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Entries for tag "events", ordered from most recent. Entry count: 139.
# Impressions from Vulkanised 2023 Conference
Thu
16
Feb 2023
Last week I attended Vulkanised conference. It is an official conference of Vulkan API. It took place 7-9 February 2023 in Munich, Germany. It was my first time at this conference. My attendance was part of my job at AMD and I co-presented with Valve about using Radeon Developer Tools on RADV (Linux AMD driver) and Steam Deck. Here, on my blog, I would like to share my personal impressions from the event.
Overall, it was well organized. There were over 200 attendees, 3 days full of talks, most of them short (20-30 minutes, some of them even 10 minutes!), happening on just one scene (apart from full-day Vulkan tutorial for beginners, happening on the first day in parallel with normal talks), with lunch break and coffee breaks in between, so everyone could see everything without a need to choose from the timetable which talks to attend. It was intense. Every evening we went for some good food and beer, which I enjoy a lot every time I visit Munich/Bavaria/Germany.
In terms of people attending, a conference like this differs completely from game developer conferences that I usually attend. On one hand, everyone there was a programmer who knows and uses Vulkan, so everyone was on the same page. On gamedev conferences, there are people from different fields, as game development is multidisciplinary - graphics and music artists, designers, programmers, business people etc. On the other hand, there were not so many people from game industry there, and if anyone, they were mostly from the world of mobile GPUs, not PC or console. It was interesting to talk with developers from various industries, using GPUs and Vulkan for different applications, like scientific computations and visualizations or even… software for cloth design for fashion business.
There were many interesting talks. I think the most valuable ones were about components of the Vulkan ecosystem that are useful to every developer, like Vulkan validation layers, VkConfigurator, Vulkan loader, or GFXReconstruct (which also added support for Direct3D 12 recently, by the way!). There were long and extensive talks teaching two recent big additions to the API: mesh shaders and Vulkan Video. Vulkan Video seems to be especially complicated, partially because it requires some knowledge of video encoding/decoding, which is something different from 3D rendering. I used to work for television, so it was not that obscure for me. But this new part of the API is also very low level. The decision to make encoding/decoding of every frame stateless, with all the state of the video stream managed by the user, makes the API surface very extensive.
Talk about Diligent Engine was interesting. I didn’t look at the project itself, but the presentation looked convincing that this is a good multi-platform 3D graphics library implemented on top of various graphics APIs. Another interesting project presentation was about VkFFT - a C library that calculates FFT on the GPU using one of many supported APIs (not only Vulkan) with state-of-the-art performance. It is implemented by assembling a string with the source code of a kernel optimized for a specific case.
Presentations about game optimization for mobile GPUs were very interesting to me. Optimizing games is what I do in my everyday job, although I work with “large” PC GPUs. I consider such talks with a collection of tips and recommendations exceptionally valuable. From these presentations, I could learn what things work fast on smartphone and tablet chips, which are different from PC and console chips. They said that on these platforms, energy consumption and bandwidth to and from memory is the most important. Because mobile GPUs are tile-based, a large amount of vertices or fat vertex format is very slow, which is not the case on PC. Also because of that, they recommend to group as many passes as possible as sub-passes of a single Vulkan render pass, even to a degree that rendering of 3D objects could be grouped together with screen-space postprocessing effects. Again, it isn’t a thing that we normally do on PCs. It was also interesting to see how they measure performance. While I always disable V-sync and just measure FPS in games, they seem to give multiple columns with results, including FPS, but also GPU utilization %, which is likely used when reaching 60 FPS with V-sync always enabled.
But more than any specific presentation, it was interesting for me to hear some general ideas about Vulkan, often repeated by multiple people. There were people from Khronos and LunarG there (the company that develops Vulkan SDK), so we could hear from and ask questions to people who really make this API. There was a discussion panel with many prominent participants who shared their voice on these topics. Noone said “what happens on Vulkanised stays on Vulkanised”, so here are some things I remember. Disclaimer: These are my personal, subjective impressions. I might remember something wrong. Please feel free to leave a comment with your own thoughts below this article.
