Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll
Blargh. Between the site being down for maintenance, the wireless connection here being cranky, and my stupid laptop liking to run at 100% CPU load sometimes for some reason until it shuts off – I hope I can finish this and post it before something happens to me.
Yeeesh.
Anyways I’m on a break between sessions right now, I just got done with Dave Weinstein’s talk on security teams working with game development teams and how the two teams are actually working towards the same goal and that developers shouldn’t be looking at security guys as people who are trying to ruin their game in search of a more secure product. Earlier I attended a talk on AI for dynamic MMO environments. I took a few notes on both but I can reference the slides they made available on CD. The AI talk reminded me of an AI talk given to my local IGDA chapter by a developer from THQ who worked on Company of Heroes, an RTS with destructible (read: dynamic) environments. It was also given at last year’s GDC, I’ll have to look it up to reference it in my final write-up.
So other than attending sessions, of which I have one more coming up, I’ve just been doing the networking game. Got two more people I’ll be talking with in terms of content, one of them actually is from the MS security team from the last lecture. Kinda stinks that I haven’t run into anyone else familiar, but I hear the attendance for this conference is running around 350-400 so it’s not too surprising. And it’s mostly Seattle-based companies as well other than the various sponsors.
I also stopped by the “Expo” they have set up here. John Hattan would have cried had he seen it, it was pretty sad. I don’t think they’ve gotten much traffic and I don’t think it will be back next year if this conference continues unless they find a better place to put it. But there really isn’t a better place so that would mean finding a new venue. The Expo is on the completely opposite side of the hotel than all the session rooms, and there are only 10min breaks between sessions (many of which have been running over their 50min limits) so that leaves little time or compulsion for people to walk over to where the booths are.
Still, as a whole this has been a pretty decent conference to me, however I don’t have anything to compare it to besides GDC, which really isn’t a fair comparison (though in some ways I like this better than GDC). As I continue to attend more small conferences like these, and medium-sized ones (like Austin GDC) I’ll get a better idea of what makes up a well-run conference. Still, I have no major complaints about this one.
Well it’s been fun. As I said I’ll be writing up a full report over the next week, so expect it sometime before Friday. Now hopefully I can post this.
Cross your fingers…
Anyways, I’ve been able to post up the remainder of the Linux Game Development articles. If you page ahead through October you’ll see them all scheduled, descriptions included of course. Troy Hepfner, the author of this series, is the president and owner of My Game Company, an independent game development studio that produces clean, family-friendly games for children of all ages. Anyone looking to get into Linux development? This series is for you!
