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Dolby Digital 5.1 and the Dolby Game Studio Program

Matt Tullis and

Dan Sperry, Dolby Laboratories

Game audio is more important and complex than ever before. A top-selling title increasingly relies on cinematic, high-quality sound. In this session, learn tips and techniques to make your Xbox 360 game sound better. The session will deal with bass management and downmix considerations for the Xbox 360, then move on to mixing techniques for your game audio engine.  We also discuss the mixing environment and lessons learned from Dolby's Game Studio Program on acoustics, reflections, and the LFE channel.

Audio Blueprints: Microsoft Platform Audio Architecture 101

Sebastian Lange

This talk takes an introductory look at audio tools and libraries on Microsoft platforms, with an eye towards new and upcoming features and future strategies in the Xbox 360 and DirectX software development kits. Topics include audio-relevant gaming libraries for audio playback, mixing, 3D positioning, signal processing, music integration, cut scene/video playback, voice chat, and other areas relating to audio, on both Xbox 360 and Windows. 

XAudio 2: An Acoustic Architecture

Duncan McKay and

Dugan Porter

XAudio 2 is Microsoft’s new cross-platform low-level audio library for Xbox 360 and Windows (XP and Vista), featuring true API and feature parity on both platforms, as well as a host of sophisticated routing, digital signal processing, and mixing features. In this introductory talk, we present an overview of the audio pipeline design of XAudio 2, introduce XAudio 2’s basic voice and engine objects, and discuss core audio implementation scenarios and best practices.

Learn to Speak XAudio 2 Like a Pro: Translating from DirectSound and XAudio

Duncan McKay and

Dugan Porter

Not interested in building a new audio engine implementation from scratch? XAudio 2 offers straightforward porting methods from previous-generation Microsoft audio engines, with measurable functional and performance gains along the way. DirectSound users will find significant improvements and enhancements over the “old” ways of Windows game audio. XAudio users will find many similarities but also advances based on user feedback. Bringing together these previously foreign tongues into XAudio 2 allows for true native cross-platform audio development. This talk covers the most common techniques and best practices for moving from these older interfaces to XAudio 2, with discussions of the similarities and differences to anticipate.

XAudio 2 Advanced

Duncan McKay and

Dugan Porter

XAudio 2 does much more than just mix and route a game’s sound effects and music. In this talk, we explore some of its more advanced features, including digital signal processing routing, running multi-rate audio graphs, utilizing per-voice filtering, and getting the most out of XAudio 2 performance.

XACT Field Guide

Scott Morgan

The Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT) offers a compelling combination of low-level solutions for asset bundling and compression and high-level audio constructs for creating dynamic and non-repetitive sound effects and music. Following a brief overview of concepts and objects of XACT, we focus on new engine and authoring tool features that take advantage of XAudio 2 to more effectively marshal the strengths of audio programmers and content creators. Topics include filtering, xWMA, digital signal processing, content-driven 3D implementation, and dynamic sound control via runtime parameter controls (RPCs).

Codifying Microsoft Game Audio Codecs

Scott Selfon

A host of audio compression schemes are available on Microsoft platforms to allow titles to balance the needs of quality, storage, and bandwidth. This talk offers an introduction to xWMA, XAudio 2’s new software compression format, as well as discussing its similarities to and differences from XMA, the native hardware format of Xbox 360. Also covered will be ADPCM on Windows, compressed music file playback via the Xbox 360 Music Player (XMP) library, and voice compression via XHV.

 xAPOs: Build Your Own “Sound Shaders”

Duncan McKay

Real-time digital signal processing is the next frontier for game audio implementations, and custom per-title effects allow for dynamic sound manipulation that’s unique to your title. In this talk, learn how xAPOs are built as dynamic and discoverable entities of XACT and your own custom engine tools. We also discuss the DSP effects already offered “in the box” that you can chain together, tear apart, and otherwise modify to create new and exotic effects.

The Sound Design of Fable 2: How We Scaled to Beat the Clock

Kristofor Mellroth, MGS; Guy Whitmore, MGS; Kristen Quebe, MGS; Jeffrey Linsenbigler, MGS; Ken Kato, MGS and

Shannon Potter, Soundelux DMG

Fable 2 is the sequel to the hit game Fable, by Lionhead Studios. In this talk, we discuss how we tried to raise the bar with a very compressed schedule. Topics include team structure, demonstrations of the game, tools demonstration, and techniques used to accomplish a rich and deep sound design.

Everybody’s a Critic: Understanding and Implementing Audio Content Reviews

Scott Selfon

Microsoft’s XNA Developer Connection (XDC) team offers “Audio Content Review” services for titles in any stage of production, from pre-production to post-mortem. This talk covers the processes and methodologies used to create these reviews, with particular focus on the most typically highlighted boilerplate challenges encountered by titles. Topics covered span the gamut from reference levels and dynamic range to interactivity of sound effects, dialogue, and score; from loading screens and audio menus to cinematic/in-game transitions. Come learn some of the low impact/high return recommendations that top Xbox 360 and Windows titles have utilized to add final polish to their implementations.

Sound Design for The Simpsons Game

Paul Gorman, Dave Swenson, and

J White; Electronic Arts

In this talk, we discuss the project’s unwieldy scope, the challenges of shipping on six simultaneous platforms, and how the title utilized the Xbox system resources in contrast to other platforms. We also present an overview of our physics and procedural data pipeline. From The Simpsons Game: the only game that gives you 5G achievement for pressing the START button.