Some profound things have been said about Vulkan. Someone said it’s not a graphics API, more like a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) or an API for programming accelerators. They said it is a “design by compromise” rather than “design by committee”. They said we should think of Vulkan as not only the specification, by the entire ecosystem, including libraries, tools, code samples, learning materials, etc. I was pleased to hear that Vulkan Memory Allocator that I maintain was often mentioned as one of the examples. An open question is how many of these 3rd party components should be considered “canonical”. Many are already included in Vulkan SDK, but should official samples use them as well? Currently, they don’t, as they teach raw Vulkan. Someone also said that these ecosystem components should be properly funded. Another question was about the direction Vulkan should go. One person said it should probably become even more low-level, with app-space libraries on top of it more widely used.
It was surprising to see that there are solutions to run Vulkan above and below every other graphics API, which makes Vulkan a common ground across systems and APIs:
Among problems that developers have with using Vulkan and potential areas of development for the future, I noticed several common themes:
Overall, participation in Vulkansed conference was a great experience for me. I wish I will come back there. But Vulkan, even with its unprecedented openness, portability, and universality, is just part of the entire world of 3D graphics programming. On a conference dedicated to Vulkan I wouldn’t say loud that Direct3D 12 is more popular among PC game developers and it is not without a reason, or that maybe both these “explicit” APIs are at the worst possible level of abstraction - low level enough to be difficult to learn, to use, and easy to create bugs, while high-level enough to still hide hardware details crucial to squeezing maximum performance. But this is a separate topic…
When attending any event, I always pay attention to the quality of the audio-video system. On Vulkanised, it was very good. I especially liked the acoustics of the room, which clearly someone paid attention to when designing the interior. But there were some issues with presentation video that I don’t see too often. I blogged before about 3 Rules to Make You Image Looking Good on a Projector, where I mentioned potential problems with contrast, reproduction of colors or thin lines. Another time I described a possibility that edges of the screen may be cropped. But this conference had a different problem. Instead of connecting their laptops to a HDMI cable, speakers were asked to join an online meeting via Google Meet and share their screen there, with presentation on the big screen by another participant of that virtual call, streaming the content. We were in a Google office, after all :) This surely helped them record the presentations easily, but it also made any video or animation degraded to what looked like 2 FPS.
For more photos, see the official gallery 2023 Vulkanised by Khronos.
Comments | #rendering #vulkan #events Share
# Impressions After Global Game Jam 2023
Tue
14
Feb 2023
I usually write technical blog posts to educate readers on specific topics. However, this time, I wanted to share something more personal - my experience after participating in the Global Game Jam 2023. The event took place from February 3 to 5, 2023, but only now did I find the time to write this post, as I spent a week in Munich attending the Vulkanised conference right after GGJ.
For those unfamiliar with the Global Game Jam, it's a worldwide event where participants come together to create games for fun. Unlike Ludum Dare, GGJ is not just an online/remote event. It's an opportunity to spend the weekend in person at one of many sites around the world and develop a game based on a specific, globally-announced theme within the constrained time limit. In Poland alone, there were eight sites organized in major cities. I attended PolyJam 2023 (GGJ entry, FB event), which was organized by Koło Naukowe Twórców Gier Polygon, a game development interest group at Warsaw University of Technology that I still regularly attend even though I'm no longer a student.
The theme announced for this year’s GGJ was “roots”. A theme is something that games made during the jam should be related to, or at least be inspired by. But the theme can be interpreted freely. Roots of trees and other plants are the first association that comes to mind and that most teams followed (including us), but others are also possible, e.g. a heritage like genes or culture inherited from parents and ancestors, something about indigenous people, or even… calculating mathematical square root.
