Somehow I’ve all made it through many hours of very interesting presentations — still my spirits weakened: Four hours of sleep a day just isn’t enough for conventions like the FMX where one should be as sharply focused as a Pong-player in order not to miss anything: Today it was everything about games mostly.

The Russians at my hotel made a lot of noise, chatting on the hallways until 4am, chatting in the hallways from 7am on and using the floor’s toilet¹ every half an hour. But I was so exhausted from the evening at the Schräglage that I slept well for the first time.

The Plan

Turkish Coffee

That’s what I wanted to do,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

After checking out I was way too early so I visited the Starbucks once again where I wanted to check my email (which piled op constantly — unfortunately not with responses to my applications). I ordered a tall Iced Caramel Macchiato and went to the counter where also some teen with Turkish background was talking to the Tunesian barista giving out the coffee. Somehow I got involved in the chat and the barista said

I nodded

and so I spent twenty minutes chatting with the two guys, the barista derogatory talking about women and his girlfriend using terms I won’t reproduce on behalf of decency. The Turkish teen, after asking about my strange accent (= Austrian), asked me a question on his mind in such a straight forward way that I nearly chocked on my macchiato.

Pause.

That was a crapload full of very sensitive questions so I took my time to explain it all very detailed and as neutral as possible.²

the barista said, threatening with his fists; people turned around. It was time to gently switch the topic to something else.

I asked the teen but the barista replied

the teen didn’t pay attention to the raging barista.

he pointed absentmindedly onto the floor. Grey tiles. One was cracked.

That was hard! I asked him whether he had sent out any applications and he nodded.

the barista looked up from behind the counter, opening his mouth for some reply but got distracted by a blond girl in a mini skirt passing by outside. The teen asked me about my admittance card that was hanging around my neck. I told him a little about the fmx and the companies that came to my mind he might know: Pixar, DreamWorks, Disney.

It rang a bell and for a secon he drifted away in memories, probably of a film. I seized the moment:

He shook my hand, the barista was grumbling something and I thanked him for the coffee. Then it was time for me to get to the first presentation.

Bread and Games. But mostly games

fmx flags,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

Videogames Today and Tommorow’s Gamers by Joseph Olin, president of the Academy of Interactive, Arts & Sciences, who was the host of the day’s other presentations too. He just showed a couple of statistics and demographics followed by a short history of innovative games:

Zork (1980) as an example for immersion, Tempest (1980) for adjustable difficulty, Contra (1988) for the first cheat codes, Prince of Persia (1989) for it’s realtime challenge and score, Lost Vikings (1992) for multiple characters in the gameplay (by the guys who later became Blizzard) and Flashback (1992) for its handdrawn backgrounds and animation.

He also mentioned Into the Pixel, an opportunity for game artists to submit their works for exhibitions about the art of game making.

Animation Systems on Assasin’s Creed by Sylvain Bernard from Ubisoft really got into the nuts and bolts of the animation system they used for creating a blend of motion-captured animation and keyframed animation they call “stylized reality” animation. They tried it totally realistic at first but the ore real the movements were, the less resposive was the control over the movement, e.g. when you stop pressing forward on the gamepad Altair would have had to finish the animation cycle he was in first, then going into a “stop” animation which would total to about one and a half seconds of movement not controlled by the player.
And there were a lot of animations for the three (or five?) animation artists: Alone for the ground movement existed 168 different animations.

Collision detection and prevention during fights as well as making sure the involved characters were in sync to the animation was achieved by them sharing the same reference “pivot” during the animation.
Cloth movement was done procedurally for Altair, for all the NPCs there were hinge bones without collisions used as handles for the forces.

Altair shared his skeleton with every character in the game. This made it possible to use the animation in a modular fashion: If Altair’s ground-movement fit also for a blacksmith you could keep it (saving memory), the same time you could say the blacksmith NPC has a different set of fighting animation.

Although I had troubles staying awake I realized how much work and how much brain power was in the final great looking game. Can’t wait for the PC version!

Developing Games with Pixar was canceled thanks to some tragedy in the speaker’s family. So I went to (a different) Starbucks, guzzled some Strawberry & Cream Frappucino before returning to the convention for my very last presentation of the day:

Visual Design in Video Games by Ryan Wilkerson from the Microsoft Game Studios. I was expecting some artistic guidance but he mostly spoke about the perfect pipeline, from finding references to the final shipped product, along with some description how the engines render stuff, namely in passes — much like we do for our 3d-projects.

Ryan had to cut much of his presentation shortly before because he got a call that most of the conceptual stuff he wasn’t allowed to show wasn’t announced yet and hence top secret. But from what he mention in his answer to one question about emotional involvement of NPCs and that “Molyneux will kill me if I tell too much” I am making a wild guess that the top secret un-announced project will be Fable 3. A very wild guess though.

That was the FMX for me, Donsch and Joschi who were my passengers for the drive back to Salzburg. I really was expecting heavy microsleep like the one I had during the ILM presentation, Carlos Baena’s animation show or that day’s Assasin’s Creed display of excellence. But everything went fine, apart from the very dense traffic slowing us below the recommended speed for the whole journey, so it took us exactly 4:30 to get back. Without any microsleep!

Speaking of which: I gotta get some macro sleep…

What I have learned today

My Yaris parking for 20 €.,
originally uploaded by Phil Strahl.

• How Austria is perceived by the world outside.
• That three different coffee beverages are too much before the first presentation.
• That old is new (in terms of game ideas).
• That a simple basic gameplay crafted very well is key.
• That casual games have much in common with short films.
• That directing a game is the Director’s Vision vs. Player Choice: They exclude each other.
• That setting up everything (everything!) modular is a good way to avoid redoing a lot of work.
• Modeling detail textures to use as normal maps is probably faster than getting them right by drawing them in Photoshop as bump-maps.
• That content creation for a game is much like cooking where you have a recipe (concept), ingredients (assets), your kitchen (development tools) and your finished dish (runtime). Now you hope everybody’s happy but there’s no accounting for taste.
• That Microsoft Games is producing 95% for the console market and only 5% for the PC market. And they aren’t the only ones. Tough times ahead…
• That the DOOM-generation (in terms of game-makers) all got kids themselves now and don’t want to make games that they wouldn’t allow their (pre-)teens to play.
• That procedural animation will be a big topic in the following couple of years.

1. my room was the only one having a shower, TV and a toilet on the floor [back]
2. For those of you who don’t know: He was referring to the incest case a couple of days ago that stirred international interest because of the incident’s ripples: See here or here for the story. [back]