PANEL: Tools of the Trade: Audio Middleware Solutions

Andrew Scott, Firelight Technologies; Thomas Miley, CRI; John Byrd, Gigantic Software and Geneviève Laberge, AudioKinetic

A rich variety of middleware offerings in the audio space allows you to concentrate not only on making great audio but on using audio to create innovative gameplay. Join us for a panel discussion and open Q&A with representatives from companies focused on audio signal processing, speech processing and recognition, audio mixing, production pipelines, and interactive dynamic audio implementations. We plan to talk about hot topics in the industry today, future game audio industry directions, and establishing best practices for audio middleware integration with other game engines. We also encourage you to visit our middleware providers’ Gamefest Expo Booths throughout the conference to discuss your title’s specific needs and detailed solutions.

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Taking Xbox LIVE Arcade Games to the Next Level

Scott Austin

LIVE and Arcade offer many tools and services that developers can use to make their games even more appealing. This session gives examples of some of the many innovations in Arcade games. Also, considering that the most important tool in selling a game on Arcade is the trial, this session presents best practices for how to design a trial experience that optimizes conversion.

Building Games with Silverlight

Bill Reiss, Blue Rose Systems;

Joel Neubeck, Terralever; and Tim Heuer

Come learn how two developers used Microsoft Silverlight to create popular casual games. Each developer will dive into their experience and discuss key takeaways that will help you in developing games with Silverlight.

Game Programming with Silverlight 2

Mike Snow and Tim Heuer

This session will include a complete walkthrough on how to build a game with Silverlight 2 using Visual Studio 2008. Topics include creating your game UI, integrating media, setting up your game loop logic, animation,  web services and multiplayer networking.

Life Cycle of Casual Games

Nick Berry

Have you ever wondered what happens to the popularity of a casual web game over its life? How quickly does its population rise?  How long and bright does it shine? At what rate does it fade?  What is the effect of badges, or promotions or the release of deluxe download versions?  How does the Super Bowl™, Fourth of July, or Christmas affect the number of people playing your game? Do more people play your game on weekdays or weekends?  Do they play at lunchtime or latenight?  How has the industry changed in the last ten years?  Come learn more about the life cycle of casual games and how it impacts you as a developer.

Integration APIs for MSN Site and Messenger Games

Rocco Crea

Two of Microsoft’s most widely deployed gaming platforms, MSN Games and Windows LIVE Messenger, both offer APIs for deploying Flash-based or custom ActiveX control–based game titles. This session gives an overview of both APIs as well as the development environment and tools for each.

The Top Ten Things You Need to Know About Privacy

Nick Berry

Privacy is of concern for everyone. We’re all paranoid about identity theft or some dubious application that might track what we do online.  Are customers concerned about your applications?  Come and learn about the vocabulary of the privacy profession:  Just what is Personally Identifiable information; should this be default opt-in or out?  What are the laws concerning privacy?  The talk includes a  presentation about the principles of Fair Information Privacy Practice.  Are you confident that your applications are correctly balancing the need for privacy, whilst allowing you to target users appropriately?

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Xbox 360 Compiler and PgoLite Update

Bruce Dawson

The Xbox 360 compiler has changed dramatically in the last year, which changes the rules for how to write efficient Xbox 360 code. Many of the improvements automatically make your code faster, but others require you to change your code in order to reap the benefits. PgoLite has also improved and should be used differently, to get even better results. This talk summarizes the past year's developments, and gives simple rules for how to get maximum benefit from the changes. 

SAL, Security, Settings, and the Safe-CRT: Writing Robust Code Made Easy

Bruce Dawson

Writing robust code is always difficult, especially when hackers actively look for ways to crash or exploit your game. Using SAL annotations and the compiler's /analyze feature make it easier to find potential problems in your code. Also, proper use of the secure CRT makes fixing many of the problems easier, and choosing the right compiler and linker switches can substantially mitigate the problems of bugs that don't get fixed. See how a machine gets pwned, and how these techniques prevent it. This talk covers Windows and Xbox 360, VC++ 2005 and VC++ 2008.

Advanced Debugging Techniques with Visual Studio

Mark Roberts

The Visual Studio Debugger provides a slew of features that make the task of debugging both easier and more efficient. We walk through some powerful new features as well as time-saving tips and tricks. We also dive into post-mortem debugging, which has become increasingly popular as the VS 2008 debugger provides a familiar and powerful environment to diagnose user mode exceptions and hangs from the comfort of your own IDE. Come join us as we crack open the toolbox and highlight these features with lots of hands-on demos.

A Glimpse into the Future of Visual Studio

Boris Jabes

As the size and complexity of games continue to grow, the tools used to build games have not kept pace. Many C++ applications easily exceed 20 MLOC, which makes navigating, understanding, and updating these systems difficult. In addition, making use of many cores efficiently is a growing concern for all developers. The Visual C++ team believes that tool innovations can help address this situation. This session discusses features we’re building for future releases that will significantly improve the productivity of developing large-scale, native, and parallel applications.

Here Be Dragons: C++ Undefined Behavior

Pete Isensee

C++ allows game developers to wring awesome performance from gaming platforms while also providing language abstractions that make it possible to deliver incredibly rich titles. But there is a cost to be paid, and the cost is high. In order to give implementers maximum flexibility, many areas of the C++ language are purposefully unspecified. Developers can unwittingly rely on unspecified or undefined behavior, because compilers are not obliged to report those errors (nor can they report errors in many cases). Come learn how to navigate the deadly waters of undefined behavior.

TR1 for C++ Game Developers: shared_ptr, function, and random

Stephan T. Lavavej

The TR1 extensions to the C++ Standard Library can make your code significantly more robust and expressive, especially if it already uses the STL. However, because TR1 is a set of diverse libraries instead of an all-encompassing framework, at first they can seem like a dozen chunks of alien technology that suddenly fell from the sky. This talk covers the libraries in TR1 that are most relevant to game developers: reference-counted smart pointers, polymorphic function wrappers, and pseudorandom number generators and distributions.