Our jam site was large and well organized. KNTG Polygon has long experience in organizing such events, after many years of doing local site of GGJ, as well as their custom Slavic Game Jam. Thanks to the work of volunteers and money from sponsors, a very low entry fee ensured not only space, access to the power and Internet but also unlimited coffee, other drinks, sweets, and full catering. GGJ website says there were 124 jammers registered on the site. Although GGJ as a whole isn’t a competition, there are no winners or prizes, our local site featured a competition.
When competitions are made on game jams, there are 2 general ways of doing them:
If a team wants to win, they should take different approaches depending on this. In option 1, the game is played only by the authors, so it is enough to prepare a good-looking show for a couple of minutes. However, they need to think beforehand about what to say and how to play their game to impress people. Option 2 is essentially like preparing a booth on a gaming expo – all about attracting people, showing and explaining the game to them, and making sure the build works fine and looks playable during these few minutes when other people play it. PolyJam 2023 went for option 1. Every team had 3 minutes to present their game on stage. There were over 40 different teams, but the presentation was well organized and went smoothly.
Back to my presence there… I didn’t take part in a game jam for 2 years, since before COVID. I wanted to go there to check if I still remember how to program :) Of course I work with code in my everyday job, but quickly hacking a game jam game, which is essentially like a prototype, is something different from writing production-quality code at work. The small 2D game we made is: Roots of Life and Death. Our team was 3 people: Michał Rudnicki “Mildanach” as graphics artist, Bartek Dramczyk “Voyager” who made music and sound effects, and myself as the programmer. We’ve developed everything on a public GitHub repository. I also hosted web version of the game that can be played online. The game is about resource management – by creating new nodes (left mouse button click) and transferring resources between them (left mouse button drag&drop), player can expand the system of underground roots, create new flowers to gather more sun at the top of the map and acquire more water at the bottom. Enemy plant is playing on the other side of the screen according to the same rules, controlled by the AI.
I know the game is not finished, not very dynamic or enjoyable. What is important to me is the way we made it. In past game jams I used different technologies, ranging from a custom engine in C++, Cocos2d-x library, to Unity and Unreal Engine, which are the most popular these days. I must admit I don’t know Unity or UE too well – not as much as I wish I knew, but for this year’s GGJ I decided to try something new: I used Cocos Creator. This is a Chinese game engine that looks somewhat similarly to Unity, provides a convenient editor, features a component-based scene graph, and supports all an indie game may need (2D and 3D graphics, collisions and physics simulation, UI, sound, etc.).
The programming language used in it is TypeScript. I didn’t know either Cocos Creator or TypeScript before. Having only basic knowledge of JavaScript, I started learning them 2 weeks before the jam. I enjoyed it a lot. It is long time since I learned a new programming language, while it is always a very mind-expanding experience. I like the way TypeScript introduces strong typing into JavaScript, which is by nature a very dynamic scripting language. For example, let a: string|number; defines a variable which can contain either string or numeric values, while let eventType: 'mouseDown'|'mouseUp'; defines a variable that can hold only a string with one of these two specific values. I was learning just from a first TypeScript tutorial I found on the Internet and the official TypeScript cheat sheets.
With our game, we didn’t win the competition at our site and we were far from winning, but this wasn’t the point. I am still happy about our performance. Things that went well:
What went wrong:
Overall, participation in Global Game Jam was a fun experience. I can recommend it to everyone who likes games and feels a need to do something creative. There is no need to have a team beforehand. Some people just come and team up with freshly meet people, some make their games alone as a 1-person team. I even met some people who came but didn’t plan to make any game! They just wanted to spend this time among nice, like-minded people and do something creative, e.g. to draw new things to their personal portfolio.
Comments | #javascript #events #competitions #ggj Share
# Links to GDC 2020 Talks and More
Sat
28
Mar 2020
March is an important time of year for game developers, as that's when Game Developers Conference (GDC) takes place - the most important conference of the industry. This year's edition has been cancelled because of coronavirus pandemic, just like all other events, or rather postponed to a later date. But many companies prepared their talks anyway. Surely, they had to submit their talks long time ago, plus any preparation, internal technical and legal reviews... The time spent on this shouldn't be wasted. That's why many of them shared their talks online as videos and/or slides. Below, I try to gather links to these materials with a full list of titles, with special focus on programming talks.
