Game Developers Conference Day Three

My first session today was "The Future of Content" with Will Wright. Or at least I attempted it to be.

The room was completely overfull. I have no idea why this session that was obviously going to be well attended was not put in the ballroom (well, other than the fact that it would have cost money. The session spilled out into the corridor (about a hundred or so people including me). It took them about 40 minutes to get the a/v outside working so I missed most of it - take these comments with a pinch of salt.

Will's talk revolved around a project that he's working on - Spore. It was incredible - basically a universe-wide ala simulation/populous/sim city/civ. You can interact from the microbe level to the planet level. It has to be seen to be believed - very whimsical or cartoony in style.

It is very multiplayer and server based - you can go and see other peoples' planets - The player is the creator - he is Lucas rather than Skywalker. The creation tools/editors are the gameplay mechanics - terraforming, alien abduction, first contact, etc...

Story is a side-effect of interesting experiences rather than a pre-requisite; the game starts of with goal-orientied play which is effectively a massive tutorial for how to play in the sandbox.

This looked to be the best session at the conference. It is a shame this was hamstrung by ineffectual organization by the conference staff.

Next up was "Coding and SIMS2: Coding the Psychology of Little People" with Jake Simpson.

All objects in The Sims are self-contained (except for processes to reduce duplication of content such as textures and sound.) The editor, Edith, is completely in-game. Scripts can be changed in game with edit and continue - debugging is in real-time. This is the main reason why Maxis can pump out so many expansion packs because iteration time is so fast. All variables that are to be used for tuning are explicitly marked as such so the tuning tool can drill down to the key variables easily and make the tuning process more effective.

Scripts (in the Simantic language) are exposed in a graphical tree form. The language itself is real-time parsed/interpreted, not compiled. It is stored as binary format to try and avoid reverse engineering (though people have recently done this). All positioning is relative to other objects to avoid heavy math functions. It is heavilly multithreaded - each object has it's own thread. Yielding primitives that wait until their functionality is complete. Each thread has own stack with function calling like any other language. Internal error checking to recover object to last known good state in case of errors.

Because it's scripting, it's easy to limit CPU usage.

Cons: Non-transferable skill-set. Because it's parsed rather than compiled, bugs in code are hard to find.

Having a debugger is critical for rapid development. Using lua/python/etc... you have no direct access to gamedata - lua is seperate, not designed to share data. Has much more overhead than homegrown, but it is transferable and great for mods.

After lunch, we had "Burning Down the House: Game Developers Rant" with a number of pannelists including Warren Spector and Chris Hecker. Very, very lively and really interesting content. I didn't take notes as it was very content rich and the content was being sprayed with a fire-hose. I couldn't keep up with a pen and paper, as my laptop battery was dead. I hope GDC is going to post the audio/video.

I also had a meeting today with Genemation. They are doing some very interesting things with automatically generating heads in a parametric manner. Because it's all synthetic there are no royalty issues. The faces generated are incredibly life-like, even when the software is asked to generate very low polygon count models. It also generates the textures.

The parametric control was also very interesting. With continuous control of ethnicity, sex, age, etc...

I left for the airport at around 3.30pm hoping for an early flight back to Seattle (I was booked on the 8.20pm flight). The flights were all oversold, so I couldn't get on any early flights. Then my flight was delayed until 10.40pm. Sigh. I got home at around 1am. Thankfully some other people were around to chat to and Bob Day gave me a ride home.