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Memory Models: Foundational Knowledge for Concurrent Code

Herb Sutter

A memory model defines a contract between the programmer and the execution environment that trades off programmability, has stronger guarantees for programmers vs. performance, and greater flexibility for reordering program memory operations. The “execution environment” includes everything from the compiler and optimizer on down to the CPU and cache hardware, and it really wants to help you by reordering your program to make it run faster. You, on the other hand, want it to not help you excessively in ways that will break the meaning of your code. In this talk, we consider why a memory model is important, how to achieve a reasonable balance, detailed considerations on current and future Windows PC and Xbox platforms, and some best practices for writing solid concurrent code.

New CPU Features in the XDK

Bruce Dawson

The tools in the XDK continue to improve. New profiling features make it easier to find out where time is being wasted in your code, and lock-free primitives make efficient multithreaded code easier to write. The talk covers enhancements to trace analysis, CPU performance counters, system monitor, and timing captures, and discusses how to use LockFreePipe and XMCore.

Using VMX and SSE Instructions for Performance

Rebecca Heineman

CPUs today have large amounts of mathematical processing power and few applications take full advantage of it. Through a low-level deep dive on optimization and counter examples, this talk explains some of the most used VMX instructions for the Xbox, SSE2 instructions on PC, APIs that use vectorized data, and memory alignment issues in dealing with vector operations. 

64-bit Gaming Is Here Today: Where Are You?

Chuck Walbourn

Gaming desktop machines are shipping with 4 to 8 GB of RAM standard, and even gaming laptops come with 4 GB of RAM, but your game can’t even utilize 2 GB. The days of 64-bit personal computing, and multi-terabyte memory addressing have arrived, but just like multicore there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Games struggling to fit into the 31-bit memory limits can gain immense breathing room by moving to 64-bit native executables for tools, internal development, and for end-users. This talk covers the current virtual memory challenges in games, practical advice for porting to 64-bit, ways to address potential roadblocks, tips for optimization, ways to exploit x64 technology, and case studies from games that have already made the jump.

A Medley of Debugging Tools

Cristian Ioneci

You cannot have too much help when it comes to investigating more subtle bugs, so any extra support is welcome. Come hear about a few brand new tools, and get some ideas that will turn your next debugging session from being excruciatingly painful to ... well—and let's be honest here—bearable. We talk about less mainstream but nonetheless very useful methods for uncovering bugs on both Windows and Xbox 360, including using alternate debuggers like WinDBG and kd, using a symbol server to make it easier to deal with multiple versions of your game, catching elusive bugs using the AppVerifier. We end the talk by discussing the present and future of investigating tricky multithreading issues with the newly introduced multithread debugging window in Visual Studio.

Breaking Files

Dave Weinstein

Game data files, especially those that are user created or passed from machine to machine, are prime targets for an attacker. This talk offers a technical dive into ”fuzzing” game data files, including discussions of attack techniques, how to monitor games under test, and how to analyze the resulting crashes.

Windows Game Development Update

Kev Gee

Get up to speed on the latest game development news in the world of Windows. In this session, we cover development best practices needed to work well with Windows and deliver powerful tools based on the latest Windows technologies. Attend this session to ensure your customers have a great experience playing the games you create on Windows.

At Least We Aren’t Doing That: Real Life Performance Pitfalls

Allan Murphy

As we move towards second and third generation Xbox 360 games, the majority of titles are CPU, rather than GPU bound. This presentation draws on the unique perspective of Microsoft’s XDC proactive engineering group to present an across the board survey of the CPU performance issues even the very best developers run into, how you can find those problems, and how you can fix them.  Applicable primarily to Xbox 360, this set of mini-case studies forms a next-gen post-mortem that will help developers decide where to focus optimization effort, and ultimately, reassure you that you’re going the right way.

Microsoft Directions in Parallel Computing and Some Short Term Help

Craig Sinclair

This talk focuses on the native task scheduler being announced by the Parallel Computing Platform group in Microsoft this spring and offerings that are available in the XDK. The scheduling of tasks within games can improve resource utilization, load balancing, and performance. For games targeting the current generation of PCs and the Xbox 360 console, we discuss an interim solution. Previous talks given on this topic laid the foundation for using tasks to move work required by the engine from an over-utilized hardware core to an underutilized core. A progression of task and scheduler designs is presented that start with simple implementations and move to more complex designs that have low-overhead. The simple implementations are satisfactory for a small number of tasks but impose a prohibitive amount of overhead when the number of tasks grows.  Finally, we present the work-stealing algorithm that pulls work from one core to another in the low-overhead scheduler.

The One Disc Game: Compression, Streaming, and Caching Effectively

Zsolt Mathe

It is no surprise that game assets and content complexity are continuously increasing. In the mean time, the game disc capacity stays constant. Is there anything that can be done? Join us to find out and learn about the latest compression techniques, APIs, streaming analysis tools, streaming techniques and using the hard drive cache effectively. We also discuss topics on content distribution and glimpse into what kinds of improvements are planned for future XDK releases. Finally, we review successful techniques that current shipping titles have utilized.

Overview of Xbox 360 Input API

Pat Tharp

Obtaining user input for a gaming console used to be a far simpler affair.  Every user had exactly one controller and every controller looked like every other controller.  With the advent of racing wheels, flight-sticks, Big-button gamepads, guitar-controllers, and other assorted specialty controllers, managing input has become decidedly more complex. This talk will cover the API that exists today on the Xbox 360 for acquiring input from the broad range of controllers.  We will also explore the future of input API on the Xbox 360 and how it will be easier for games to identify and use these controllers more effectively.