GDC
They organized multi-day "Virtual Talks" event presented on Twitch, with replays now available to watch and slides accessible on their website.
GDC Videos @ Twitch
GDC 2020 Virtual Talks (agenda)
GDC Vault - GDC 2020 (slides)
Monday, March 16
The 'Kine' Postmortem
Storytelling with Verbs: Integrating Gameplay and Narrative
Intrinsically Motivated Teams: The Manager's Toolbox
From 'Assassin's Creed' to 'The Dark Eye': The Importance of Themes
Representing LGBT+ Characters in Games: Two Case Studies
The Sound of Anthem
Is Your Game Cross-Platform Ready?
Forgiveness Mechanics: Reading Minds for Responsive Gameplay
Experimental AI Lightning Talk: Hyper Realistic Artificial Voices for Games
Tuesday, March 17
What to Write So People Buy: Selling Your Game Without Feeling Sleazy
Failure Workshop: FutureGrind: How To Make A 6-Month Game In Only 4.5 Years
Stress-Free Game Development: Powering Up Your Studio With DevOps
Baked in Accessibility: How Features Were Approached in 'Borderlands 3'
Matchmaking for Engagement: Lessons from 'Halo 5'
Forget CPI: Dynamic Mobile Marketing
Integrating Sound Healing Methodologies Into Your Workflow
From 0-1000: A Test Driven Approach to Tools Development
Overcoming Creative Block on 'Super Crush KO'
When Film, Games, and Theatre Collide
Wednesday, March 18
Bringing Replays to 'World of Tanks: Mercenaries'
Developing and Running Neural Audio in Constrained Environments
Mental Health State of the Industry: Past, Present & Future
Empathizing with Steam: How People Shop for Your Game
Scaling to 10 Concurrent Users: Online Infrastructure as an Indie
Crafting A Tiny Open World: 'A Short Hike' Postmortem
Indie Soapbox: UI design is fun!
Don't Ship a Product, Ship Value: Start Your Minimum Viable Product With a Solution
Day of the Devs: GDC Edition Direct
Independent Games Festival & Game Developers Choice Awards
Thursday, March 19
Machine Learning for Optimal Matchmaking
Skill Progression, Visual Attention, and Efficiently Getting Good at Esports
Making Your Game Influencer Ready: A Marketing Wishlist for Developers
How to Run Your Own Career Fair on a Tiny Budget
Making a Healthy Social Impact in Commercial Games
'Forza' Monthly: Live Streaming a Franchise
Aesthetic Driven Development: Choosing Your Art Before Making a Game
Reading the Rules of 'Baba Is You'
Friday, March 20
Beyond Games as a Service with Live Ops
Kill the Hero, Save the (Narrative) World
'Void Bastards' Art Style Origin Story
Writing Tools Faster: Design Decisions to Accelerate Tool Development
Face-to-Parameter Translation via Neural Network Renderer
The Forest Paths Method for Accessible Narrative Design
'Gears 5' Real-Time Character Dynamics
Stop & Think: Teaching Players About Media Manipulation in 'Headliner'
Microsoft
They organized "DirectX Developer Day" where they announced DirectX 12 Ultimate - a fancy name for the updated Direc3D 12_2 with new major features including DXR (Ray Tracing), Variable Rate Shading, and Mesh Shaders.
DirectX Developer Blog
Microsoft DirectX 12 and Graphics Education @ YouTube
DirectX Developer Day 2020 #DXDevDay @ Mixer (talks as one long stream)
DXR 1.1 Inline Raytracing
Advanced Mesh Shaders
Reinventing the Geometry Pipeline: Mesh Shaders in DirectX 12
DirectX 12 Sampler Feedback
PIX on Windows
HLSL Compiler
NVIDIA
That's actually GPU Technology Conference (GTC) - a separate event. Their biggest announcement this month was probably DLSS 2.0.
