Passes for the Game Developers Conference 2015 are still available, and as the conference draws closer we're announcing even more sessions for the Main Conference that you'll want to check out.
Today we're highlighting a number of informative sponsored sessions from Intel, Esri and other influential tech companies. If you're looking for an opportunity to learn about how cutting-edge hardware and software works from a game developer's perspective, these are the talks you want to keep on your radar.
Now in its 29th year, GDC is the world's largest and longest-running professionals-only game industry event, and will once again take place at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California during March 2-6, 2015.
How to get the most out of Intel's latest mobile game tools
It's important for developers to deliver the best possible performance and power efficiency for their Android games. With the addition of native x86 Android support in Unity, Square Enix was able to take advantage of the new feature with their popular title Hitman Go; one of the first games published with x86 Android native support developed with Unity.
At GDC 2015, Square Enix-Montreal programmer Francis Petrin and Intel's Cristiano Ferreira will lead a session, Play Faster and Longer: How Square Enix Maximized Performance and Battery Life with Hitman Go to discuss how the development team's "design by constraints" philosophy helped them deliver a polished, high-end experience to mobile devices. They'll walk you through adding x86 support to a previously ARM-only project, and show how to use Intel's Graphics Performance Analyzer tool set to provide the best possible user experience. Check it out if you'd like fresh insights into the Android game ecosystem and tools/techniques to optimize your work and provide a better experience on all levels of hardware to reach as many end users as possible.
Learn to procedurally model your own open-world cities
Curious about tricks and tools you can use to create urban game environment procedurally? Too strapped for time and resources to build every city in your game by hand? Make time to attend the Hacking Cities: Procedural Modeling of Cities for Open-World Games talk sponsored by Esri at GDC 2015. That's where Esri personnel will show you how to use CityEngine, 3D modeling software developed specifically to generate 3D urban environments for use in real-world computer modeling.
Check out this talk to learn how you can harness that power for use in your own game, or even embed it into your game engine with the CityEngine SDK. Expect to walk away with an understanding of how to smoothly integrate CityEngine into your production pipeline and the different techniques you can use for defining rule-based placement of structures and adjusting levels of detail on the fly.
Upping your security game
The security of your game is no joke, not in an age where high-profile game companies like Sony, Valve and Microsoft are getting hacked by rogue agents. As our industry grows, hackers are exploiting game code, compromising game integrity and ultimately, game revenues.
Dedicated software security company Arxan Technologies is sponsoring a talk at GDC 2015, "Game Security", aimed at getting you up to speed with the current state of data security in games. Arxan's Rennie Allen will explore the threat landscape associated with different game architectures, from MMORPG to mobile games, and suggest best practices for game protection across diverse platforms. Check it out, and you'll walk away better equipped to protect against attacks ranging from server cloning, cheating, or reverse-engineering to tampering for botting & intellectual property theft.
Further details on these and many more announced talks are available now in the online GDC 2015 Session Scheduler, where you can begin to plan out your conference week and later export it to the up-to-the-minute GDC Mobile App, coming soon.
Conference officials look forward to announcing more GDC 2015 sessions spanning a diverse array of game industry issues in the months ahead.
For now, don't miss the opportunity to save money by registering early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is January 21, 2015. GDC 2015 itself will take place March 2-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
For more information on GDC 2015, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
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