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Towards Real-Time High-Fidelity Special Effects

Zoran Popovic

This talk explores how the real-time domain of interactive games requires a completely new approach to algorithms for most problems in graphics. To do so, we explore three fundamentally different phenomena—character locomotion, human crowds, and fluids—and the unusual algorithms that meet the requirements for real-time rendering. The first part of the talk presents a real-time model of crowd dynamics based on continuum computations instead of per-agent simulations. The second part describes real-time character controllers capable of achieving high-dimensional locomotion tasks. The third part covers a new model reduction approach to fluid simulation, enabling large, real-time, detailed flows with continuous user interaction capable of performing six orders of magnitude faster than current high-fidelity algorithms.

Xbox Textures --- Formats, Conversion, Fetching, and Performance

David Cook and

Jason Gould

This talk cover details of texture formats—exactly how is the data laid out in memory, and how does the GPU interpret it? What happens if you resolve or render a value from one format to another? We also walk through the texture pipe from beginning to end, and discuss the details of the texture cache, with emphasis on improving pixel shader performance.

Shedding (Indirect) Light on Global Illumination for Games

Claude Marais

Many innovative global illumination techniques have been described in recent years, but using these techniques in actual games seems to be a non-trivial task. This presentation sheds some light on these difficulties and discusses possible solutions. We review a few of the recent global illumination techniques and, in particular, discuss a detailed implementation of reflective shadow maps, with demos. The goal of the presentation is to leave the audience with a renewed optimism and excitement for implementing global illumination techniques in their games.

Multi-Threaded Rendering for Games

Matt Lee and

Brian Klamik

One core is just not enough for graphics anymore—rendering tasks often have to run in parallel to hit the target framerate and hide latent operations. This talk includes best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and a range of design patterns for implementing multithreaded rendering on today’s platforms, including Direct3D 10 and Xbox 360. We cover everything from batch submission to resource management and discuss future plans for greater flexibility and higher performance when rendering on multiple threads. 

Direct3D Samples Update

Cameron Egbert

Come see the latest developments from the DirectX and Xbox 360 samples team. This presentation is a deep-dive into the inner workings of recent and upcoming graphics samples in the DirectX SDK and Xbox 360 XDK. Techniques discussed include deferred particle rendering, Xbox 360 geometry instancing, edge-based antialiasing, and more.

Next-Gen Content Pipelines: A Study of 1^st Party Titles

Kutta Srinivasan

The breadth and quantity of content required for triple-A games has increased dramatically over the years. As a result, content creation is often the biggest challenge and cost for a game studio. This talk presents best practices for developing a content pipeline and builds on experiences from the trenches of Microsoft’s 1^st party studios including Rare, Ensemble, and Bungie. This talk is aimed at tool and engine developers who want to enable rapid iteration while ensuring the robustness of content builds for their artists and designers.

A Detailed Overview of Xbox 360 Direct3D Synchronization and Multithreading

Juan Carlos Arevalo Baeza

Resource locking, front buffer swapping, queries, fences, predicated tiling, direct access to GPU state… Direct3D for Xbox 360 includes a lot of mechanisms that involve, enable, or enhance the communication between the multiple CPU cores and the GPU. This presentation provides a brief overview of previously existing primitives, a detailed overview of recently introduced primitives, as well as an examination of the various interactions between them. The goal of the presentation is to provide the audience with a deeper understanding of the inner workings of Direct3D for Xbox 360 and discuss common scenarios, enabling them to keep the GPU running at full steam and make efficient use of the power of multiple CPU cores for graphics rendering. 

Performance Tools Update

Karen Stevens

The XNA Professional Game Platform (PGP) development team has been hard at work delivering updates to PIX for both Xbox and Windows. This session brings you up to speed on the new features and improvements made to this critical toolset for performance investigation and analysis with your game.

Introduction to the Direct3D 11 Graphics Pipeline

Allison Klein

Be the first on your block to learn about how Direct3D 11 extends and enhances Direct3D 10 with new hardware and API calls. This talk discusses the features in Direct3D 11 that enable you to create content that scales from small screens to high-resolution displays, and across different CPU and GPU configurations. 

Direct3D 11 Tessellation

Kev Gee

Direct3D 11 contains new programmable and fixed function stages designed to enable powerful, flexible tessellation approaches at interactive frame rates in games and modeling applications. Come with us as we take a trip through the pipeline and hear how to prepare your content pipelines to exploit this incredible step in the evolution of graphics.

Direct3D 11 Compute Shader —More Generality for Advanced Techniques

Chas Boyd

The Direct3D API imposes some constraints on the processing model in order to achieve optimal rendering performance. Direct3D 11 introduces the Compute Shader as a way to access this computational capability without so many constraints. It opens the door to operations on more general data-structures than just arrays, and to new classes of algorithms as well. Key features include: communication of data between threads, and a rich set of primitives for random access and streaming I/O operations. These features enable faster and simpler implementations of techniques already in use, such as imaging and post-processing effects, and also open up new techniques that become feasible on Direct3D 11–class hardware.

High Level Shader Language (HLSL) Update—Introducing Version 5.0

Michael Oneppo

Get ready to shift your shader development into high gear with the next version of HLSL. This talk introduces new High Level Shader Language features coming in Direct3D 11, including support for Dynamic Shader Linkage and more. Hear how HLSL 5.0 brings support for interfaces, objects, and polymorphism, and get yourself ready for this exciting update to the world’s leading data-parallel programming language!

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A Custom Marketplace? Where Do I Get One!

Jeff Sullivan

Don’t you just love getting all those extra goodies for your games out to your players? Sure – who doesn’t? So why not use our new and improved “In-Game Marketplace” functionality to showcase your game’s content even better? That’s right! You too can shine with the best using an extra coat of API, and back-end storage. Operators are waiting – call now!

