GDC Europe, Köln 2009
A few months back I decided to try GDC again and got myself a place as a volunteer over at the European conference in Köln. So there I went, bags packed and leaving to Deutschland, hoping to have a good time, meet interesting people and drink great beer (which is pretty much what happened).
I really enjoyed my time there; it’s always great to meet new people from all walks of life yet sharing the love for games (or programming, in some cases). I’d like to give out a big thanks to all my colleagues from staff, the guys over at games academy, the cool people from the Intel booth, binary madness and everybody else I might have forgotten to mention.
So onto the content, here’s a brief highlight of all the sessions and keynotes I got a chance to check out (I’ll go further in detail on later posts).
Kicked off the Conference with Bioware’s Dorian Kieken ‘What Is a Living Plan and How Can We Achieve It?’ where their planning strategies really impressed me (in a good way), followed by Crytek boss Cevat Yerli on ‘The future of Gaming Graphics’ with a peek at the kind of technology they were betting on. Later that day a quick talk about SIMD programming with Larrabee and one of my favourite keynotes of the show with the guys from Remedy about the company, the decisions they made and how it eventually affected them. Unfortunately, I missed the last session (I really wanted to see that one) about designing Flower.
Working next day, I missed the morning (still the only thing interesting keynote I might have missed was the CCP keynote), and at the afternoon I got the chance to see another Intel session about their performance analyzer (neat stuff) and then a pretty big and controversial keynote from David Cage (Quantic Dream).
The last day of the event I ended up working a lot less than expected so (yay) I got to see a bit more stuff. Started the day off with Michal Drobot from Reality Pump talking about ‘Quadtree Displacement Mapping with Height Blending: Practical Detailed Multilayer Surface Rendering’ (phew, that’s a mouth full). I loved this session, very meaty and very well prepared… a real treat. By this time I switched my attention to the Gamescom next door (more on that later) and missed Molyneux session on Choice (aka. Fable 3) though that really didn’t bother me. Ended the conference with only a few remnants listening to Kees van Kooten about ‘Efficient PCF Shadow Map Filtering’, a bit too specific in my opinion but still quite interesting (a sort of performance compression applied to shadow map filtering).
So, now that the overview is over, we’re onto:
Day 0
I actually arrived a day earlier (Saturday, day -1?) to Köln and spent most of my day enjoying what the city has to offer. Next Sunday (day 0) I went to scout the conference grounds at the Koelnmesse a bit early, later I was escorted to the registration area where all the volunteers were and after a few minutes of chatting we moved over to the EuropaSaal room for briefing and work assignments, after that was over on we went for the Speakers’ Welcome Reception (free beer!) over at ‘Haxenhouse’ by the river.
That’s it for the introduction, I’ll be posting the rest of the conference in detail in a few days.
See you then!
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