RTX-Accelerated Hair Brought to Life with NVIDIA Iray
Material Interoperability Using MaterialX, Standard Surface, and MDL
The Future of GPU Raytracing
Visuals as a Service (VaaS): How Amazon and Others Create and Use Photoreal On-Demand Product Visuals with RTX Real-Time Raytracing and the Cloud
Next-Gen Rendering Technology at Pixar
New Features in OptiX 7
Production-Quality, Final-Frame Rendering on the GPU
Latest Advancements for Production Rendering with V-Ray GPU and Real-Time Raytracing with Project Lavina
Accelerated Light-Transport Simulation using Neural Networks
Bringing the Arnold Renderer to the GPU
Supercharging Adobe Dimension with RTX-Enabled GPU Raytracing
Sharing Physically Based Materials Between Renderers with MDL
Real-Time Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion of Complex Scenes using Spatial Hashing
I also found some other videos on Google:
DLSS - Image Reconstruction for Real-time Rendering with Deep Learning
NVIDIA Vulkan Features Update – including Vulkan 1.2 and Ray Tracing
3D Deep Learning in Function Space
Unleash Computer Vision at the Edge with Jetson Nano and Always AI
Optimized Image Classification on the Cheap
Cisco and Patriot One Technologies Bring Machine Learning Projects from Imagination to Realization (Presented by Cisco)
AI @ The Network Edge
Animation, Segmentation, and Statistical Modeling of Biological Cells Using Microscopy Imaging and GPU Compute
Improving CNN Performance with Spatial Context
Weakly Supervised Training to Achieve 99% Accuracy for Retail Asset Protection
Combating Problems Like Asteroid Detection, Climate Change, Security, and Disaster Recovery with GPU-Accelerated AI
Condensa: A Programming System for DNN Model Compression
AI/ML with vGPU on Openstack or RHV Using Kubernetes
CTR Inference Optimization on GPU
NVIDIA Tools to Train, Build, and Deploy Intelligent Vision Applications at the Edge
Leveraging NVIDIA’s Technology for the Ultimate Industrial Autonomous Transport Robot
How to Create Generalizable AI?
Isaac Sim 2020 Deep Dive
But somehow I can't find their full list with links to them anywhere on their website. More talks are accessible after free registration on the event website.
Intel
GDC 2020. A Repository for all Intel Technical Content prepared for GDC
Intel Software @ YouTube
Multi-Adapter with Integrated and Discrete GPUs
Optimizing World of Tanks*: from Laptops to High-End PCs
Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit and its Application to Games
Intel® ISPC in Unreal Engine 4: A Peek Behind the Curtain
Variable Rate Shading with Depth of Field
For the Alliance! World of Warcraft and Intel discuss an Optimized Azeroth
Intel® Open Image Denoise in Blender - GDC 2020
Variable Rate Shading Tier 1 with Microsoft DirectX* 12 from Theory to Practice
Does Your Game's Performance Spark Joy? Profiling with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers
Boost CPU performance with Intel® VTune Profiler
DeepMotion | Optimize CPU Performance with Intel VTune Profiler
Google for Games Developer Summit 2020 @ YouTube (a collection of playlists)
Mobile Track
Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote
What's new in Android game development tools
What's new in Android graphics optimization tools
Android memory tools and best practices
Deliver higher quality games on more devices
Google Play Asset Delivery for games: Product deep dive and case studies
Protect your game's integrity on Google Play
Accelerate your business growth with leading ad strategies
Firebase games SDK news
Cloud Firestore for Game Developers
Clouds Track
Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote
Scaling globally with Game Servers and Agones (Google Games Dev Summit)
How to make multiplayer matchmaking easier and scalable with Open Match (Google Games Dev Summit)
Unity Game Simulation: Find the perfect balance with Unity and GCP (Google Games Dev Summit)
How Dragon Quest Walk handled millions of players using Cloud Spanner (Google Games Dev Summit)
Building gaming analytics online services with Google Cloud and Improbable (Google Games Dev Summit)
Stadia Track
Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote
Bringing Destiny to Stadia: A postmortem (Google Games Dev Summit)
Stadia Games & Entertainment presents: Creating for content creators (Google Games Dev Summit)
Empowering game developers with Stadia R&D (Google Games Dev Summit)
Stadia Games & Entertainment presents: Keys to a great game pitch (Google Games Dev Summit)
Supercharging discoverability with Stadia (Google Games Dev Summit)
