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March 12, 2005

GDC 2005, one of the best experiences of my life!

Wow. Just....wow. I can't believe how incredibly good this week has been for me on so many levels! The classes have been not only interesting, but extremely useful on a very practical level (can't wait to get all the slides!), the expo was fun (and the Nintendo Booth babes were nice eye candy =) ) for the little time that I managed to get wandering the floor, the parties were great (especially ours, which just rocked!), I got my quaternion camera working well and my movement system working in 3D while I was here (yes, I actually managed to find a few spare hours to code!), and I got to have fun and interact with really fun people. This week is definitely going down as one of the best of my life.

So, for those who are interested, here's what I did on a day-by-day basis:

Monday: After getting the first good night of sleep I've had in weeks, I went to Advanced Visual Effects with Direct3D. I was completely blown away by this talk, but I already talked about it, so I won't bore you with it again.

Tuesday: Went to The Microsoft Game Developer Day. Mostly great stuff with a couple of interesting but not quite "great" talks thrown in. Started with a really fun walkthrough of computer game history in the last 10 years or so. It's amazing how far games have come in 10 years and it was fun to remember what it used to be like =). Learned a little about the Common Game Controller and what they're planning with it, saw a talk on Pre-Computed Radiance Transfer that seemed really out of place and was kind of ruined by trying to cram too much subject matter into too short of a time, but was otherwise interesting. Saw demos and got tutorials on PIX for Windows and XBox (and let me just say...WOW). Learned lots of practical tips on DirectX programming optimizations (really useful stuff!) and then saw a presentation of what Visual Studio 2005 will be (and got a free copy of the beta =) ). Can't WAIT for that to get released, if for no other reason than it makes debugging STL easy. But there's actually a TON more to VS 2005 that will just continue to make it the killer IDE. The new TEAM functionality looks really promising too. And finally, got a glimpse of what's planned for DirectX-10 (though they're calling it Windows Graphics Foundation since it'll be totally integrated into Longhorn). Overall, an excellent event that was well worth attending. Oh, and I got my picture on GameDev.Net!

Yeah, ok, not really =)
That night, I ended up going to Criterion's RenderWare party with Steve. Not being good at shmoozing, ended up sitting at the bar, gabbing with Steve and enjoying the ambience. Won't elaborate on my condition at the end of the party, but I did write this little.."gem". LOL!

Wednesday: The main conference started and most people arrived. The day-long tutorials turned into hour-long sessions and the pace got a little more hectic. Ended up doing:

Thursday: Another day of classes, and a good party!

Friday: Woke up still buzzed. *sigh*