GDC: Quick Show Report!

[ChrisM]

All,

Just got back from GDC and wanted to give everyone a quick update with regard to the show.

This ywar's GDC was bigger than last year with a record setting 10000+ people pre-registered, but something didn't seem quite right.  There was a lack of excitement than prior years, or so it felt.  

I spoke in 2 sessions this year.  One was at an event called the MMORPG Boot Camp that was held by Zona, Inc. in the Hilton hotel and was packed to capacity.  I talked about scalable architectures and how game companies today need to build scalibility and expanding features into their design, not as an afterthought.  The session was received VERY well and we got a tremendous amount of positive feedback.

Our second session, was interesting.....We had, let's just say, not a small but "intimate" group of people show up for the talk.  This was due to bad session time, location, and lack of a description in the show program, but, ok.

Our buddies at FullSail (Shawn Kendall, Sirus (what is his last name anyway?) and Dustin Clingman) did a full day tutorial on Java game programming (yea guys!).  The room was full for the entire day and was very well received.  I believe that this will become a perminant track for GDC moving forward.

We discussed Java technologies overall, Sun technologies in the games space, and showed game demos that were provided by Cyperstep, our very own Cas and Herkules, and FullSail.  The people that did attend were very impressed.  (BTW Cas, I suck at your game  Need more practice and have to try it when I haven't been out drinking the night before)

There was a 2 day mobility conference this year as well.  I did not attend, but I hear good things

Ok, the show.  The usual suspects were there.  ATI kicked major ass!  nVidia looked good but with the announcement of the ATI 9800, nVidia has their work cut out for them.

A VERY cool little company named aJile (www.ajile.com) was showing a cartridge for the GameBoy Advance that allows you to play J2ME/MIDP games on your GBA!  The cartridge has a Java processor with a hardware based VM and does multi-threading in hardware as well.  The performance is somewhere in the neighborhood of 8-10x performance increase over software processing.  The best part is....the cart will retail for $99!  The full development kit including the cart: $199.  EXTREMELY COOL INDEED!

Another semi-suprise was the focus on MMORPG by several companies.  Companies like Zona, Silver Platter, Big World, and Quazzel (sp?) were there showing their solutions for back end infrastructures to enable the next generation of games to exist.

Of course, Sony kicked ass, Nokia unveiled the nGage, and Microsoft discussed XBox 2.

Laslty, I was amazed with how many people came up to me and told me that they are developing in Java and really believe in the language.  Even more amazing () is the people who came up to me and told me how much they rely on this humble site  Thanks to all who participate and contribute.

All in all, it was a great show.  The parties were kick ass and I realize that I can't stay up drinking all night any more.  Body can't handle it

Peace out peeps

-SG

[Herkules]

I am a bit disappointed. I looked up several GDC coverages but neither Sun nor Java got mentioned anywhere.

Did I miss something? Sun had a booth? Are there images, other impressions....

Also, GDC is not mentioned at all on www.java.sun.com. Does not seem to be a very important event for Sun?

[princec]

Not this year it seems! Rats, I was hoping to have Sony execs swarming all over Alien Flux. Never mind :/

Chris, the version I gave you had broken laser collision detection Whoops! It's fixed now if you want to grab it again but in a few days the public alpha's out with a bunch of niceness and tweaks so you might just want to wait for it.

Cas

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[ChrisM]

Sun did not have a booth this year, tis true.  There is a good reason for this.....

Also, don't view the lack of coverage on java.sun.com as an indicator of Sun's interest in this area.  JSC is primarily a "corporate" site for "serious" Java developers, not us fun guys

We were there and had a ton of meetings.  Jeff can tell you just how tired we got

Cas, looking forward to seeing the game

-SG

[Herkules]

Sun did not have a booth this year, tis true.  There is a good reason for this.....

That is?