Ubisoft
Ubisoft’s GDC 2020 Talks Online Now
Online Game Technology Summit: Start-And-Discard: A Unified Workflow for Development and Live
Finding Space for Sound: Environmental Acoustics
Game Server Performance
NPC Voice Design
Machine Learning Summit: Ragdoll Motion Matching
Machine Learning, Physics Simulation, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies
Khronos: I can't find any information about individual talks from them. There is only a note about GDC 2020 Live Streams pointing to GDC Twitch channel.
AMD: No information.
Sony: No information.
Consoles: Last but not least, March 2020 was also the time when the details of the upcoming new generation of consoles have been announced - Xbox Series S and PlayStation 5. You can easily find information about them by searching the Internet, so I won't recommend any links.
If you know about any more GDC 2020 or other important talks related to programming that have been released recently, please contact me or leave a comment below and I will add them!
Maybe there a positive side of this pandemic? With GDC taking place, developers had to pay $1000+ entrance fee for the event. They had to book a flight to California and a hotel in San Francisco, which was prohibitively expensive for many. They had to apply for ESTA or a vista to the US, which not everyone could get. And the talks eventually landed behind a paywall, scoring even more money to the organizers. Now we can educate ourselves for free from the safety and convenience of our offices and homes.
Comments | #gdc #intel #nvidia #google #events #directx #rendering #microsoft #rendering Share
# Slavic Game Jam 2019 and our project
Thu
25
Jul 2019
Over the last weekend I took part in Slavic Game Jam 2019 in Warsaw, Poland. (See website, Facebook event, games at itch.io). It was a big one - over 200 participants, many of them coming from different countries all around Europe. The event started on Thursday with a session of talks in 2 parallel tracks. In the evening there was a pre-party in VooDoo club, with electronic music played from GameBoys and live visuals. The jam started on Friday with the announcement of the theme which was "growth". As always, this was just an inspiration, so participants were free to make any kinds of games.
During the event there was food provided, as well as fruits and vegetables, coffee, and ice cream - all for free, included in the ticket price. Also during the event there was "HydePark" organized in a separate room - something like a small Slot Art Festival where people could reserve time slots to organize their events of any kind - like a talk, a workshop, playing video games, or playing some instruments. It made me wonder if people could come to SGJ, not make any game and still enjoy themselves all the time!
The official communication between the organizers and participants happened on a designated Discord server. Organizers kept us informed about everything what's important by posting announcements to @everyone. And there was a lot happening. For example, they asked us to deliver an exactly 3-second video from our games, from which they later assembled this showreel. They were also making quality photos and posting them during the jam on the Facebook event.
The deadline for games was on Sunday midday. What's interesting is that SGJ was non competitive this time. There were no presentations of the games on stage, no voting or judging by any jury, no winners or prizes. Instead of that, everyone needed to prepare their game to be played by others at their desk. I liked that. I think it might even feel somewhat like preparing a booth at some game expo if taken seriously. Finally, as every good party has a before- and after-party, so in the evening we went to a bar :)
To summarize, I think that in some way it's quite easy to organize a (normal) game jam. You need not invite speakers like for a conference. You need not provide any hardware, as people will bring their own laptops. All you need to do is to have some venue booked for a weekend, and some marketing to invite people to come. Possibly that's why there are so many of such events. My friend once said that taking part in game jams can become a lifestyle - you can go to one almost every week. But SGJ was different. There was so much happening and it was so well organized that I'm sure it required enormous work from everyone involved. Congratulations to the entire crew, KNTG Polygon group from Warsaw University of Technology, volunteers and others!
