Bit of a delay in the reporting… caused not so much by the fantastic time that I was having, as by the gradual worsening of my flu :(

The hilight of these days for me was the “Best Practices” session by Grady Booch. I’d like to see more sessions like this at GDC - from mainstream computer science experts rather than just from games specialists.

Other interesting sessions included the next-generation animation panel, “crowds in a polygon soup”, and a session on how the God Of War programmers tried to arrange things so that they could spend the last month of the project on the beach! I’d recommend looking up the slides for these if you missed them.

Overall, I think I’d only give the conference a 3/5 mark. There were a few interesting sessions, but I didn’t feel that it was brilliant from the programmers perspective. The best sessions were about techniques - whether high-level planning, medium-level algorithms, or low-level implementations. These sessions explained how the authors had gone about doing something, and hence how we could do the same thing. Unfortunately, there were a few too many sessions which just told us what someone else had done, without explaining how/why, or in a context which wasn’t very useful for anyone else.

GDC: Day 3

Another day, another bagel… actually, I only remember the end of the day vaguely… something about a Sony party… I’m seeing lots of vodka…

This was the first day of the conference proper and the expo - all of a sudden the halls were swamped with people.

I got to a few good sessions - mostly pretty tecchy. C++ on Next Gen Consoles from Pete Isensee was quite useful - there wasn’t much that I hadn’t heard already but it’s good to have one’s assumptions confirmed. Phil Harrison gave a good speech (but then I would say that) - overall I thought that the strategy he described sounded pretty sensible. Some of the PS3 demos looked good, although some were a bit pants. I also went to a good Animation panel presented by some big-wigs in the field. Quite a bit of the detail went over my head, but they showed some great techniques and I think I got the key bits :)

For some bizarre reason, most of the next-gen coding sessions (the ones that everyone wants to attend) seemed to have been located in the smallest rooms, so were absolutely heaving. This is bloody frustrating, and meant that I missed some of the stuff that would have been most useful. Grrr… whoever did the room allocation this year should be shot.

Still battling this bloody cold. Not sure if the excessive vodka consumption has killed it, or just preserved it for a day or two.

Top fives for the day:

• spirit measures at the Sony party: 5/5
• phil’s keynote and Sony’s strategy: 4/5
• conference organisation: 1/5

I attended the OpenGL ES tutorial today, which was pretty tedious. To be fair, I’m no graphics programmer so there were parts that I might have got more out of had I understood what they were talking about. That doesn’t really excuse the fact that these guys weren’t great speakers, and that they were mostly giving dry facts that I could read directly from the slides, as opposed to an insightful commentary on the issues around the slides.

I was also suffering badly from a combination of jet-lag and a cold, which probably didn’t help. Unfortunately Sony have plonked us in a hotel which is a 20 minute bus ride away from the conference. This is no problem in the morning, but the ability to nip back to the room for a quick hour of sleep in the middle of the day would have been invaluable today. If you’re coming to GDC from Europe next year, I’d strongly advise that you find yourself a hotel within easy walking distance of the convention centre!

On the positive side, I managed to meet up with Kevin Marks and Maf Vosburgh in the evening (both fellow MMC alumni). We had a few beers and talked over old times, then Maf took me off for a tour of the humungous Google campus where he works. Judging by the size of the canteen, they really are talking over the world ;)

Top fives for the day:

• breakfast at the hotel: 4/5 (mmm… pancakes…)
• lunch at gdc: 1/5 (a sandwich and a packet of crisps? I long for the halcyon days of WWDC circa 1994!)
• dinner at Google: 4/5 (mmm… burritos…)
• San Jose weather: 2/5 (feels more like Manchester to me)
• OpenGL ES geek factor: 5/5 (nuff said)

Hmm, well it seems that the gods are indeed not smiling on me. I got back to the hotel to discover my door ajar, and some stuff missing. Only a book and magazine as far as I can work out, but still somewhat unnerving. Oh yeah, and I’ve got a bloody cold - no boozy parties for me today. Bastard.

Other than that, I had a good day. I went to a day long tutorial on engineering issues for online gaming, which on the face of it isn’t that relevant to what I’m doing. I was worried that it would be a bit dry, and overly technical, but it turned out to be five excellent speakers, all with interesting stuff to say, and focussed on quite high level issues of planning, organisation, management etc. Very useful stuff, and a lot of it was quite applicable to next-gen development even if you’re not making an MMO game.

Marks out of five for the conference so far:

• goody bag: 1/5 (two juggling balls? what the hell is the use of that?)
• sessions: 5/5 (people who can talk to humans, what a relief)
• food: 3/5 (more than one choice for veggies would be nice)
• hotel: 1/5 (what’s mine is yours)

Top quotes so far:

“I like a good bitch… erm, no hang on, that came out wrong” - me, after ranting for a while.

“Johnny has a nice pink one” - Dave.

This week I’m lucky enough to be attending the GDC Conference in San José. In a wild burst of enthusiasm, I thought that it might be a good idea to post some reports here as it goes along. It remains to be seen how long this lasts…

Day 0:

If one believed in omens, then to start my trip, at 7am in London, by dropping my mobile phone into the bath might have seemed to be a bad one. Luckily I’m made of sterner stuff, and anyway the phone seemed to be ok… until I was on the move and it was too late to do anything about it. Arse!

Hopefully, that was my big bit of bad luck for the week. The rest of the trip was pretty painless - a few minor delays, but we got to the hotel eventually, had a few beers, and hit the sack for some much-needed sleep. Unfortunately Dave wasn’t so lucky - losing his wallet in the cab on the way to the hotel! Double-arse, with knobs on…

It’s 7am again now and I’m about to venture out to the convention centre for the first time. Further reports to follow (they might even have something about GDC in them).