Focus on GCDC: Development

In the third and final preview of this year's key sessions at the Games Convention Developers Conference 2008, we're looking over the development conference track, a wide and encompassing subject now the industry has more successful and diverse platforms than ever.

GCDC this year will serve as a hub for developers looking to teach and learn and will have a wide variety of development sessions spanning business, science, and mobile gaming at Leipzig, August 18 - 20.

The development sessions will not only feature input from notable developers but also hardware manufacturers, especially that of Intel's senior application engineer, Basher Khan, who will kick off the event with his colleague Jerome Muffat-Meridol to talk about "Intel Tools - Accelerate your PC Software Performance".

Khan will follow this up with another lecture, also featuring Intel's application engineer Steve Hughes, on "Game Development on a Moving Platform". This lecture will focus on the startling growth of the laptop and other mobile PC devices as gaming platforms, as well as the hardware challenges this produces.

Intel's senior application engineer, Leigh Davis, will deliver a session on "Driving DirectX into a Parallel World", looking at how developers can best use a CPU to drive video cards.

And another session from Intel, this time by senior graphics architect, Remi Arnaud, will focus on "COLLADA - An Intermediate Format for Game Developers". During the talk Arnaud will describe how COLLADA could save time and money of thousands of 3D content developers, while giving an overview of the application's new features.

Autodesk, the world-leading software design solutions company, will also provide three sessions at GCDC, with Andy Branmall to present one on an as-yet-unannounced topic.

The Tuesday of the event will play host to a panel on the links between the game and music industries. Featuring Daniel Kozlov of Streamline Studios and EMI Music's Erroll Antonie and Floris Janssen, the panel is called "Cross Media Projects: Bringing Games and Music Industries Together". The panel will talk about the differences between the two industries and outline strategies to overcome them.

ArenaNet's writing team lead, Bobby Stein, RPG freelance writer Stephane Bura, Steven E Meretzky of Bluefang Games and industry veteran Bob Bates will deliver a panel on "Game Design". The panellists will discuss gameplay mechanics and game designer habits.

Meanwhile GCDC's "Tech-Track" will consist of five different sessions spanning a variety of topics, including:

• "Simplifying Cross-Platform Development in a Multi-Core Environment" by Vincent Scheib of Emergent Game Technologies.
• "Variable-Size Penumbra with Variance Shadow Mapping" by Sebastian Tusk, technical director at The Games Company.
• "A Simple and Powerful Property System for C++" by David Salz, CEO of Bitfield.
• "Practical Use of Screen Space Ambient Occlusion" by Michal Drobot, visual technical director at Reality Pump Game Development Studios.

GamesIndustry.biz will be on hand at GCDC to cover the event taking place at Leipzig, August 18-20.