SQL – The Next Great Gaming Platform

Steven Jackson

As games continue to innovate online, the role of persistent storage is becoming increasingly important. Whether you are building an MMO or extending Xbox LIVE via XLSP, how to store your user’s data is a big problem. Features such as Forza 2’s online auction house, or Halo 3’s replay server need to scale to millions of users and terabytes of data over time. There are many questions that need answering, from latency to scalability to data redundancy. Come learn more about the lessons we’ve learned in developing these relational database system, how and when our SQL Server will suit your needs, and when to consider alternatives.

Adventures in NetGrove, or There and Back Again

Jason Strayer

NetGrove is the newest and most potent tool in the network programmer’s arsenal, a veritable Yew Longbow +5 for those who venture out into multiplayer territory. In this talk, beginner and intermediate hunters learn of the myriad pitfalls of network optimization and gain specialization in the LIVE secure protocol format. Topics covered include bandwidth compression tips, appropriate packet and topology choices, expected best practices for the console, and a short discussion of the network review service conducted by skilled hunters in XNA’s employ. Careful demonstration of NetGrove’s features, based on the packet sniffing capabilities of NetMon 3.1, then quickly uncloak easy-to-adopt techniques that even neophytes can use to tune games for today’s typical bandwidths and latencies.

Winning the Security Game – Protecting Your Title from Malware

Jeff Williams

As online games have increased in popularity, so have the number of people who view games and game services as potential targets for theft. Whether it’s stealing your player’s digital goods for resale or capturing his or her personally identifying information, you need to be aware of these threats. You also need to actively combat these threats in order to maintain the integrity of your games and services, not to mention the goodwill of your user base. This talk covers the general threat landscape for Windows-based titles, with specific real-world details on the telemetry we see, and addresses both what we do to assist you and what you can and should be doing to protect your products.

Attacking Network Traffic (Before It Attacks You)

Dave Weinstein

This talk is a technical dive into the ”fuzzing” of network traffic, including discussion of network assumptions that are both common and wrong, and how to analyze the results. 

Extending Xbox LIVE with the Xbox LIVE Server Platform

Matt Mills

Xbox LIVE is the premier online gaming and entertainment platform with over 10 million passionate users. Xbox LIVE provides a large number of built in services that you can include in your game, such as friends list, matchmaking, and leaderboards, but what if you want to create new and unique experiences that are specific to your title? The Xbox LIVE Server Platform (XLSP) enables you to extend the power of the Xbox LIVE service by allowing you to host your own title servers. Many premier titles have used XLSP, including Grand Theft Auto IV, Halo 3, and Forza 2, to create innovative server-based features that set them apart from the competition. This talk introduces attendees to the fundamentals of using XLSP to write your own extensions to Xbox LIVE. In addition, we discuss and show the upcoming enhancements to XLSP releasing this fall!

Challenges of 24/7 Server Hosting

Martin Lavoie, Quazal

While XLSP lets you extend Xbox LIVE services, the commitments needed to provide a reliable and scalable service on launch date should not be underestimated. We share our knowledge in building reliable and scalable hosting facilities for titles like Rock Band, exploring issues such as capacity planning, load testing, monitoring, and management. This talk is geared towards producers and managers who want to understand everything that needs to be considered when deciding to host 24/7 servers for their game in order to have a successful and smooth game launch that meets players’ expectations.

An Evolving Platform: Initiatives to Enhance the Games for Windows – LIVE Development Platform

Arka Ray

This talk will focus on the initiatives that are underway to enhance Games for Windows – LIVE as a development platform. We will discuss the major pain points and requests that developers and publishers who have been working with Games for Windows - LIVE have had over the past year, and we will detail the steps that the Games for Windows - LIVE team has taken to address these. These steps include delivering exciting new features that have been major requests from developers and publishers, an improved development toolset, streamlined documentation, and a reduced set of TCRs, among others. The key takeaways of this talk are a comprehensive overview of Games for Windows – LIVE as a development platform, how the platform is evolving to accommodate the requirements of our developers, and how to prepare for the exciting new features that will be introduced in future releases. The talk is primarily for engineers and includes code samples and demos of our toolset, though producers may find the information on upcoming features valuable.

Got a Match?  Don't Get Smoked by Your Competition's Matchmaking System!

Finding someone to play online has come a long way from just whomever happened to be in the college computer lab that night.  Matchmaking on Xbox 360 and Games for Windows  - LIVE consists of a rich set of features and tools that your competition is using to make stand-out multiplayer experiences.  Why aren't you?  This talk focuses on practical use of the tools in the matchmaking toolbox and shares the secrets behind some current trends like party matchmaking and playlists.  Additionally, it details upcoming matchmaking TCR changes that you simply won't want to miss!

Enhancing Player Investment and Personalization Through Avatars

From gamer pictures to themes and even custom faceplates, part of the Xbox 360 experience has always been about personalization. The Fall 2008 Flash update introduces the latest customization element for Xbox 360 players – the Avatar. This session reviews the title implementation specifics for this new system, and discusses how to best take advantage of it in your titles.

Social Interaction and Xbox LIVE Party

The new Xbox LIVE Party feature extends the concept of social interaction on Xbox LIVE with 8-person voice chat.  It also provides simple mechanisms for the Xbox LIVE Party group to play multiplayer games together.  This session reviews the Xbox LIVE Party feature and discusses how to integrate your game to create cutting-edge social experiences. Come find out how to make your title interact seamlessly with Xbox LIVE Party, and how doing so will improve your user experience.  If you are currently enabling your title for Xbox LIVE, or are just interested in learning more about the latest features, this talk is for you.

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Procedural Fire and Procedural Trees in a Virtual World 

Hugh Smith, Intel Corporation

This talk discusses how to implement procedurally generated trees and fire. We present methods to create fire that spreads between branches and trees using smart particle systems. Fire eventually engulfs and conforms to any unique tree or grove of trees. We also look at the parser and grammar used to create the trees.   

