

I didnt know what to expect for this lecture, but it ended up being very entertaining and inspirational. Cliff talks of the idea of a “Power Creative”,  a developer who is highly visible, highly active, and plays a leadership role on their team. He encouraged more companies to nuture and grow their own Power Creatives, and expressed concern that he had never met a developer from Rockstar, despite all their successful games. He also stressed the importance of understanding how to sell, pointing out that every great idea has to be sold first to your teammates, then to your company at large, and then to the public, so it is a very valuable tool to possess even for those of us in the trenches.

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* The cheese sucked