What inspires you?

The Game Developer's Conference is well under way. Many are participating in the "Destroy all Developers Challange" while other take the time to sit in on the many available tutorial session during the past two days. Myself, well I try to stay motivated.

Monday began with a tutorial on "Core Shader Algorithms and Techniques," which covered many techniques in the lattest edition of ShaderX books. The most memroblewas a technique that covered by Carsten Dachsbacher from University of Stuttgart who spoke about a new technique for generating texture maps. Instead of using texture atlases he suggested an idea called "TileTrees," a data-structure that generates 2D tiles around the surface of a model.

Later that night, I met up with Sean Hathaway, James Leonis (http://virus2566.blogspot.com/), and Mike Arlington (www.deflesca.com); where I had been introduced to this year's scholarship recipients. I got to meet some fascinating people:

- Andrew Armstrong - a student from England who is this year's Eric Dybsand AI Scholarship recipient. Check out his website at http://www.aarmstrong.org/
- Jordi Fine - Jordi is an inspiring Game Designer with some real works under his belt. Definetly check him out at http://www.jordifine.com/
- Enrique Saul Gonzalez - Will be attending Tokyo University, with a goal of producing educational games for the Japanese.
- Andrew Sorkin - Sound design and composition, easily stands out as one of the few people I get to meet interested in audio for games. Check him out at http://sorkinsound.com/
- Tatyana Dyshlova - She's currently attending Brown University, with the intension of working with hardware and production.
- Michael Lee - Michael just like myself is last year's Eric Dybsand scholarship recipient. After catching up, he's apparently doing very well with his own company at http://ludoko.com
- Silvia Lindtner - highly talented, she's interested in pursuing sensors in video games and is currently enrolled in University of California. I was especially impressed with her business card, particularly after learning she designed it herself. Her website is equally as impressive at http://www.ics.uci.edu/~lindtner

Phew, that's a rather large list, and I do appolize for anyone I forgot to mention.

The following day (today), I stumbled down 4th street to Mascone center where I set down for my day two tutorial which covered "Physics in Video Games". Although the lecture started off slowly covering most fundementals such as the Euler's method for velocity as well as angular velocity. Squirel was quick to point out some of the pitfalls involved with irregular timesteps and tunneling. The lecture picked up pace after lunch during which I got to speak with Ben Retan (www.benretan.com) who is also a Full Sail student about to graduate. The second half opened up with the Minkowski Differences, a crash course in GJK which absolutly blew me away with it's complexity, and finally wrapped up the tutorial with a talk on constraints.

Overall these past two days have been incredibly exciting and I try to recover my energy tonight and get some more work done on Amoeba Sports, I can not wait to get back and put some of these techniques to work.