Water-Tight, Textured, Displaced Subdivision Surface Tessellation Using Direct3D 11

Ignacio Castano, NVIDIA

In this talk, we discuss using the Direct3D 11 pipeline to tessellate displacement mapped subdivision surfaces. We cover motivation for use of tessellation in games. We also discuss various issues related to water-tight approximation of surfaces. Finally, we cover content creation issues, tools, and model quality.

Graphics Performance and Authoring Tools for Direct3D 10

Daniel Horowitz and

Jeff Kiel, NVIDIA

In this fast-paced, one-hour talk, attendees learn all about NVIDIA's latest debugging, performance analysis, and content creation tools. It includes several recently-released products such as PerfHUD 6, FX Composer 2.5, and the NVIDIA Shader Debugger. For each product, key features for DirectX developers are demonstrated with the goal of helping attendees to rapidly increase their productivity. 

Smoke: Architecting an N-Way Threaded Scalable Game Engine

Orion Granatir, Intel Corporation

This presentation examines Smoke, a game architecture developed by Intel to take advantage of all CPU cores available within a system. This presentation explores how to support and overcome the challenges of parallelism in the context of a game architecture.

Advanced Topics in GPU Tessellation

Natasha Tatarchuk, AMD

This talk presents a number of rendering techniques using GPU tessellation. Both current architectures and Direct3D 11 are discussed. In addition, we thoroughly cover various issues relevant to game development pipelines for integrating tessellation.

GPU Performance Programming with DirectX 10

Bill Bilodeau and

Yannis Minadakis, AMD

When using Direct3D 10 and 10.1 on today’s GPUs, programmers face a variety of performance considerations. In this talk, we discuss these considerations and cover aspects of Direct3D 10 and 10.1 performance programming common to all vendors. We also discuss performance considerations with multiple GPU configurations.

Visibility Optimization for Games

Teppo Soininen, Umbra

Modern game consoles can process loads of data but rendering really massive dynamic environments can choke the graphics hardware quite quickly. Through proper visibility optimization, use of massive dynamic environments is possible. This talk introduces the basic problems of visibility optimization, techniques to tackle these problems, and ways to optimize performance on current generation hardware.

Procedural Texturing for Retail Games: Cost Killing and Creative Opportunities

Sébastien Deguy, Allegorithmic and Jarred Everson, Ready at Dawn

The talk demonstrates how procedural texturing can help save space both on the game disc and in console memory, and how it can greatly improve streaming data asynchronously on the Xbox 360. We also showcase new creative opportunities and never-before seen effects that can be realized by animating and interacting with textures.

Practical Parallel Rendering with DirectX 9 and 10, Windows PC Command Buffer Recording

Vincent Scheib, Emergent Game Technologies

In this talk, we present an open source command buffer recording library for DirectX that enables multicore acceleration of rendering with single-threaded Direct3D devices. Our talk describes its design, and techniques for use. Attendees take away knowledge and code they can apply to their title to enable multicore decomposition of rendering CPU load.

Capitalizing on Middleware without Capsizing Your Project

Mike Capps, Epic Games; Stuart Denman, Midway; Geremy Mustard, Chair Entertainment; and

Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Software

You’ve jumped onto the middleware boat, and now it’s time to get all your oars rowing in the same direction. This panel, consisting of Epic Games and Unreal Engine 3 licensees, will help you decide how much modification to make to licensed code out of the box to fit a project's specific requirements.

Adaptive Tactical Team-AI for Next Generation Bots

Sebastian Risi and Thorsten Maier, xaitment

This talk shows how different state-of-the-art game techniques, such as probabilistic target tracking and dynamic tactical position evaluation, can be easily combined with hierarchic, probabilistic finite state machines to create more realistic team-AI. We also discuss the use of so called “in-game-learning” algorithms and how they can be used to create bots that can adapt to the player, resulting in a more engaging game experience.

Enlighten: From the Science of Light to the Art of Illumination

Julian Davis and Ivan Pedersen, Geomerics

A physical model for light provides a good starting point for designing lighting in a game, but in practice artists need to be able to control and manipulate the model to achieve the effects they are after. In this talk, we describe how this balance in achieved in Enlighten, and describe how Enlighten fits into a typical game development tool chain.

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Getting from Good to Great: How Improving User Research Results in Better Games

Bill Fulton, Ronin User Experience

Consistently making great games is the Holy Grail of the games industry—after all, the rewards for a great game are staggering compared to the rewards for a “good” game. However, once you've hired top talent and streamlined your development process, what more can be done? Microsoft Game Studios answered this question by improving its user-research program. The timely, accurate, and actionable feedback that the user-research program supplied helped great teams make far better games far more reliably. The founder of MGS's user-research program discusses how user research works, and provides simple tips for improving your own user-research processes.

Tracking the Success of the Games Industry, the Expanding Market and New Revenue Models

Mike Klotz, NPD Group

The games industry has undergone dramatic changes over the past few years. More revenue is being generated from gaming than ever before, and the market is no longer dominated by retail sales to core gamers. The market has expanded to include more casual gamers and a more demographically diverse user base. New revenue models, including subscriptions, digital downloads, and micro-transactions, have become the norm. Consumers are more comfortable with accessing games through different mediums and online gaming has become a way of life. This talk shows you how the industry is changing and provides you with insights to help you determine the right strategy for your games and your company.   

Maximize Online and Retail Revenue with Premium Downloadable Content (Plus: PDLC Case Study)

Alvin Gendrano and Chris Novak

Want to join the growing number of developers and publishers who are each making millions in the console world’s largest online marketplace? With the rapid growth of Xbox LIVE Marketplace (400% annually), compelling PDLC experiences, and a fast-growing base of LIVE-connected gamers, it’s easier than you may expect. This session covers key trends, growth metrics, best practices, and how PDLC helps retail titles (reduced trade-in, more sales, higher pricing, etc.).

