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.

Pre-GDC 2008

In the past 72 hours I've slept a total of maybe 10, in small intervals of 2 hours, 3 hours, and that which I wouldn't even consider to be rest during the flight. The cause for all of this is of-course the Game Developer's Conference 2008. I wont waste my breathe on the importance of this event, but that doesn't mean that my school schedule would in any way be lenient towards this once a year phenomenon. Therefore I have spent sleepless nights wrapping up the Gameplay AI for Amoeba Sports (Beta), and as of a few hours ago I would have to say it's been a total success. A week's worth of features, and gameplay mechanics finished in more or less a day and a half.

But I wont get ahead of myself as I am now past exhusted from the flight. From MCO airport we first went North towards Atlanta, during the flight we experienced some technical difficulties where the landing gear on the right wing would not release. The stewairdess did not help the situation as her nervous face was read by every passanger in the five feet radius, who continously kept glaring over my should looking at the wing. When we eventually landed, and my headache subsided, we faced a fifteen minute delay and took off again, this time for what seemed like a six hour long flight, I landed only three hours later (time zones are funny that way).

Oh I almost forgot, I'm not attending alone this year; as Jim Leonis, MFA, and Sean are all joining me, and where supposed to have gotten to San Fransisco an hour before I did. After landing I had quickly unpacked my cell phone and attempted to call them, as we planned to meet up at the airport. After dialing Sean, followed by Jim, and followed by Mike; I found each one of their cell phones turned off (I understand the airplane policies, but I see no reason to fully turn the device off and cut off all communication with the outside world). After three hours went by and I began to panic and think that something might have happened to my deer old friends, and worse yet I might be left sleeping on the cold streets of San Fransisco as the hotel room was registered uner Sean's name; I got the bright idea to call up Rev (Sean's and MFA's roommate). He informed me that they had missed their flight and had not departed yet at 2:00 pm EST. Which means they would not arrive for another four hours.

At the current time of blogging I am at the familiar Citizen's Cupcake Cafe, the place changed a little but still nice, and my friend's still have not turned on the mobiles. According to flightaware.com they should have all arrived at 5:10 (that was 30 min ago). So in the meantime I had registered myself at the Masconi Center and read every slip of paper I could find in that black bag of goodies. My favorite being a Ping Pong Ball by GameDev.net, which will surely be used sometime in the near future. The other item of interest is a "6 hour Energy! Mini Thin RUSH." That's right, if you haven't seen this yet than it wouldn't be far from the actual produce provided. As I like to live dangerously I intend to save this for the upcoming Wed or Thur.

GDC08 First Keynote Announced!

This is big news! As some of you know I will be attending GDC08 this year, this time without a scholarship to lean on, I am more determined than ever to make the most of it. So after I opened my e-mail today I find that they have begun to announce the keynotes. Last year's being Miyamoto, and Phil Harrison; suffice to say that's one tough act to follow. So to my surprise I was too ignorant not to recognize a name as famous as Ray Kurzweil. But after doing minimal research on this man, he has quickly grown on me as an inspirational figure.

Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.



As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.

Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame , established by the US Patent Office.

He has received fifteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.

Ray has written five books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy.

Getting Ready for GDC08

I'm incredibly excited with so much to do in order to get prep. Finish a website, learn dx10 shaders, and find a roomate. Btw pictures from last year's GDC are here. Check em out, and shoot me an e-mail if your going.