CONFERENCE
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PROGRAMMING
As new platforms emerge and existing platforms evolve, programmers face an ever increasing challenge to produce games that capture the attention of the public and the media. The Programming Track focuses on these challenges and the opportunities presented by next and current generation development including: mature consoles, new handhelds, a highly competitive sales environment, and increased demand for very high production values in games.
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HIGHLIGHTED SESSIONS
Rigging a Resident Evil - Inside the Bone Code of Operation Raccoon City
Ben Hanke (Slant Six Games)
This session will demonstrate how Slant Six Games implemented runtime support for helper bones driven by Maya expressions in 'Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City'. It will describe the authoring workflow, pipeline and runtime implementation in detail, and demonstrate the practical application of expression-driven helper bones in our game.It will show how we drive a range of detailed rendering rigs from a single animation skeleton, allowing us to completely decouple the production of art and animation for player characters. It will describe how this brought benefits ranging from higher fidelity skinning to significant savings in time and memory.
It is expected that attendees should get enough detailed information from this presentation to be able to evaluate the potential gains of employing this technique in their own engine, and gain a significant head start in implementing a similar system themselves should they wish to do so.
This talk is aimed primarily at an audience of intermediate to senior level engineers with 4+ years experience. Attendees will benefit most from this session if they already have a good understanding of basic skeletal animation and have an interest in the low-level implementation details of the end-to-end system described.
It is expected that attendees should get enough detailed information from this presentation to be able to evaluate the potential gains of employing this technique in their own engine, and gain a significant head start in implementing a similar system themselves should they wish to do so.
This talk is aimed primarily at an audience of intermediate to senior level engineers with 4+ years experience. Attendees will benefit most from this session if they already have a good understanding of basic skeletal animation and have an interest in the low-level implementation details of the end-to-end system described.
Crowds in Hitman: Absolution
Kasper Fauerby Kasper (IO Interactive)
A key requirement in Hitman: Absolution is to have very dense crowds which allow players to both interact with and influence the behavior of each individual character. This presentation describes the techniques and optimizations used to achieve the 1200 character crowds present in Hitman: Absolution while still running at 30fps on current-gen consoles. We will provide an overview of our crowd implementation and discuss both the algorithms used as well as how gameplay considerations affected our design decisions. Throughout our presentation we'll demonstrate the discussed topics using videos from a real production level in Hitman: Absolution.
Attendees will learn about the design and implementation of the crowd system within Hitman: Absolution both with regards to workflow, gameplay and technical detail. This talk will discuss some of the pitfalls we encountered and will provide the audience with a good understanding of the complexity involved in implementing crowds. This talk is intended for game programmers who are thinking about adding crowd simulation to their game, or are simply curious about how crowds are implemented in Hitman: Absolution. Some basic understanding of steering behaviors is recommended, but not required.
Attendees will learn about the design and implementation of the crowd system within Hitman: Absolution both with regards to workflow, gameplay and technical detail. This talk will discuss some of the pitfalls we encountered and will provide the audience with a good understanding of the complexity involved in implementing crowds. This talk is intended for game programmers who are thinking about adding crowd simulation to their game, or are simply curious about how crowds are implemented in Hitman: Absolution. Some basic understanding of steering behaviors is recommended, but not required.
Passenger: Story of a Convergent Pipeline - From Assassin's Creed Lineage to Assassin's Creed Revelations
Thomas Felix (Ubisoft)
Two years into the development of an exclusive technology connecting Game and CG pipelines, the Passenger team -- part of the Technology Group at Ubisoft Montreal, now focuses on solving game content production issues. In this presentation, we will explain our strategy to expand a game universe, and describe the underlying authoring pipeline. We will then focus on the framework we developed to bridge both game and CG technology, and finally demonstrate how this powerful workflow can be applied to narrative game content creation. Practical application of the passenger technology will be given throughout the gamut of various well-known productions, from films like Assassin's Creed Lineage and Embers, to games like Assassin's Creed Revelations.
The Cameras of Uncharted 3
Travis McIntosh (Naughty Dog Inc.)
This session reviews the different types of cameras in Uncharted 3. It also looks at how they are managed in engine. Player cameras such as follow, aim, melee, and cover cameras are discussed, as well as how they can be tweaked by designers. Other cameras, such as fixed, spline, and animated cameras are covered in depth, as well as the designer/programmer's interface for fading them in/out and priority schemes. Next, Uncharted 3's camera shake system is detailed, a separate layer of additive cameras keyed off of player animations. Finally, this session will include Uncharted 3's use of Depth of Field and 3D as it relates to cameras, and plans for future improvements.
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