GDC 2023
After all these tough years, that has been challenging for all of us during the pandemic, I had a wonderful opportunity to finally visit my colleagues onsite in California and have fantastic conversations face-to-face. My employer, Visual Concepts has the headquarters in Novato, where I spent most of the time with onsite work. Fun fact: the office is a former military hangar, which has been converted to massive office spaces and play areas today. Skywalker Ranch is in the vicinity, that may explain this location even served as a set in Indiana Jones!
Besides work, of course we had a lot more fun as well, exploring the perks of the office, such as the theater, gym, play areas. There were plenty of options away from Hamilton Landing as well, such as exploring the lovely sights at Bay Area and the famous vineyards. Of course, there was great reason for our visit. I had the chance to attend the amazing and largest game developer conference in the world, the GDC '23. This was the first Game Developer Conference I attended onsite. Due to this event, we spent one week in San Francisco.
The city is the most beautiful I have seen in the US so far, however the pandemic affected it badly: the homeless situation is notably worse compared to last time I visited.
Preparing for the event was already firing up my mood. The entrance at Moscone Center had an enormously long queue. I spent at least 45 minutes in it to grab my entry badge and bracelet the day before the event starts. It was fascinating to see lots of game developers from various locations all hyped to start the conference.
The main attraction to me were the presentations. Especially some of them I would like to highlight. My favourite one was by far the Scaling Tools for Millions of Assets for 'Horizon Forbidden West by David Marcelis from Guerialla. The topic was not very far from what I was also working on, but unfortunately I cannot go into further details for that.
David showed an efficient query system about browsing in assets and asset usages in the game efficiently. Games have massive maps nowadays and Horizon is no different. Querying for a specific asset usage marked by locations may be handy for developers. As the best description for this presentation, I would like to quote CasualEffects here: The subtitle for this talk should have been "what if databases were written by game programmers? SQLite query: 25 seconds, Guerilla's Asset Indexer: 16 milliseconds"...it runs at 60Hz :)
The presenter not only talked about this tool, but a completely new pipeline how builds and build caching/sharing can speed up the process for developers, as it is has been a serious bottleneck for developers for such large projects.
Another one that really catched my attention was Realistic Real-time Sky Dome Rendering in Gran Turismo 7 by Polyphony Digital Inc. They presented how they made a realistic and generic sky dome rendering system. The presenters talked about two main parts: the rendering of the sky and the clouds. For the former, they took the majority of the presentation, and the team researched a highly accurate and realistic physical model on how light scattering works in our atmosphere. They implemented a tool that generates a set of lookup-textures and efficiently reads them runtime. In particular, a fundamental technique of atmospheric scattering simulations, the importance of measurement-based atmospheric composition, and accurate Mie scattering was explained in detail. As for the cloud simulation, the team used a multi-level noise generation method and ray marching, as well as implementing self-occlusion and shadow casting to further improve the realism. As a take-away, I was really impressed by how far they are pushing the limits to improve the immersion in this racing simulation game, which in my humble opinion is probably the best in category.
One last presentation I would like to mention was Advanced Graphics Summit: Open-World Water Rendering and Real-Time Simulation by Lightspeed Studios. Usually, game developers do not bother using water simulations in games, they rather rely on pre-generated meshes. They took a different approach, using a simplified physical model, which takes flow, hydropressure and level differences as well into account, they could generate a very impressive and realistic water and water flow simulation. They even played the animation how releasing the water is filling up the empty riverbed and it looked fascinating. They even used a physical model when should foam appear on the surface. The mesh they used to generate on the top of it is also optimised: they use a CDLOD method for accelerated rendering. Lat, but not least, when the water reaches a large height difference at the terrain, a waterfall (particle system) is generated, then the simulation is continued at the lower level.
Wandering around the expo was fun, lots of exhibited gadgets, demos and loots to be taken home.:) Besides the flashy stuff, I managed to find Eric Lengyel's stand, where I had a chance to meet him personally. I admire his work, I even couldn't resist buying a book from him there about rendering in games.
After some exploration, I found the stand of my employer, Visual Concepts. I had a wonderful chat there with the recruiters and they informed me they all heard nice things about me. That was a pleasant surprise for me!
I could talk for pages about the city as a final thought, but I did not intend to turn this into a travel blog. I highly recommend though visiting the Ghiradelli for chocolate lovers, trying the clam chowder at the famous Pier 39, while watching the sea lions at the bay. Lastly, for the most decent view on the legendary Golden Gate Bridge, I recommend the Battery Spencer.
