Buzz and Twitter and Reader, oh my

I write more often on Buzz/Twitter, and not so much here these days.

Follow Me on Buzz for more frequent short posts. Twitter and RSS Feed available too if you don't use Buzz.

Follow me on Reader to see links and RSS posts I share.

GDC 2010 - What to attend?

Time for Game Developers Conference! I'm attending sessions, which I haven't done for years when working the show. If you have any session suggestions, please comment! Here are the GDC sessions that look interesting to me so far.

I'll probably post notes from GDC to Scattered Pixels, we'll see if I have time for a post conference report here... ;)

Working on Chrome OS at Google

Many have been curious what I'll be working on at Google, including myself for a while. Google is interesting in that you are not allocated to a team until just before your first day. You accept the job because you're a good fit for Google in general, not just one team.

I'm going to work on Chrome OS. There's a lot to do for the initial launch, but long term my goal is to help make it a great platform for rich graphical apps and games too.

Whoa, you say, I thought you worked on high performance games? Yes, high performance 3D games will be running inside browsers, with security and performance delivered via Native Client.

New Blog: Scattered Pixels

I put effort into posts to Beautiful Pixels. I hope you've liked what you've seen the last few years.

I've started a shadow blog called Scattered Pixels, for random thoughts, images, links. If you'd like more frequent updates from me that are less filtered, subscribe to both.

Subscribe in a reader to:
Beautiful Pixels
Scattered Pixels

And, maybe to comments:
Beautiful Comments
Scattered Comments

Vincent goes to Google

Taking a short break, then starting at Google in February.

GDC 2009 - My Overview

Gamebryo Lightspeed consumed nearly all my GDC hours. I was slammed with setup, demos, client meetings, partner tech meetings, and selling on the show floor 16 hours a day all week. ;) Friday 11pm when I thought I was finally free, I was pulled into a group of Japanese developers to pitch some more.

Other things I did see:

• OnLive - cloud computing video games delivered via low-latency live video/audio feed. They've got a little hardware box to connect to your TV. AMD has made some vaporware news on this topic too. I'm not certain OnLive will make it, and get publishers to sign on etc... but I am certain that we'll see this technology eventually. More likely that it will stick vs:
• Stereo - NVIDIA has been pushing it, Sony had some R&D passive displays and games with stereo, and some other vendors have contacted me about it too. A nice suit from a market research firm interviewed me on the topic... just about everyone except users and game makers seem keen on this. I'll put my money down that it's a short term flop of a gimmick.
• Engines - So many engine companies... alpha sort: BigWorld, Blade3D, C4, Crytek, Evolution, Gamebryo LightSpeed, Hero, Infernal, Project Offset, Source, Torque, Unity, Unreal, Vicious, Virtools, and some not-yet-announced engines walking the show floor. Somehow I don't think they're all going to make it...
  ... If you checked some out - drop a comment and let me know what you thought.
• Tools - A few different "platform" companies have shown some very nice tools for developers in the works. NDA blocks me, but the good news is that game development on increasingly complex machines will be a tad easier.
  

Mark DeLoura's Game Engine Survey

Mark DeLoura has published results from a Game Engine Survey (part1, part2). Well worth a read for any game developer.

I’m pleased to see that developers are using engines!

55% of the responders stated that they are using a middleware game engine on their current project.

Also, many are using Gamebryo:

39% are using Unreal, and 22% are using Gamebryo, with other engines landing significantly smaller percentages.

Gamebryo 2.6 has been on the market since last fall, and stacks up nicely to the needs developers are expressing: They want tech that works for any genre, Source code, Easy integrations with other middleware, Multi-threading, On target viewers, stand along editors, solid documentation, and real support.

At GDC we’ll be unveiling Gamebryo LightSpeed. (Some press coverage has already gone out.) Looks like we’re on the money with our major new features and tools. Mark’s survey shows developers are demanding tools for rapid prototyping and rapid iteration. We’re delivering just that with LightSpeed, and doing it with the same technology that clients can use all the way to gold master.

Interesting times. I’m glad to have made the transition from internal tech at game studios to a tech company supporting hundreds of games. The industry has rounded the bend on adopting this business model, and from an engineer’s point of view it just makes me feel good to have things built more efficiently.

The Escapist Show coveres the Triangle Global Game Jam

The Triangle site of the global game jam was covered by The Escapist Show:



After the "48 hours later" montage, all games shown were developed by our game jam group.

