Game Tech

What can I say. So far a great conference exceeding my expectations.

Last night was a cool hotel bar discussion with people from Valve, Sony, Microsoft, etc... Then today the intensity just ramped up with a constant flow of information from 9am until past 9pm.

All the slides are going to be up at the Game Tech site, so I won't reiterate them here. Of course, the quality of the speakers so far (Jay Stelly from Valve on Half Life 2, Chris Butcher from Bungie on Halo 2, Charles Bloom from Oddworld on Stranger's Wrath, Andrew Willmott from Maxis on The Sims 2) has been excellent. The crowd is small (about 60ish attendees) and thereby focused and knowledgeable, no daft questions.

A long intense day, with a few 10 minute breaks, lunch and dinner, sponsored by ATI and Intel respectively, and even those times were intense talks. The architects from Intel were talking about new stuff coming down the pipe, getting opinionated feedback, answering back. Very cool. The information and discussion flow didn't let up all day.

A great experience and it didn't stop there. Intense after-session discussions were flowing in the bar until, well, just now when I decided it was time for me to retire.

These small, focused conferences are great.

The postmortem talks today really reaffirmed my feeling that we're doing everything (well most things ;-) right with our development processes on Flight Simulator, with the one caveat that everyone other than us appears to be doing distributed builds. Our builds take way too long - something we need to look into. Most people seem to be using IncrediBuild.

A cool soundbite from Charles Bloom today that I liked particularly: "It's all about managing complexity."