Office location today and movie scene from Indiana Jones
Besides work, of course we had a lot more fun as well, exploring the perks of the office, such as the theater, gym, play areas. There were plenty of options away from Hamilton Landing as well, such as exploring the lovely sights at Bay Area and the famous vineyards. Of course, there was great reason for our visit. I had the chance to attend the amazing and largest game developer conference in the world, the GDC '23. This was the first Game Developer Conference I attended onsite. Due to this event, we spent one week in San Francisco.
The iconic golden gate bridge
The city is the most beautiful I have seen in the US so far, however the pandemic affected it badly: the homeless situation is notably worse compared to last time I visited.
Preparing for the event was already firing up my mood. The entrance at Moscone Center had an enormously long queue. I spent at least 45 minutes in it to grab my entry badge and bracelet the day before the event starts. It was fascinating to see lots of game developers from various locations all hyped to start the conference.
The main attraction to me were the presentations. Especially some of them I would like to highlight. My favourite one was by far the Scaling Tools for Millions of Assets for 'Horizon Forbidden West by David Marcelis from Guerialla. The topic was not very far from what I was also working on, but unfortunately I cannot go into further details for that.
David showed an efficient query system about browsing in assets and asset usages in the game efficiently. Games have massive maps nowadays and Horizon is no different. Querying for a specific asset usage marked by locations may be handy for developers. As the best description for this presentation, I would like to quote CasualEffects here: The subtitle for this talk should have been "what if databases were written by game programmers? SQLite query: 25 seconds, Guerilla's Asset Indexer: 16 milliseconds"...it runs at 60Hz :)
The presenter not only talked about this tool, but a completely new pipeline how builds and build caching/sharing can speed up the process for developers, as it is has been a serious bottleneck for developers for such large projects.
Wandering in the Expo
Another one that really catched my attention was Realistic Real-time Sky Dome Rendering in Gran Turismo 7 by Polyphony Digital Inc. They presented how they made a realistic and generic sky dome rendering system. The presenters talked about two main parts: the rendering of the sky and the clouds. For the former, they took the majority of the presentation, and the team researched a highly accurate and realistic physical model on how light scattering works in our atmosphere. They implemented a tool that generates a set of lookup-textures and efficiently reads them runtime. In particular, a fundamental technique of atmospheric scattering simulations, the importance of measurement-based atmospheric composition, and accurate Mie scattering was explained in detail. As for the cloud simulation, the team used a multi-level noise generation method and ray marching, as well as implementing self-occlusion and shadow casting to further improve the realism. As a take-away, I was really impressed by how far they are pushing the limits to improve the immersion in this racing simulation game, which in my humble opinion is probably the best in category.
Sony stand
One last presentation I would like to mention was Advanced Graphics Summit: Open-World Water Rendering and Real-Time Simulation by Lightspeed Studios. Usually, game developers do not bother using water simulations in games, they rather rely on pre-generated meshes. They took a different approach, using a simplified physical model, which takes flow, hydropressure and level differences as well into account, they could generate a very impressive and realistic water and water flow simulation. They even played the animation how releasing the water is filling up the empty riverbed and it looked fascinating. They even used a physical model when should foam appear on the surface. The mesh they used to generate on the top of it is also optimised: they use a CDLOD method for accelerated rendering. Lat, but not least, when the water reaches a large height difference at the terrain, a waterfall (particle system) is generated, then the simulation is continued at the lower level.
Wandering around the expo was fun, lots of exhibited gadgets, demos and loots to be taken home.:) Besides the flashy stuff, I managed to find Eric Lengyel's stand, where I had a chance to meet him personally. I admire his work, I even couldn't resist buying a book from him there about rendering in games.
After some exploration, I found the stand of my employer, Visual Concepts. I had a wonderful chat there with the recruiters and they informed me they all heard nice things about me. That was a pleasant surprise for me!
Visual Concepts stand
I could talk for pages about the city as a final thought, but I did not intend to turn this into a travel blog. I highly recommend though visiting the Ghiradelli for chocolate lovers, trying the clam chowder at the famous Pier 39, while watching the sea lions at the bay. Lastly, for the most decent view on the legendary Golden Gate Bridge, I recommend the Battery Spencer.