GDC2011 Presentation: HTML5 and Other Modern Browser Game Tech

HTML5 and Other Modern Browser Game Tech

GDC 2011 Report

Some of my observations from GDC 2011:

I've been mispronouncing Bokeh for years, and posted before about how there's a lot of room for improvement vs what's common on PS3 and Xbox 360. Well, it's all the rage these days. E.g. check out the Unreal demo and stills. Blur alone was a topic AMD discussed on DX11 day, discussing perf and memory optimizations of the heat distribution method from Kass et al at Pixar.

Tessellation and Displacement Mapping were put to good use in a variety of places too, e.g. terrain in Battlefield 3, character morph in Unreal demo.

On a much different note, I spent most of the rest of my sessions in design and rant topics. Much of that is hard to summarize, but here are some bits:

Trip Hawkins quote from the Social Rant: "Think more about the browser. The browser will set you free." after he described challenges Nintendo, Apple, etc have presented for game developers in the form of license agreements.

In general I was disappointed by the Social Game Devs Rant back, in that no strong defense was made for social games. Much of what was discussed was the same anti slot machine techniques we've already heard.

The Experimental Game Design session had two games with recursion build in. One spatially, e.g. the level had a model of the level in it, and you can manipulate objects from the different scales. The other “inside a star filled sky” with the player, enemies, and power ups all agents but also levels that can be entered and ascended out of.

[update] I forgot to mention user generated content. Andy Schatz (Pocketwatch Games / Monaco) discussed it and pointed out his site: http://hellodotdotdotgoodbye.com/ (cool, simple idea I keep being drawn back to) and others http://infiniteblank.com/, http://playpen.farbs.org.

I've not been keen on the 3D wave in cinema, TVs or games. So, I thought I'd better take a good look at the Nintendo 3DS which is the best option I've seen yet. Autostereoscopic works nicely in a personal device like a hand held, and I can't stand glasses. The 3DS works well if it’s close to your face, not as well at my comfortable playing distance ~1.5 ft. Was very cool to see, but I’m concerned about eye strain. I played a few demos looking for any where the stereo effect really helped them. But none really stood out, and were all just as nice to play with the effect turned off. But, the always on wireless feature to exchange data between games seemed cool.

Google (I work there on Chrome) had a stronger presence than previous years with 2 tutorial days, booth, and some additional appearances. I gave a talk "HTML5 and Other Modern Browser Game Tech" (slides up soon, promise) which was received well.

I got a chance to meet up with friends, including the guys at Activate 3D, who had a cool demo running on Kinect. Being able to jump, swing on ropes, zip lines, monkey bars, etc, with video motion capture is pretty cool. They need to update their website's video, they had a nice rooftop race demo running.

David Jaffe pointed out that Consoles are way too slow to resume playing your game -- why can my DS pop back instantly and my plugged into the wall console takes minutes.

And finally, I'm inspired to do more design work and game Jams. Especially Stone Librande's talk 15 Games in 15 years, where he described creating games for himself and children was superb. Build fun in your life.

Get Ready for GDC 2011!

Here comes GDC!

I'm presenting at GDC this year on HTML5 and Other Modern Browser Game Tech. Still busy getting slides ready, I've a lot of tech I want to cover... WebGL, canvas 2d, svg, web sockets, storage, audio, Native Client, etc. Whew. Well, it deserves a bit logo off on the right. ;)

Google's going to make a good showing this year. Check out our GDC Agenda.

Here's a list of sessions that caught my eye when I skimmed through. Did I miss any awesome session? Let me know in comments. ;)

(you can add it to your own calendar view by putting bdsmf82ejdng803qok5mlmsn4s@group.calendar.google.com into your "other calendars")

See you there.

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.

One Year at Google

I've been at Google one year.

A lot has happened, but the vision stays the same. I and others are working on improving tech to support great applications on the web. Better performance, use of GPUs, 3D, and much more (audio, connectivity, device access, monetization, discovery, ...).

Google continues to build it's engagement with game developers. We're already engaging on multiple platforms (Android, Chrome, Google TV) and offering useful services (YouTube, AppEngine, Analytics, Ads) and building out great tech.

We've also continued hiring great game developers, and I'm humbled every day by the ones I'm working with. (e.g. people keep doing double takes that Bill Budge is working a few cubes down.) Ian Lewis has hit his stride and is doing a great job driving Game Developer Relations (btw: hiring) (and, well, all of Google is hiring really, even back in the Research Triangle NC, drop me a line if you'd like help applying).