Also, don't view the lack of coverage on java.sun.com as an indicator of Sun's interest in this area.  JSC is primarily a "corporate" site for "serious" Java developers, not us fun guys

Sometimes our stuff and the serious things overlap!

Maybe it could help if serious world gets notified there is something strange like us. And if it's only that they can order a studid gadget to decorate an otherwise boring website

[erikd]

Also, don't view the lack of coverage on java.sun.com as an indicator of Sun's interest in this area.  JSC is primarily a "corporate" site for "serious" Java developers, not us fun guys

Then why the long haired dude babbling about virtual reality on JSC?  
My feeling is that either you're interested in this area and you cover it on your web page, or you don't cover it because you don't care that much.
As simple as that; Either you care or you don't.
('You' meaning 'Sun' of course)

But anyway thanks for the update. It's nice to read that there are still some Sun folks that do care  

[mitu]

Thanks for the update, it's nice keeping up with the bigger picture

[ChrisM]

Ok, ok...  the jav.sun.com comment was a bit of a joke, sorry if it didn't come across that way.

We maintained a low profile at the show this year and, as a result, there was no coverage from Sun this year in the press.  I can tell you that there is committment from Sun in this space and there is LOTS that is going on right now.  Unfortunately, we can't discuss outside of NDA and publicly.

I will be able to bring everyone up to speed as soon as I can.  Suffice to say that we had a ton of meetings with some big players and things are looking very good for Java.

Sorry to tease, but it's all I can say right now.

Peace out!

-SG

[markuskidd]

"The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating."- Jeff Kessleman, March 13, 2002

http://www.java-gaming.org/discus/messages/19/1024.html?

This thread seems even more amusing a year later  

[erikd]

Ok, ok...  the jav.sun.com comment was a bit of a joke, sorry if it didn't come across that way.

Oh oops, it must have been my usual monday morning temper  
I'm humourless during those few hours of the week, but
The Jeff Kesselmann quote made it better  

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[ChrisM]

"The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating."- Jeff Kessleman, March 13, 2002

http://www.java-gaming.org/discus/messages/19/1024.html?

This thread seems even more amusing a year later  

Ahahahaha!  Very good.  Markuskidd, I am confidant that we will have a BIG bowl for you to start chewing on, so save your appetite

-SG

[cfmdobbie]

Naturally, the exact size and colour of the bowl cannot be mentioned at this time.  Maybe soon.  It's going to be fantastic though!

[erikd]

[Breakfast]

If it were possible to get a bit of a write-up of the fullsail tutorial, or at least a summary of what it covered, that would be really interesting.

[shawnkendall]

We will have the complete slides on the IMI web site by the end of the week. (www.imilabs.com)
The demos as mention in the tutorial will come piece by piece later.

Thanks for your interest!

_______________________________________________
Shawn Kendall
Course Director 3DCC and RT3D
Full Sail Real World Education
skendall@fullsail.com  

Technical Director
Immediate Mode Interactive
Shawn.Kendall@imilabs.com

[shawnkendall]

Wow, double sig.
Sorry 'bout dat!

[erikd]

Thanks Shawn!  

[gdada]

Well Sun was presentr at GDC big time this year, only it was not on Sun'S booth. Java technology was big:

- Nokia was showing the nGage and three other Symbian phones - all run MIDP and PJava. PLus half a dozen MIDP phones

- Motorola was showing its MIDP 2.0 phones

- Sony Ericsson was lunching its Java phones at the show, including the incredible P800 and the new 610 which has an integrated camera - nice!

- Metrowerks was demonstrating J2ME development tools and a global applciations catalog to get developers and business opportunities together.

- During the 2-day mobile conference, J2ME was the most talked about technology. Do you think the fact that a few undred million phones shipping this year will be Java enabled has something to do with it?

Sun had a small booth (a cube for meetings really) by the exhibitor's lounge , and I stopped by half a dozen times to find it empty.

