GDC 2023
After the difficult pandemic years, I finally had the opportunity to visit my colleagues onsite in California and talk with them face to face. My employer at the time, Visual Concepts, is headquartered in Novato, where I spent most of my onsite time. 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.
The anticipation built even before the event. The entrance at Moscone Center had an enormously long queue; I spent at least 45 minutes in it to collect my badge and bracelet the day before the event started. It was great to see game developers from all over gathered for 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 Guerrilla. 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, Guerrilla'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 that really caught 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 opinion is among the best in its 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 showed the water filling up an empty riverbed, which looked impressive, and used a physical model to decide when foam should appear on the surface. The mesh generated on top of it is also optimised, using a CDLOD method for accelerated rendering. Last but not least, when the water reaches a large drop in the terrain, a waterfall (particle system) is generated and the simulation continues at the lower level.
Wandering around the expo was fun, with plenty of gadgets, demos, and giveaways. Besides the flashy showcases, I found Eric Lengyel's stand and had the chance to meet him in person. I admire his work, and could not resist buying one of his books on rendering in games.
I also found the Visual Concepts stand and had a good conversation with the recruiters there.
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.
The anticipation built even before the event. The entrance at Moscone Center had an enormously long queue; I spent at least 45 minutes in it to collect my badge and bracelet the day before the event started. It was great to see game developers from all over gathered for 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 Guerrilla. 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, Guerrilla'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 that really caught 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 opinion is among the best in its 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 showed the water filling up an empty riverbed, which looked impressive, and used a physical model to decide when foam should appear on the surface. The mesh generated on top of it is also optimised, using a CDLOD method for accelerated rendering. Last but not least, when the water reaches a large drop in the terrain, a waterfall (particle system) is generated and the simulation continues at the lower level.
Wandering around the expo was fun, with plenty of gadgets, demos, and giveaways. Besides the flashy showcases, I found Eric Lengyel's stand and had the chance to meet him in person. I admire his work, and could not resist buying one of his books on rendering in games.
I also found the Visual Concepts stand and had a good conversation with the recruiters there.
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.