Day 3 - GDC Europe, Köln 2009
The final day of GDC Europe finally came, and with it all the crazy chaos of the first day of Gamescom, just next door. I arrived and reported to my post to find out that the Gamescom organization had taken over one of the balconies and the entrance, sending all the staff to a single side. This caused us to have too many people for the posts available, so they ended up releasing us volunteers except for an occasional need to move something around or pack some printers.
Given this unexpected free time I hopped over to CongressSaal2 to check out a session from Michal Drobot on Quadtree Displacement Mapping with Height Blending (Practical Detailed Multilayer Surface Rendering… reminds me of one of those old ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ titles). Again, this turned out to be a favourite in the conference. The speaker did his homework and provided a very exhaustive, very complete presentation. He should have it up at his website soon (www.drobot.org) and I advise you to check it out, very neat stuff. He started by explaining Displacement Mapping with various implementations, especially parallax and how to use a quadtree structure for more efficient and correct mapping. After that he went on to discuss ambient occlusion, everything from theory, implementation, pitfalls and usual artefacts. Later, a texture blending technique that would take into account the height of each surface to achieve more realistic results, though not very noticeable in a final scene, and more importantly improve efficiency of the displacement mapping techniques. Given all information, complete with implementation, quirks and demos he went on to suggest building a final effect with the given techniques, shaping it to one’s needs. Like I said, meaty…
After that was done with I couldn’t resist the urge to check out the Gamescom and spent most of the day between there and helping out at the entrance. Moving around the booths, everything seemed pretty crazy even knowing it wasn’t even close to the number of visitors it would reach the next couple of days. Spent my time wandering around the booths, taking pictures of little R2D2 over at the ‘Star Wars’ booth, playing some DragonAge and asking for those fun inflatable swords, playing some Mass Effect 2 (yum, Mass Effect 2) and queuing for half an hour to play Diablo 3 (go Wizard!), among other things.
All fun and games… literally.
Meanwhile, Peter Molyneux was giving his session on ‘Choice: The Ultimate Game Mechanic’ which as I understood meant talking about Lionhead’s next game, Fable 3. I didn’t see this session yet from what I gathered, it didn’t seem at all that different from the session he gave back in GDC London ’06, that time revealing details of Fable 2. A lot of talk on the kind of experiments they were performing and ideas they had for the sequel.
Later that afternoon I came back for a last session that caught my eye, this one from Kees van Kooten on Efficient PCF Shadow Map Filtering. The room was almost empty, with everyone lured by the siren call of the Gamescom and away from boring old programmer talk. Like the name said, it was quite specific, regarding a technique used to filter shadow maps (though with other applications, I’m sure). An interesting presentation, it seemed to borrow some ideas from compression and apply them to sampling, reducing the number of lookups needed by manipulating position and scale. This would allow cheaper filtering with minimal to negligible artifacts.
Wrap up
And that’s it. That was the last session of the Game Developers Conference ’09, European Edition. Now all attention would be turned to the Gamescom next door.
Saying my goodbyes and thanking everyone I’d recognize, I ended up that afternoon shaking my fists to the heavens, finding Sony’s booth with a playable ‘God of War 3’ that was shutdown for the day, no more than 10 minutes ago. I was leaving early the next day, no more Gamescom for me. Still, even though this was a somewhat different experience than that of GDC London, it was all great fun. Met interesting people, shared visions, was motivated by young (read: about my age) start-ups with great successful ideas. All this was very empowering.
To anyone who enjoys travelling, meeting new people, getting your foot in the door perhaps (or just orient yourself in the right direction), I absolutely recommend trying to volunteer for one of these conferences.
In the end the balance was a success: I had a great time!
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