Dear Friends:
This week, I'm in beautiful San Francisco, California. The weather here this week is simply fantastic. I'm here to attend the annual Game Developers Conference, where folks from throughout the gaming industry gather to share ideas, show new techniques and introduce new technology. This conference is focused on the actual creation of games, but has grown to include just about every aspect of the game industry.
I arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area early in the week and received a frantic call from my boss to attend a meeting taking place in Santa Clara, about 50 miles south of SF. I had to jump in a car and drive during the morning rush hour. This is pretty much what I experienced for over 90 minutes:
This is definitely not one of the things I miss about California...
That afternoon, I made my way back to SF. The weather, as I indicated above, was amazing...even for San Francisco ; ) The sky was blue...the sun was shining...I tried to take a couple of pics as I was walking to the conference:
Over the next two days, I spent the majority of my time inside the Moscone Center, at the conference. The conference is spread out over three buildings...it's a big event. The biggest part is call the Expo Floor, which is what most people think a tradeshow looks like. Lots of booths and display areas that are dedicated to companies that sell products in the game industry. Here, the focus is on tools and technology that can be used by game developers. My company had a booth with lots of game demonstrations. It was quite popular ; )
One of the demonstrations that we created was truly spectacular. However, you have to be a tech nerd to truly appreciate it. Here's the deal - we had 3 different 4K monitors, all working from a single PC graphics card. The game that was playing on this set-up was BattleField 4. True HD images are about 1,920 pixels wide by 1,080 pixels tall. This set-up that we created had 11,520 pixels wide by 2,160 pixels tall:
Outside of our own booth, there were lots of other companies that were pitching products and solutions to these game developers:
Our biggest competitor - Intel
One booth had a lot of people crowded inside. The company used 3D printers to create figurines out of video game characters. They used some of the most advanced 3D printers that I've seen, to take the 3D image of a game character and turn that into a small statuette that you could keep as a souvenir:
The level of detail here is simply amazing...from a 3D printer....
Another booth was demonstrating software that lets you capture the motion of a dancer or athlete - and translate that to characters in a game. They hired a woman to basically dance on a stage for hours, to show that the software works. I hope they paid her well...that's a LOT of movement ; )
The majority of my time was spent in meetings with game developers. Inside of our booth, we had a collection of meeting rooms. I met with some creative people that wanted to talk about ways to improve their games. I absolutely loved the meetings and had a blast talking about some of the games that will be introduced in the next year.
That's it from sunny California! I'm on my way back home, to see my family. I have a few days in Austin before heading out on another big trip. More later... ; )
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