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GDC

CONFERENCE  

|    Programming
    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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2013 HIGHLIGHTED SESSIONS

Outernauts: From AAA Console to AAA Flash Games
Joe Valenzuela (Insomniac Games)
 
Insomniac Games recently launched its latest Flash game, Outernauts. The release of Outernauts marks a number of firsts for Insomniac: the first non-console game, the first free-to-play (F2P) game, and the first game not written in a low-level language (C++). It required effort to maintain Insomniac's standards of production quality, and learn a new development environment and tools pipeline, especially while aiming to follow idiomatic Flash development practices. Joe Valenzuela (@jvalenzu) describes the technical challenges involved in making Outernauts, and focuses on the differences from traditional console title development.
Creating the AI for the Living, Breathing World of Hitman: Absolution
Mika Vehkala (IO Interactive A/S)
Maurizio De Pascale (IO Interactive A/S)
 
Hitman: Absolution is a third-person assassination game, where action and stealth are treated as equal citizens, granting the player total freedom in the way missions are tackled. Its gameplay is a combination of voyeurism, social stealth, action stealth, and tactical combat. All these styles, as well as the transitions between them, must be challenging and fun to play. This requires an AI that adapts to multiple situations and reacts to the player's actions in a believable way. This presentation explains the rationale behind design choices, and provides detailed information about the implementation of the multiple software layers driving AI and NPC animation in Hitman: Absolution.
Reinforcement Learning Based Character Locomotion in Hitman: Absolution
Michael Buttner (IO Interactive / Square Enix)
 
Character locomotion systems usually consist of manually crafted blend-trees and large chunks of gameplay code in order to drive and micro-manage them. In this session, we'll talk about the novel approach that we took to create the crowd characters in Hitman: Absolution. This talk will cover how we arranged animation clips in an appropriate data-structure, the controller strategies we used to derive the animation clip selection from high-level AI goals, and how the system can be used in path following scenarios. We will touch on the challenges that we faced during the development of the system.
Rendering Assassin's Creed 3
Jean-Francois St-Amour (Ubisoft Montreal)
 
The presentation describes the rendering techniques used for the latest opus in the Assassin's Creed series. Assassin's Creed 3 takes place in an extremely vast and varied world, in both summer and winter, and this required work across a wide number of topics. This talk will cover the game's weather system, lighting solution, ocean rendering and material system. In addition, this presentation covers what the AC3 team believes are the biggest bang for the buck improvements that can be made to current-generation titles being ported to DX11 PC hardware.

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