Regarding the games created during the jam, I could see most of them were developed using Unity. Other technologies were used as well. There were few mobile games, few board games... I couldn't see many VR games. I was developing a game in a team of two, together with my friend Thomas Pendragon - just two programmers. We were planning to use Unreal but we eventually used Unity. We ended up making this game: see entry at itch.io (including binary download for Windows and MacOS).
In our game, you need to "grow" your city by creating a balanced number of places of 5 types (red for building, green for park, blue for water, yellow for airport, gray for road). The city visualization on the left is just eye-candy. You play a tile-matching game like Candy Crush Saga, but with one twist. In the bottom-center there is a Tetris-like indicator that goes up every time you make a match of some color. When all colors are matched, the bottom row is cleared - like in Tetris. If any color goes all the way to the top, you lose, so you need to consider which colors do you match to keep a good balance. That makes the game more strategic. Points are calculated for every match - more if you match 4 or 5 in a row or if something else is matched in the same move. How many points can you reach? The record during the jam was above 1000.
Thomas gave initial idea and designed the game. He did some coding (like the city building on the left), composed the music, added sound effects, made some graphics in Blender, and assembled the rest from some assets. I coded the core logic of the matching game, the whole UI, and juicing, like particle effects and animations.
As a post-mortem of this little project, here is the list of what went right:
What went wrong?
Comments | #productions #competitions #unity #events Share
# Global Game Jam 2019 - my impressions
Thu
31
Jan 2019
Last weekend the 2019 edition of Global Game Jam took place - a worldwide event where teams od developers gather in different sites all around the world to make games during two days and two nights. There was a large site in my city (Warsaw) - PolyJam, but I decided to go to Gdańsk to participate it their local site called Hackerspace Game Jam together with my friends.
Theme this year was "what home means to you". As always, participants interpreted it very differently. Those who have families associated home with all kinds of troubles caused by the other residents. Pooplers - the game I liked the most - is about babies crawling around the house and pooping competitively to cover as much surface as possible with their specific color, while avoiding the mother :) Home Alone: Cat edition is about a cat that can destroy and drop stuff from the shelves, all in first person perspective. Kapeć Defender is about a man who throws slipper (pol. "kapeć") at the wife and other people to be able to just sit and watch TV. There were more sci-fi settings as well. I liked the game Gwiezdni Somsiedzi a lot. It is the only one with multiplayer over network. Players have to control satellites flying in space, catch asteroids and throw them at the other players. Another space game was Glop where players have to cooperatively control various devices on the surface of a planet to make it fly, as well as shoot at incoming obstacles.
When it comes to technology, most teams used Unity engine. Some used JavaScript with some game framework. There was just 1 VR game. Many games included multiplayer on a single computer using gamepads, one included networked multiplayer.
Our team was a group of friends from the demoscene - 2 ex-Intel C++ developers and 2 DevOps currently working in a bank. Unfortunately we had no graphics artists. Although I would prefer to use Unity or Unreal Engine these days, we eventually decided to go the hard way and code in C++ using dxfw - the old framework developed by Krzysiek K., based on Direct3D 9. I had to remind myself this old technology before the jam, including all these D3DRS_ fixed-function pipeline states and D3DX math library. By the way: If the last version of DirectX SDK for DX9 was released in June 2010, can we already consider it a retro platform, along with Atari and Amiga? ;)
We used FMOD library for playing sound and music and Gainput for handling input from gamepads. We started from having a ray-traced sphere, so we had to code all the game logic and rendering from scratch, including displaying characters, UI, collisions, etc. We've developed some of the logic in C++ and some in Squirrel, because we had this scripting language already integrated with the framework. I had no previous experience with Squirrel, so I had to learn it very quickly. After going through the documentation, I concluded that I love it! It looks like a great scripting language for simple applications. It's not perfect, e.g. it lacks vector and matrix types so necessary in game development (just like pretty much every other programming language except HLSL/GLSL), but I like its simplicity and syntax. It is very similar to Lua in its overall philosophy - dynamically typed, object oriented, and based on key-value arrays. The syntax is not that weird though. It seems to follow the "principle of least astonishment" - it's very similar to C++, arrays are indexed from 0, plus ending statements with a semicolon is optional - end of line also works.