Also, I spoke with lots of press and analysts - they all agree mobile gaming was the big news of the show, and most of it is Java mobile gaming.

-GD

[ChrisM]

Sorry we missed you, we were combing the floor all day and in and out of meeting rooms.  It was a HECTIC show

-SG

[William]

IGDA posted some proof on its front page (the pic is also found just above the bottom of this page: http://www.igda.org/events/events_gdc_2003.php) that Chris was indeed at the GDC and some circumstantial evidence indicating that he may have talked to someone from Sony (go Java on the PS2!)

[ChrisM]

OK!  You caught me....

Didn't think the drunk pix would get out

That is indeed Bret from SCEA, very good guy BTW.  He is 1/2 of the wonder team at SCEA for 3rd party development.  GDC was a great event and I had the opportunity to catch up with some friends and continue pushing for Java and this community.

More info to follow, soon

-Chris

[shawnkendall]

I am happy to say the slides from the GDC Java Gaming tutorial are up on the IMI web site.  Some of the examples are there as well, we will be adding more of them as we get them released.

Sorry for the delay!
Enjoy!
<a href="www.imilabs.com">www.imilabs.com</a>

[shawnkendall]

Cut and paste link :-(

http://www.imilabs.com

[Herkules]

Nice - but not much to learn for us here....

[Matzon]

but not much to learn for us here...

My thoughts exactly - seems *very* basic?

[shawnkendall]

I only posted the slides links here because there was a request too.

I agree it was rather basic, if you have done things like JNI-> native through bytebuffers, and used standard Java media APIs.

However, at the presentation, I would say that we went over the majority of the attendees most of the time.  And those that we didn't had really great Q&A sessions.

Anyway, all Java Game Hackerus Experiencius please disregard. ;-)

[shawnkendall]

One other note:

This are the SLIDES from the presentation.  Not the actual dialog, it was 8 hours long ( minus breaks and lunch ).

In any case, unless you were there and also took notes, I don't think these will be all that helpful.

[Breakfast]

I wasn't thinking the slides would be a useful learning resource, I was just intrigued to see what kind of stuff was covered that day.

Thanks Shawn.

[bmyers]

Having attended the talk, I can definitely say that the slides alone do not nearly capture the depth of discussion that happened in the talk, and in the Q&A sessions, and especially in the informal discussions during the breaks.

Great talk, Shawn, Syrus, and Dustin!  

Now where's that particle code you were going to send me?  

And maybe you can post a screen-shot of the cel-shading demo?

[shawnkendall]

We will definitely post the particle code as soon as we are through prying it from the old Humid run-time system (the updating and behavior classes are core to any per-frame behavior such as the particles and we cannot release the complete source).

In the tutorial I explain how to do it in Java3D, with the update coming from the source of your choice, so I showed the Java3D part of the code not the Humid core connection.  In reality, it's not a big task to pull the particles out, just a question of when we have a break to do that.

As far as a screeshot of the cel-shading...
One, this is difficult because the examples rely on our custom content loaders, i.e. the models we load have information for the cel-shading code.
Two, we learned our lesson in this forum before. (rant alert)

[RANT]
We are not going to release imagines of anything in the future that is not available as downloadable exmaples.  The grief and criticism we received for just trying to show good Java demos was too great, and the explaining lasted for months (unfortunately, the Java community is one of the biggest obstacles to the Java community - not unlike Linux and others I suppose).  In addition, sometimes the content (the model) it's self is not releasable. So screenshots should not be not expected until a actual demo is released if ever.

The flip-side is that we have on several occasions release examples and pieces to specific individuals that contact us directly or that were working on projects that could benefit from seeing a particular solution, not unlike what you might except from a typical game community company.  There are no examples to download from the RenderWare site and there engine was part of $2 billion of the gaming industries revenues last year.
[/RANT]

If you attended the tutorial, we will be happy to get you the particle demo and at least the core Java3D cel-shader code ASAP.