Chrome GPU team is my home, though I'm still excited about Chrome OS where I started. There's a lot of core infrastructure for all GPU features, some of which are starting to ship, like WebGL.

20% time is a great perk at Google. Not everyone uses it, but I take a lot of it to help Game Developer Relations out and also do some game experiments.

Google was the hardest job I've joined yet, though. There's so much to learn, so much great tech and products, tons of fascinating things to look into, and so many rather smart folk. I love the culture, the positive "do the right thing" attitude, and that there are engineers all the way to the top. I'm excited for year 2. ;)

Tools of a Day

I use these tools daily:

• Chrome
• Profiles (I run multiple, work/personal/spouse with --user-data-dir="C:\example")
• Themes (Easly tell profiles apart) e.g. A B C
• Chrome to Phone
• Gmail
• Google Chat with AIM linked
• Buzz (Easiest for quick public posts, but much richer than Twitter, Great for private posts)
• Google Docs (I'm so loving the cloud - any machine, same time, always auto saved, revision history, on my phone, sharable)
• Google Reader
• Google Latitude (Friend at work yet? What's the wife up to?)
• Google Listen (podcasts)
• Google Maps
• Delicious.com
• Git (source control, easy local branches)
• Beyond Compare (file and folder comparison + FTP)
• Slick Edit (Linux)
• Notepad++
• Visual Studio
• Cygwin
• Process Explorer
• Mixapp.com (Music, shared with friends, think Pandora you can control + others)
• Bike ;) the commute is the only exercise I get.

How about you, anything interesting?

How to Share an Email Address in Gmail

My wife and I each have our own email addresses. Common, though she is irked by a few friends who don't. They can only be emailed by sending to the joint "family" email, often actually just the husband's name. Trust issues? Anyway...

Having a joint account is handy now and then. I want one. They're good for things like that real estate agent who just can't figure out "reply all", or that web site that only allows one email address to be entered you both want to track.

Bad news, I didn't find a perfect answer. Good news, I found one good enough... only you and your significant other can mess it up, and only slightly:

Set up a new gmail account, have it forward to each of you. Set up your gmail account to be able to send as the joint account when you choose.

Walk through:

• Create a new gmail account wife.and.i@gmail.com by going to gmail when you're not logged in. (or use an incognito window in chrome)
• In Settings/Forwarding, add forwarding addresses for your existing accounts, wife@gmail.com and me@gmail.com
• In Settings/Filters, add a filter to match everything. This is a tad tricky, you can't just use From: *. So, create a filter that Doesn't have: some_long_random_string_sldkfjslkdjfsdfkjsdf and then select one account to forward to. Repeat, creating a new filter, for the second account.
• Configure your personal account (me@gmail.com, repeat for wife@gmail.com) to be able to send and reply from the joint account.
• in Settings/Accounts in the "Send mail as:" section, add wife.and.i@gmail.com
• On the same page, select "Reply from the same address the message was sent to"

It works: 

• Easily give the shared email address wife.and.i@gmail.com to anyone and you'll both receive the emails in your personal accounts without needing to ever log into wife.and.i@gmail.com again.
• Replying to an email sent to the joint account will "just work" and appear to come from the joint account. (But, don't forget to CC your significant other if you want them to see your reply)
• Writing a new email as if it came from the joint account is easy too:
• Compose a new message, above the To: is the From: address, and you can change it to the joint account.
• (But, don't forget to CC your significant other if you want them to see your reply)

What's tedious is that you must remember to CC your other every time. Now, we're all high and mighty about external people who can't remember to reply-all, so we should be able to remember to CC everyone each time, right? Still... tedious. If you forget, at least the reply from the external people will go back to both of you.

Here are the other things I tried:

• Create an outgoing filter to automatically forward to your significant other's account?
• Nope, you can filter outgoing email (adding labels, say), but you can't forward them.
• Create an outgoing filter to label and remind you that you forgot to CC?
• Nope, you can add a label, but not send it to the inbox also or mark it unread, so no way to get attention.
• Create a group on googlegroups.com?
• Nope, you can send and reply as the shared email, but you must manually CC your significant other's account each time. The group account doesn't appear in a reply all because you're sending as that account. If you're not sending as that account it works, yay, but then you're sending as just you, and replies will not go to the joint account.

Have a better solution? Lemme have it in the comments!