Landed Monday night, straight to sleep, up Tuesday for a full day of presentations, meetings, setting up demos and then off to the pub for a swift half. Wednesday through Friday included booth appearances, two speaker presentations, meetings and of course a quick tour of the EXPO floor to see what's hot in 2014.
V.R NETWORKING AT THE IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGY
ALLIANCE MEETING ON TUESDAY (http://www.ita3d.com/)
I think this picture sums up my GDC week very well. One the face of it, it looks like Lee checking out the latest V.R experience, a wires-free peripheral vision virtual reality running Android OS with full calibration-free head tracking all the way from London (amazingly had to fly half way around the world to check out tech from my own backyard).
On closer inspection though, you will see that Lee is drinking a virtual beer. The combination of cool future tech and the perfect beer is very much the take-away from GDC 2014, and I was greatly honored to be part of it.
Made most of my social feeding on Twitter which meant my blog was pretty silent for the week I was away. Naturally no development was made, but plenty of testing was done on several Ultrabooks plus a snazzy new device which was the size of a box of teabags and contained a full PC with Iris-Pro graphics. This little brick ran my Reloaded demo at super fast speed, even though it was an integrated graphics device, and I was quick to learn that Intel are now dedicating about 75% of their available silicon on the latest processors to graphics!
For Reloaded this means we are really hitting the mark when it comes to performance, and being best friends with integrated graphics means we are also best friends with low-end graphics cards too!
As much as I enjoyed my time talking shop during the event, I also enjoyed my occasional stroll around the EXPO floor looking at the amazing tech and learning of the incredible announcements. Had a chance to meet some of the guys and gals at PrioVR and try out their body suit, which in my humble opinion is a game changer you can only appreciate by using it.
The announcements from CryTek and Epic are set to once again to transform the ecology of game making solutions, and probably giving Unity developers something to think about too :)
New hardware devices are coming thick and fast, and I managed to check out three new VR headsets as well. Wanted to try the Sony headset but the cue was a mile long, but by all accounts is as good as the new Rift DK2. I put my order in for DK2 as soon as I got back, and will be watching and waiting for what the Sony VR device does.
I don't want my blog to decent into a GDC report as I am sure you can check out the news from dedicated bloggers. My personal impression was that GDC represented some of the best stuff happening in the games industry right now and it's cool to be part of it.
My own GDC demo could have been better I felt. The visuals needed to be a few notches higher, it had some stability issues on my older Ultrabook and my new voice-control system suffered from the overall 'noise' of a large conference style event. The introduction of effective noise-cancellation technology would to wonders to improve that scenario! Amazingly I felt the performance was fine during my demo, but I did notice something very strange which meant even though 'mouselook' was silky fast, the 'move player' stepping was very stuttery. I suspected the physics coding was to blame, and will be something to look at when it becomes an issue for the community.
I did return to a nice surprise in the form of a new 'grass system' which eliminates the CPU stall issue and increases overall processing speed. I also got some free shader tweaks as well, and it looks as though I get extra speed with no visual or functional drawbacks. I will be pouring through the code once I have cleared my not insubstantial email mountain.
My attention was given to a forum post which raised issue over the lack of feedback during GDC week, and the lack of a beta to replace the last one which left many users without a stable version. Hopefully I have addressed the lack of info with this blog and I will be looking at the second point this week. I should get back into the coding swing of things from Tuesday but I have meetings Wednesday and Thursday so expect this to be a slow week for development progress, but I will still blog for you, even if it's a picture of the juicy steak I ate Wednesday night ;)
Welcome back Lee! " but I have meetings Wednesday and Thursday so expect this to be a slow week for development progress".... thats definately not good news. People are getting anxious about next beta. Things should move a little bit faster...forums are getting dead, because there is nothing new to play with. I think another week without any progress will not be good. Sorry for that criticism, but this is how I, and more people are feeling...
ReplyDeleteI agree ,been spending bucket loads on steam waiting for something new from reloaded to play around with.Seems a bit trickle fed atm.
DeleteGlad you had a good time Lee,as for the next beta i can wait.Looking forward to when performance problems are sorted and the new toys are put into reloaded for us to play with.
ReplyDeleteI can't wait. That's mainly because I am unable to do anything stuck at a bug :/
DeleteDidn't know you were posting about GDC on Twitter (makes sense, but there was no posting about it on FB, nor on the Forum); as such I and many others had the impression that you had gone dark during GDC (unlike other development companies). Any reason why no one let us know about the twitter feeds?
ReplyDeleteIndeed. I assumed there was simply not communication from Lee at all.
DeleteWelcome back, hopey you gyus enjoyed the trip - looks like Lee just got hooked into vr land.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the blog and the forum messages and the Free AGK :),
lookin forward to the next Reloaded Beta.
Welcome back Lee - did you get a chance to demo DK2? I am having a hard time holding off on ordering as I am thinking that the final release will be coming shortly after...
ReplyDeleteI am very excited for Sony to be in the VR game as well - I will be grabbing one of these as soon as they release!!!
I think the PiroVR sensor suit would be a great thing to intergrate into Reloaded... What was the secret sauce? Remeber? Cheers!
ReplyDeleteFrom the forum
Delete(The 'secret sauce' was in fact the addition of some experimental 'lean-detection' and 'voice-control' in the main editor and test game (a module created for Reloaded by a non-Lee coder) and using the Intel RealSense technology. I also demonstrated the performance of the engine on the Iris-Pro technology, Intel's latest integrated graphics solution for Ultrabooks and other larger-mobile devices.)
Oh, thanks, sounds cool.
DeleteWelcome back lee you refer to "stepping was very stuttery" we have been saying this on the forum for some time now.
ReplyDeleteCome on dudes time to crack the whip near 2 months since a beta im all for improving betas but side tracking can be a killer if toooo long. Time to give us candy :)
ReplyDeleteMovement being stuttery is an issue we have harped on about for ages. It needs sorting before the next release. Even if FPS is good, the stuttery running makes it awful regardless.
ReplyDeleteWelcome back to the show! Sounds like you and Rick have been networking the games for us already. I am proud to be working with you all for this latest project. Looking forward to the next round of play.
ReplyDeleteDr. Colosso
It is never wise to develop in a vacuum :) I could easily lock myself in a room and spit out betas like fortune cookies, but I think you would be pretty disappointed with the constant disappointments from a stream of 'not yet' messages and taking a breather to view the whole game industry landscape is good for the soul, recharges the batteries and creates a renewed sense of urgency. P.S. The 'stutter' only happened on Ultrabooks, testing which only happened because of the GDC booth work, otherwise I would have never seen it on my desktop PC. I think this is how the universe works ;) If you want evidence that I was doing something other than drinking beer, here is a sample of my presentation work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABrngfSWL2o#t=23
ReplyDeletePerson walking by the camera, I hope he wasn't leaving. Must have been an ouch.
DeleteGood work Lee! You have a lot on your plate; please, do us all a favor and take a beer break. ;-)
ReplyDeletewelcome back lee m8, stuttering movement yeah had that for beta 5 but think it goes back to beta 4 or maybe 3. anyways hope you had fun and learned some helpful stuff for reloaded cant wait to see all the new fps and such in the next beta release :) hope it proves to be as fast as we all hope it will, and more.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I know, I've seen the stuttering problem on my PC. I'll check properly later.
ReplyDeleteGood to see you're still alive, Lee! You should've said you'd be tweeting. I had no idea because I rarely use Twitter.