This was the first AGDC i attended as a developer. In 2000 i flew down for the conference, forgot my student id so i couldnt get a cheap student day pass, and had to make do with just the “exhibition”. This time around I was a speaker, so i got in for free no worries, and thankfully spent as little time in the exhibition hall as possible.
I was originally planning to do a talk called “Tribes: Vengeance Networked Character Physics and Animation” where i would discuss the code i developed for the character movement and animation over the past 2 1/2 years or so at Irrational Games. Once we shipped Tribes in September though, in fact, on the day we went gold, I decided I’d had enough and quit.
This left me in a bit of a dilemma, i didnt really feel too comfortable doing a talk in which i would discuss systems i developed for my ex-employer, even though Jon Chey had given me approval. Instead in the months before AGDC, i spent all my time researching, developing and writing a set of articles on game physics and networking.
This work became the basis for my talk “Zen of Networked Physics” which i presented at AGDC. Ultimately, i took the standard techniques used in first person shooter netcode, generalized them to any physics simulation driven by input, and was able to present a cool talk with a networked bouncing rolling cube simulation, with no latency or snapping under 2 seconds lag and 50% packet loss.
This was all great, and i’m very proud of how my talk went. But the problem was that i worked so hard preparing my talk for AGDC that i basically missed AGDC itself. I was up the entire night before my flight down to melbourne on the first day of AGDC, i arrived late and missed the opening ceremony. I crashed almost the entire first day in my hotel room, waking up at around 11pm that night to work through to 5am friday morning finishing my talk.
Sleeping until 11am friday morning i missed the keynote for that day and the first round of talks, arriving just in time to miss lunch. I was able to nervously attend only a single talk (microsoft mmo xbox live talk, which was mostly promotional material), before my talk started at 2:30pm.
The upside of all this is that although the first two days of the conference were a complete write off, i was able to relax and get some sleep and turn up on the final day all bright eyed and bushy tailed, while everybody else looked exhausted and hung over from the Sony party the night before. A small consolation i guess.
Next AGDC i’d love to do a talk again, however i’ll definately take it a bit more easy so i can actually spend some time at the conference.
Highlights:
- Bill Roper’s keynote “Shootout at OK Morale”. If working at Flagship Studios is anything like he described, then you’d be a fool to not apply for a job there.
- David Pevreal’s talk on multiplatform console development. Lots of solid techniques were presented, general head nodding stuff, but overall good information. Respect.
- Networking. I got to meet a lot of new people, catch up with old industry friends, and generally have a good time. All this in spite of me being flipped out for most of the conference preparing for my talk.
- The Apple MacOS X lab. These guys have a great dev suite in XCode with some really amazing profiling and OpenGL debugging tools. I got to meet the Apple guys on Saturday (eschewing my last chance to see actual talks at the conference to do so), but it was worth it, great bunch of guys. I impressed them by porting the demo program from my talk to MacOS X in about an hour. Hey it was easy, its an OpenGL program.
- Free swag. The AGDC laptop ‘manbag’ was just awesome. I’ll have to buy a laptop just so i have an excuse to carry it everywhere and show it off.
Bummers:
- Sleep deprivation and stupid preparation. I went a little bit too hard. If you ever get the idea, “hey, i dont need to use powerpoint, i’ll just write my own in OpenGL” the night before a conference, i have some advice for you. Dont.
- Stupid promotional talks wasting my time. I didnt get to attend many talks, but the general buzz was that attendees were pissed that they effectively paid good money to see talks that were nothing more than promotions for products. About the closest thing i saw to this was the microsoft xbox live MMO talk, which was ok, but really just felt to me more of a ‘hey xbox live is cool… use it for mmo games’ pep talk rally, instead of giving us some actual information. I already know xbox live is cool guys, i’m a programmer, throw me a frickin bone here.
- Bad organization and zero training for the people assisting the talks. Highlights include that guy that handed out performance evaluation cards in the middle of the microsoft MMO talk, annoying speaker setups in tiny rooms which didnt need speakers anyway, and the monkey boy who interrupted me, halfway through my talk, to put a lapel mike on me ‘because they were recording’. Too late bud.
- Pissweak exhibition hall. Its just so small and sad, and most booth attendees seem so bored to be there. If you actually paid money to get in just to see the exhibition i think you’d be quite disappointed. It doesnt have to be E3, sure, but they should be able to do better.
Thats it for AGDC this year, on a closing note, if you are looking for the lecture notes for my talk you can find them here.