Participating in an event such as GGJ is always an adventure and an opportunity for many new experiences - much better than just sitting on the Internet at home. During this jam I not only learned Squirrel as a new programming language, but I've also heard what is it like to work as a programmer at a bank, I've registered on Asana (a web service for organizing TODO lists, just like Trello which I used before), and of course I had an opportunity to practice quick and dirty programming, as opposed to code carefully thought out and tested, like it has to be done in a regular job.
Finally, the game we've made is here: LazerBugz. It is a twin-stick shooter happening on a spherical surface of a planet. The "home" is the cosmic base that you have to defend while shooting at alien bugs and going out to gather randomly placed gems. It supports local co-op for any number of players using Xbox gamepads or keyboard and mouse. Some screenshots and a photo of people playing our game:
There was a competition on our site. We didn't take any of the first 3 places. We just got mention among the games who received a good number of votes. The game that won was Clash of T-Rexes - kind of Pong with two dinosaurs standing on two planets.
Official photo gallery from the event: Hackerspace Game Jam 2019
Comments | #productions #competitions #ggj #events Share
# "Co działa szybko, a co wolno w grafice 3D?" - talk at Collegium da Vinci
Tue
20
Nov 2018
(EN) This post will be in Polish because it's an invitation for my talk, which will happen 7th December 2018 in Collegium da Vinci in Poznań, and it will be in Polish.
(PL) Wszystkich zainteresowanych tworzeniem gier (także w Unity czy Unreal Engine, niekoniecznie zaawansowanym programowaniem grafiki w C++) mam przyjemność zaprosić na mój wykład pt. „Co działa szybko, a co wolno w grafice 3D?”, który odbędzie się 7 grudnia 2018 na uczelni Collegium Da Vinci w Poznaniu, w ramach cyklu spotkań „INTERAKCJE”.
Opis: Grafika 3D jest istotną częścią współczesnych gier video, a jej wydajne renderowanie jest niezbędne do płynnego działania gier w czasie rzeczywistym. Znajomość podstaw tej dziedziny jest przydatna niezależnie od wybranej technologii (np. Unity, Unreal Engine czy własny silnik pisany w C++). Wykład stanowi przegląd technik stosowanych w grafice renderowanej z użyciem współczesnych GPU z podkreśleniem, które z nich mogą stanowić problem wydajnościowy oraz jakimi sposobami można uzyskać lepszą wydajność.
Comments | #teaching #graphics #events Share
# Porting your engine to Vulkan or DX12 - video from my talk
Fri
06
Jul 2018
Organizers of Digital Dragons conference published video recording of my talk "Porting your engine to Vulkan or DX12":
PowerPoint slides are also available for download here: Porting your engine to Vulkan or DX12 - GPUOpen.
Comments | #vulkan #directx #teaching #events #video Share
# My upcoming 3 talks
Fri
11
May 2018
I'd like to invite you to my upcoming talks:
Tuesday 15 May at Czestochowa University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, I will talk about computer graphics. Topic is: "Grafika komputerowa jako kreatywna dziedzina informatyki".
One week later I will give more advanced talk, in English this time. At Digital Dragons conference in Kraków I will talk about "Porting your engine to Vulkan or DX12". Later that week I will discuss the same subject at Nordic Game conference in Malmö.