Triangle Game Conference - Confirmed Speaker

I'm a confirmed speaker for the Triangle Game Conference, April 29 and 30, 2009. There's a good line up of presenters, from companies including:

• Crytek
• Destineer
• Emergent Game Technologies
• Epic
• Insomniac
• Red Storm
• Vicious Cycle
• Virtual Heroes

(Are you surprised to learn that only one of these companies isn't local to the Triangle?)

dAb 3D Painting Research Licensed

[Edit 2010-03-15: A new project at Microsoft has been announced that looks a lot like dAb, Gustav]

In 2000 I collaborated with Bill Baxter on a 3D paint brush system that was presented at Siggraph 2001. Less talk, more video:


dAb: Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes (Siggraph01)

Bill continued the line of research for his PhD, and you can see some great improvements to the paint model and brush simulation:


IMPaSTo: A Realistic Model for Paint (NPAR04)


A Versatile Interactive 3D Brush Model (PG2004)

Over the years, we've had a few large companies inquire about licensing the research. I'm excited to say that we've closed a package deal for several systems! Perhaps you'll see this technology in consumer applications in a few years.

For more details, visit the dAb webpage.

Global Game Jam: Robot Love

The Global Game Jam weekend is over, and I'm excited to say I got to help out on Robot Love:

High Resolution Version available on youtube website.

The theme was, "As Long as We Have Each Other we'll never run out of Problems..."

Gameplay: A 2 player co-op game with a simple gimmick, you need to stand next to the other player to reload! Two robots are escaping their factory, chased by mobs of other zombie robots.

Credits:

• Demond Rogers (Epic) did an awesome job at the character animations.
• Jason Connell (Red Storm) built the 2.5D environment.
• Adrienne Walker (Emergent) was ninja lead programmer.
• Harrison Moore did sound and UI.
• Will McGuire coded and placed enemies and props in the level.
• Mike Daly (Emergent) chipped in on level file format and robot AI.
• Vincent Scheib (Emergent) helped with collision, a bit of gameplay, and gamestate/screens.

Download it!

Global Game Jam: Kicking off the Triangle

The first global game jam has been kicked off! Although I can't participate all weekend, I did help get things started at the local triangle game jam. You can check in on them with this ustream:



Icarus studios is being an excellent host, setting us up in their motion capture room and having wired up a LAN for us. We've got just under 20 participants, with 4 games in development (brainstorm names: Breeder, Tethered, Robot Swarm, Buttons and Mindy).

A Gamebryo Tower Defense Game: Defense Grid The Awakening

Happy holidays! I have a gift to give away, one free copy of Defense Grid: The Awakening. It is a Tower Defense game built with Gamebryo, just released on Steam. [Update: Deokhee Lee takes it!]

Here's a youtube video-interview that previews the gameplay nicely:

HD Video

If you're keen on the free copy, drop me an email at vincent.scheib at the emergent.net. [Update: Deokhee Lee takes it!] If you miss out, you can pick it up for $20. If you're feeling grinchy, there's always the free flash Desktop Tower Defense... but... lacking the richness.

Fallout 3 and Game Engine Overview

Fallout 3 has shipped, with 90+ review scores on xbox 360, ps3, and PC respectively. Major kudos to Bethesda. (Fallout uses Gamebryo)

Also, Gamasutra has an excellent feature article with overviews of 12 Game Engines, including:

• Bigworld: Bigworld
• CryTek: CryEngine 2
• Emergent: Gamebryo
  
• Epic: Unreal 3
• GarageGames: Torque
• id: iDTech 5
• Qubesoft: Q2
• Simutronics: Hero Engine
• Trinigy: Vision Engine
• Valve: Source
• Vicious Cycle: Vicious Engine
  
  

Heading to Siggraph 2008

Siggraph 2008 is here! I'm not ready!

Monday, I'll be presenting. If you missed my Gamefest presentation on Parallel Rendering with DirectX 9, now's your chance. ;)

• Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games: Part l & Part2
  - Loads of excellent presentations for game developers
  - I'll be presenting at ~11:30
  - Monday, 8:30 am - 12:15 pm, 3:45 pm - 5:30 pm
  

I'll be focusing a lot on the future of game systems.... Larrabee is making waves there, but so are others. Here are some events I'm prioritizing:

• Parallelism Papers
  - Larrabee paper is there
  - Tuesday, 10:30 am - 12:15 pm
• Beyond Programmable Shading class: Fundamentals & In Action
  - Excellent topics relevant for future systems such as Larrabee ... (and other unannounced systems)
  - Thursday, 8:30 am - 12:15 pm, 1:45 - 5:30 pm

I wanted to review plenty of papers before going, but I just didn't get time. So, of course I'll hit

• Fast-Forward Technical Papers Preview
  - Monday, 6 - 8 pm

What are your must see sessions?

