my GDC experience Ch 03

Wednesday was a huge day for the conference.  I was busy most of it, but i did have enough open time to explore some of the expo floor, and go to one talk.



Just so happened to be the unreal talk. With unreal's CEO Tim Sweeney

In a packed room, I sat toward the front of the room, eager to hear about how unreal would be handling it s new free business model. Being as I'm an artist, but would love to make games myself, I love the way unreal works, and was glad to hear that its visual scripting system would now be more accessible, whereas unities plug-in would still cost 100 dollars. as long as i don't make anything especially profitable, unreal 4 would be free to use. Adding to this excitement, who should come in and unveil their new product but:

Jen-hsun Huang, CEO  of nvidia. The Titian X is supposedly a marvel in GPU processing. I don't fully understand it's specs, but they do sound cool.


The expo floor! Perhaps one of the main reasons to go to any conference is the ability to go to their exhibition floors and career pavilion. GDC is no different. this is the place where things happen that you cannot watch on the vault. Even if you could, who else has a PC running an nvidia X graphics card?
I could have spent all five days of the conference down in the exposition hall, and still needed more time. There was so much to see, and still supposedly this was a slow year. there were several places vying for attention in the VR headset world, mobile games were the center of attention for many as the graphics of the little computer in your pocket can now rival the top line consoles from last gaming generation.

Many tech giants were pushing what they are known to do as well as promoting areas where they may not be as well known. For instance Nvidia is working and pushing a cloud based gaming console called the Nvidia shield. Houdini was promoting their Houdini Engine, which would allow for better portability of effects through the different artist programs. 

Mocap will make the non animators life so much easier. just saying.

After a day heavy in expo exploration,  the evening was exciting and filled with the Game choice awards. 

This event was filled with humor and awards for games. 

For instance it was joked Gabe Newell would speak, but for obvious reasons he did not. Gamer humor.

Monument valley I believe took home the most awards, but GOY went to Shadow of mordor. good job :D