As the GDC 2015 lineup begins to come together, conference officials would like to highlight a few notable talks on the conference's vaunted Programming track you shouldn't miss.
This cutting-edge track is available for All-Access and Main Conference pass holders, and remains one of the more popular and enduring tracks of the show.
Organizers are still announcing new talks every day, but some of the more notable Programming talks already confirmed include a rundown of how Insomniac built the enemy AI in Sunset Overdrive, a look at how League of Legends scales from Riot's Andrew McVeigh, and Ubisoft's Francois Cournoyer on the AI recycling systems at work in Assassin's Creed Unity.
These talks are part of the Programming Track for GDC 2015's Main Conference, which will take place Wednesday-Friday, March 4-6 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.
How to build bad guys for an open-world game like Sunset Overdrive
Sunset Overdrive is a fast-paced game that offers the player numerous traversal options. Insomniac's Adam Noonchester will show you how the studio created enemies able to challenge a player with such remarkable mobility in his GDC 2015 talk, "AI in the Awesomepocalypse - Creating the Enemies of Sunset Overdrive."
This talk will contain detailed descriptions of how Insomniac solved some of the biggest AI gameplay problems faced during the development of the game, and should give attendees (especially programmers and designers) an understanding of how to better approach designing and iterating on AI in open-world games.
Optimize your AI to draw crowds like Assassin's Creed Unity
Ubisoft AI programmer Francois Cournoyer will also be speaking at GDC next March about a new AI design technique that allowed the company to create thousands of replicated, persistent, interactive NPCs for Assassin's Creed: Unity.
His talk, "Massive Crowd on Assassin's Creed Unity: AI Recycling", will go detail how the Unity programmers created a pooling system that allowed them to swap from low-res NPCs to high-res NPCs without the player noticing.
Cournoyer will also explain how you can create a simplistic AI brain to animate thousands of NPCs, so that by the time you walk out you'll know how to work within the limits of 40 real AIs and 120 high resolution models to successfully create a scene where 10,000 crowd NPCs are on screen at the same time.
Design your code to scale like League of Legends
Service communication between game features has always been a critical part of the League of Legends architecture, and this assumed even more importance when Riot started evolving the platform from a monolithic architecture to a microservice-based one.
To handle it Riot developed Hermes, an extensible (Java-based) communications system that allows each game feature team to customize it for their own feature without compromising interoperability.
Curious to learn how it works? Then make time in your GDC 2015 schedule for Riot software architect Andrew McVeigh's "Hermes: Extensible REST and RPC Communication for Games Features" session.
You'll learn the full details of Riot's inter-process communications libraries, and the patterns used to construct a diverse set of game-related communications facilities. McVeigh will also touch on the cultural issues and how the studio achieves developer consensus in an environment that empowers team choice.
Further details on these and all other announced talks is 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.