Podcasts, and Sharks with frickin' laser beams!

Sharks have invaded the office... There is a battle between product management and engineering over who can build the best shark with frickin' laser beams. (Spoiler: engineering wins, with real lasers.) The latest challenge includes irritating the turtles in the fountain with a self propelled shark... we'll see if joat can pull it off!

And, podcasts!.. Adam has kicked off an official-un-official Emergent podcast. ;) He and Dan Amerson ramble away about Gamebryo 2.5.

E3 2008 - Xbox 360

E3... blah blah, some things that jumped out for me from the Microsoft news:

• Netflix on 360 - This has been speculated on for some time, but it's great to get the official word. It seems clear to me that the future of entertainment delivery will be along the lines of IP cable, streaming movies, etc. The next few years we'ss see the battle between the console providers, cable companies, probably phone companies as well.
• Install to HD - A great feature, since the 360 is so loud while spinning a disk. Most games are doing this to some extent under the hood anyway, so why not just copy the whole thing? Sadly, you still need the disk in to boot... I'm looking forward to the disk just being a high bandwidth way to download, and then tossing it.

Google's Lively

Google has launched Lively, a virtual space for chatting... and... hanging out.

Several blogs mention that Lively uses Gamebryo: e.g. Gamasutra & Virtual Worlds News

I've put up a room here, and embeded it here:

Johan Andersson's keynote at Graphics Hardware

Johan Andersson's slides were recently posted for his keynote The Intersection of Game Engines and GPUs - Current & Future at Graphics Hardware (other presentations there too...). I've looked over several of Johan's presentations in recent years, and am a big fan. This presentation covers many interesting topics, though is light on details:

• Most screen shots and examples are from Bad Company
  
• Shader node editor
• Rendering jobs, task decomposition for concurrency
• Command buffers used on 360, PS3, but DX10 is a problem
• - He also mentions an approach I'll be presenting on ind detail at Gamefest 2008 - software command buffers - with the con of "Difficult to update dynamic resources efficiently in parallel due to API", quite true
• Software rasterization for occlusion testing
• - low rez floating point buffer, renders 100 meters of low-poly occluder meshes, limited to a max of 10,000 verts. Use on all platforms
• Prefer bumpmaps to normal maps - better compression - sample to normals in shader
• Virtual textures
• Raytracing - cites Mirrors Edge - urban environments with reflections
• DOF implemented in CUDA

Virtual Training, games aren't just for fun

The ESA is reporting that 70% of major businesses are using game technology. Their survey (150 major companies polled) doesn't convince me that gaming tech is used in the working masses yet, but clearly it has it's place in large corporations such as Hilton, IBM, Canon, &c...

“Businesses across the spectrum, from automobile manufacturers to financial service providers, are utilizing entertainment software to help educate their employees to better serve their customers and improve their bottom lines,” said Michael D. Gallagher, CEO of the ESA, the U.S. association representing computer and video game publishers. “Interactive technology is a valuable tool in workforce development and this study underscores the fact that video games have become a mass medium helping Americans live, work and of course play.”

The survey indicated benefits of:

• a reduction in costs;
• more efficient and faster training;
• the ability to apply consistent training across all parts of an organization;
• the ease of measuring employee participation; and,
• better information retention.

Well, Gamebryo is game tech, how widely is it being used? Vis/Sim customers include:

• BAE Systems
• Breakaway Games
• Chi Systems
• Cubic Defense Systems
• Electronic Warfare Associates
• Engineering & Computer Simulation
• General Dynamics
• Honeywell
• Muzzylane
• Navteq / Mobility
• RTI International
• STS International
• Syandus
• Techrizon
• Total Immersion
• USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)
• Washington Hospital Center

So... how long until McDonalds employees learn their job tasks by training in Virtual McDonalds Camp?

--
P.S. Thanks Phaedra for pointing this out.
P.S.S. baxissimo, nice to see you're finally reading RSS... now... of the countless people I've given that advice... who lives in Tokyo... hmm....