Community Games on Xbox LIVE Marketplace

Albert Ho

With our new offering of community games, we are delivering on the promise to truly democratize game development and revolutionize the way consumers get and play community-created games on Xbox 360. This offering is a friction-free distribution channel on Xbox LIVE. Using XNA Game Studio, the community will be able to create games and submit them to a peer-review system. Through this system, other XNA Creators Club members will classify and review submissions for appropriateness and accurate representation before allowing them to be listed in the Xbox LIVE Marketplace for all to download and play. Come learn more about how Community Games will be rolled out this fall and how you can participate. 

Developing Hit Games for Xbox LIVE Arcade

Mark Coates

Whether you’re a seasoned developer or brand new to the platform, this session provides you with valuable insight into what it takes to develop high-quality, successful Xbox LIVE Arcade games. We share new best practices for integrating your game with the Xbox LIVE Arcade platform, identify key areas to impact quality, and discuss how to make your game stand out amid the competitive landscape. This session is intended for anyone who is interested in publishing or developing games for Xbox LIVE Arcade—especially producers and designers who drive the overall creative vision for their products. 

Getting to Xbox 360 Platinum Certification: A Case Study on Activision

Christopher Wilson, Activision

This talk covers how Activision was able to achieve Platinum Certification status on Xbox 360. The talk also discusses centralized TCR testing and code submission, and gives attendees a general overview on how Publisher QA teams can assist development and production teams in making TCR-compliant games.

3rd Party Marketing:  Partnership & Opportunities

Katrina Strafford and

Dan Cawdrey

The 3rd party marketing team is evolving to meet the growing demands of the Xbox and Games for Windows business and of the publishing community. In this discussion, we introduce who and how to engage the 3rd party marketing team, share lessons learned and best practices from CY07, and review the many FREE co-marketing opportunities open to 3rd party publishers. 

The Great Exaggeration of PC Gaming’s Death

Walt McGraw

If the sheer size of the debate over the health of PC gaming is any indication, then the PC market is stronger than ever. It’s pretty clear that there are as many opinions and interpretations of PC gaming today as there are PC gamers – that is, 300 million. How is it that a market forecasted to grow by 80 percent over the next five years by DFC Intelligence can be dying? Where is that growth? Are the demographics changing? Will games for PC outsell the Wii and the PS3 at U.S. retail once again this year? Is the 64-bit revolution right around the corner? Hear from the Windows gaming team on the state of PC gaming, the trends to follow, and Microsoft’s view of the PC gaming customer.

One Live World: Opportunities with Games for Windows - LIVE

This talk will focus on the advantages of the Games for Windows – LIVE platform, fact and fiction about the service, and problems we are solving for the developer/publisher. We will cover details on what’s available today, and what you need to get started. You will leave this talk with an understanding of the advantages of one LIVE world, and the benefits to your gamer! We will also cover some changes we are making to improve implementation. The audience is the PC Game developer/publisher who wants to know the advantages of Games for Windows - LIVE.

The New Xbox Experience

This holiday, when Xbox LIVE gamers turn on their consoles, they’re in for a completely new experience.  From the redesigned and updated dash, to the smarter Guide, to the richer Marketplace, Avatars, and Xbox LIVE Party features, there’s a lot to get excited about.  Come hear Benjamin Kilgore (general manager of the Xbox 360 Platform Team) talk about his vision and what it means to you and your titles in the coming years.

Taking Advantage of Avatars and Xbox LIVE Party

Your Xbox 360 titles can benefit from deeper integration with Xbox LIVE Party and the new Avatars system starting with the November 2008 XDK.  Come hear about the history, vision, and direction of these features along with specific opportunities for both in-game Avatars and how you can use Xbox LIVE Party to bring players together into your game quickly and easily.

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Seeing Is Believing: Discovering Value in Game Data Through Visualization

John Rush, Microsoft Games Studios

Visualizing bugs, performance data, and more—see what the Microsoft Games Test Organization is doing to capture and view game data in new ways. Gain a better visual understanding of your bug distribution, provide better performance coverage to developers, and help testers navigate in-game through the identification of key-game objects. Get a close-up look at "XVisualizer", a reusable component purpose-built to meet these needs, which found its way into almost every test team in Microsoft Games Studios.

Test Lead Gems: Getting Out in Front of the Increasing Complexity of Our Games

John Noonan, Microsoft Games Studios

Leading a test team is never easy, but with the ever-increasing complexity of today’s games, test leads are faced with greater and greater challenges. Come experience a collection of best practices and lessons learned on titles that shipped on PC and Xbox platforms by Test Leads within Microsoft Games Studios. Topics covered include test automation and build instrumentation, managing relationships between testing and other functional groups, team management, identifying and mitigating risks in project schedules, and formalized procedures for verifying the quality of our titles.

Lessons Learned: The Challenges of Testing XLSP in PGR4 for Content on Demand and Tournaments

Matt Fleming

Today, most games are required to support online play and include online features to keep up with the competition. Xbox LIVE is a great platform, but testing games that utilize its features can be hard and complicated. In this talk, we show techniques, processes, tools, and results of our testing experience through games like Forza2, Project Gotham Racing 4, Viva Piñata 2, Fable 2, and so on. Some of the takeaways of the talk are: understanding of common architecture of games that leverage Xbox LIVE and XLSP; how to test the correctness, performance, and load capacity of the server backend; test tools and automation that help you achieve these goals; and recommended steps to successfully release the game and the service.

