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Track
Descriptions
Audio
Casual Games
Compilers and Code Quality
CPU
and System Programming
Graphics
LIVE and Networking
Partners
Producer and Business Development
Quality Assurance and Certification
Visual Arts
XNA Game Studio
AUDIO
Bloops and
bleeps? Hah! Today’s games continue to tear down the boundaries to
immersive and dynamic audio as key aspects of story-telling, game
play, and entertainment. This year’s Gamefest audio track will cover
not only the incredible array of technologies that are available
today to empower sound implementers to create their art, but also an
examination of the palette of libraries and tools on the way to make
sonic sculpture even easier and more powerful in the future. Topics
will include Microsoft platform audio tools and technologies,
including XAudio2, the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool
(XACT), xWMA, XMA, and many more; case-study discussions with title
audio creators, who offer their own experiences and strategies on
the platforms; and other subjects that will help develop a deeper
understanding of the interlocking technical, creative, and
logistical aspects of cross-platform audio development for Windows,
Xbox 360, and other Microsoft platforms. This track is designed for
professional audio programmers, composers, sound designers, audio
directors, and it also provides topics of interest to game producers
and designers.
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CASUAL GAMES
Microsoft
Casual Games offers the best of casual gaming on multiple platforms,
reaching 120 million global players each month. Come learn about
Microsoft casual gaming services such as MSN Games, Windows LIVE
Messenger, and Xbox LIVE Arcade. Discover the lessons casual games
teach us about making big budget games accessible to a much broader
audience. Hear about Microsoft's upcoming efforts to further
broaden the audience and what these efforts mean to developers who
want to drive the next wave of growth across the games industry.
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COMPILERS
AND CODE QUALITY
As both the
hardware and software for games become increasingly complex,
development tools are evolving to meet these challenges, including
enhanced support for parallelism, improved multi-target builds, and
upcoming debugging visualizations. Catch up on recent updates to the
Xbox 360 toolset, including new compiler optimizations and PGOLite.
Learn about Microsoft Visual Studio support for the TR1 extensions
to the C++ standard library, and hear our future plans for the
proposed C++0x standard. Discover how static analysis tools,
combined with SAL annotations, can prevent the late-night debugging
of those ”stupid-little” bugs we all wish we could avoid. Finally,
avoid the pitfalls and pratfalls of undefined C++ behavior.
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CPU AND
SYSTEM PROGRAMMING
Do you feel
that you are in a deadlock every time that you think about
multithreading? You are not alone. Learn about an array of new and
existing technologies and tools that are designed to help you scale
your game and fully utilize all cores and processors. You may think
you have your game optimized for VMX or SSE, but wait until you see
our code snippets! Is your title short on storage and slow on
loading times? We have new tools and compression APIs that may help
you out of this bind. Dying to find out what researchers are working on
for the next-generation OS and hardware? Learn all this and more in
CPU and System programming talks, diving deep into current and
future technologies that are based on real-world experiences.
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GRAPHICS
The graphics
track has everything you need to get the most out of your
high-performance graphics engine. Join us as we cover exciting new
ground, including the lowdown on the upcoming Direct3D 11 API set. We also cover the recent improvements to PIX (for both Xbox
360 and Windows), giving you tips to help eke out every last cycle
of performance. And finally, we share never-before-seen details on
the inner workings of the Xbox 360 GPU.
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LIVE AND
NETWORKING
The
importance of online gaming has continued to grow steadily over the
years. Whether it’s the in-game networked play or the out-of-game
social, players expect more from titles than ever before. As in past
years, this track focuses on how to best take advantage of the
latest tools, technologies, and techniques to improve the online
experience for players on the Xbox 360 and Windows platforms. Come
hear the inside scoop on how best to use the LIVE feature set to
improve your Xbox 360 and Games for Windows – LIVE titles, to learn
more about the technologies that expand your game’s online presence,
to explore the intricacies of protecting your community and your
game experience, and to have a look at the latest developments in
LIVE.
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PARTNERS
Partners from
across the industry, including hardware vendors and games tools and
middleware developers, join us to present a wide-ranging program of
in-depth technical discussions on cutting-edge solutions to
difficult technical problems, best practices, and lessons learned.
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PRODUCER AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
The art of
making games stretches far beyond the work of developers, designers,
and artists. Producers and Business Development Managers are
expected to know platform policies, best practices, and future
developments to help them guide both their teams and their
companies. The Gamefest 2008 Producer and Business Development track
will provide you with upcoming policy changes, platform and feature
enhancements to LIVE, best practices for the Xbox 360 and Windows
platforms, as well as the industry knowledge and metrics that you
need for your upcoming Xbox 360 and Games for Windows titles.
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QUALITY ASSURANCE AND
CERTIFICATION
Game
development increasingly presses resources to the limit.
Commensurate with these challenges, QA professionals must continue
to increase their effectiveness. Come explore some approaches
designed to increase QA efficiency, thoroughness, and impact on your
title’s quality and success on the Xbox 360 and Windows platforms.
Also, examine the tools and services that Certification provides,
meet the people responsible for certifying your titles, and learn
how they can help you get your product out the door quickly and
easily. Jump in and prepare to be at the top of your game!
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VISUAL ARTS
Artists face
a variety of issues when designing art that pushes the limits of
current gaming hardware. Be prepared for an unprecedented look into
the innovative future of graphics hardware and its capabilities in
modeling, animation and shading. Discover what it takes to improve
the overall visual fidelity and pipeline productivity for games on
the Windows and Xbox 360 platforms.
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XNA GAME STUDIO
XNA Game
Studio has continued to evolve powerful features that have enabled a
strong community of game developers. With the addition of XNA Game
Studio 2.0 XDK Extensions, XNA Game Studio technologies can be used
to deliver world-class professional games on both Xbox 360 and
Windows. The XNA Game Studio presentations will be repeated over
both days to give game developers who attend Gamefest additional
flexibility to attend other tracks. Presentations focus on XNA Game
Studio networking, performance, XNA Framework Content Pipeline,
business, and platforms.
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