Informal White Box Testing

Josh Bell, Microsoft Games Studios

Do you want to increase your testing efficiency and save time? What about discover undocumented behaviors? Care to have a better understanding for the root causes of bugs and what their fixes actually are? With the power of source code, we can achieve all of these goals! White box testing, in the formal sense of the term, is about creating test cases that will hit all paths through our source code. But what if we shoot for a more informal definition? By reading our games’ source code and other assets, we can enhance the testing we’re already doing. This isn’t about creating new or additional work, but about making us more effective at our day jobs. This talk covers techniques such as reading source code, checking coverage with breakpoints, and light debugging. People of all backgrounds should feel welcome and come prepared to learn! 

Games for Windows - LIVE Certification: Lessons Learned

Ivan Kougaenko

The Games for Windows - LIVE Certification program is already a year old and we have a lot of exciting content to talk about. Come and learn about the upcoming changes in the Certification process, Technical Certification Requirements (TCRs), and Test Cases for Games for Windows - LIVE and why this is important to you. We also walk you through a number of Games for Windows and Games for Windows - LIVE non-compliance issues, all based on real-world examples, so be prepared to take notes.  And if you are interested in the details of Games for Windows - LIVE Certification testing and are looking for the right kind of ammunition to ensure a smooth Certification experience, then this talk is definitely for you.

Certification Tools of the Trade: Games for Windows

Chris Wilson and Mark Rabold

Want to make your life easier? Learn how to simplify your Games for Windows branding testing with a tool designed to automate some GFW test cases and walk you through the rest!

Certification Tools of the Trade: Xbox 360

James Jacoby

Looking for new tools and techniques for Xbox 360 certification testing? Look no further; API Monitor is the latest and greatest test tool to hit the XDK. The XNA Services team leads a demonstration and discussion of this powerful tool and its uses for TCR verification. 

Content Planning: Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Extending Your Game

Kevin Salcedo and

Tad Fleshman

Sit down with our panel of content experts to discuss the methods and means to submit downloadable content for Xbox 360 titles. This talk includes introductions and basics of the tools, best practices, and common "gotchas" every developer and publisher will want to know in order to extend the life of their product and avoid unnecessary hassle along the way.

Xbox 360 Certification: Platinum Style

Mellissa Ransmeier and Brannon Zahand

Interested in moving your final game code submission candidates through certification testing quicker? Wish there were more resources available to expedite the test schedule and secure your release to manufacturing goals? Come and learn more about Game Quality’s program that reduces their Testing Service Level Agreement (SLA) for qualified publishers. Breeze through Certification in Platinum style.

Preparing Your Games for Windows - LIVE Submission

Clifford Garrett

Join this talk with the Games for Windows - LIVE mastering lab as we present what we learned in our first year of processing titles. We examine any and every detail of preparing a submission and even show how the mastering lab will process your submission. There are no secrets, so bring all your questions. 

PANEL: Xbox 360, Games for Windows, and Games for Windows - LIVE Certification

Peter Cardwell;

Qumar Jamil;

Mike Gamble; and

Josh Eash

Come join our Q&A session specifically designed to provide an open discussion on all Certification-related topics. Several representatives from the different branches of Microsoft Game Quality will be on hand to field your questions about certification on both Xbox 360 and Windows.

Josh Bell; Jami Johns; Justin McBride; John Noonan; and Jimbo Pfeiffer

A unique team of professionals from the games testing organization of Microsoft Games Studios invites you to join them for a discussion about the processes and challenges of game testing.  We welcome questions throughout the period. These questions will be fielded by professionals, ranging from individual contributors and subject-matter experts up to the management level.  Come join what is bound to be a lively discussion. You can learn what other professional teams are doing to solve the problems of modern games testing!

Xbox 360 Certification from "The Other Side": A 1st Party Account

This presentation will give you some insight into Certification from a Publisher’s perspective. We’ll describe the Certification process, and how the process and the Cert team evolved over time. We’ll explain how MGS handled specific issues with TCRs and FTCs (our top failures). We’ll show you how to avoid some of the serious problems we encountered. Finally, we’ll provide some useful insights, tips, and tricks regarding the submission process. You will have time for Q&A at the end of the presentation.

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Steve Scott, Effects Art Lead, Bungie Studios

This session examines the tools, techniques, and challenges of producing special effects for Bungie’s Halo 3 from an artist’s perspective. The Halo engine’s custom particle system was rebuilt from the ground up to take full advantage of the Xbox 360 hardware. We take a look at the editing tools that are at the heart of that system. Beyond particles, we look at other graphical elements that are orchestrated to create some of the more complex effect events in the game.

Moby Francke and

Randy Lundeen, Valve

Valve's artists discuss the connection between art direction and gameplay in two very different titles: Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead. One of the biggest hits of 2007, Team Fortress 2 features an illustrative rendering style that serves critical gameplay goals, most notably facilitating the ability of players to easily identify each other in a variety of lighting conditions. Drawing on lessons learned from key historical artistic influences, Valve's artists describe how the interplay of art direction and engineering allowed them to serve gameplay while achieving a distinctive visual style. In the second half of this talk, Valve's artists describe the unique aspects of the art direction of Left 4 Dead, one of the most anticipated games of 2008. Left 4 Dead features a gritty realism that is very different from the bright illustrative world of Team Fortress 2, yet both titles are built on the Source engine developed by Valve. The differences lie in the goals of the art direction and the way in which the artists employ the shared technology underlying both titles.

Jean-Paul LeBreton and

Hogarth de la Plante, 2K Games

2K Marin's Lead Environment Artist Hogarth de la Plante and Lead Level Designer Jean-Paul LeBreton discuss how art and game design came together to create the fantastic yet believable underwater city of Rapture. The game faced many unique challenges, not the least of which was its split personality: a highly story-driven experience, an accessible mass-market shooter, and a game built on the "immersive sim" legacy of expressive play and densely interlocking mechanics. 2K Boston/Australia's process for building the game's world was a microcosm for this: starting from the paramount goal of immersing players in Rapture, taking into account the needs of a fairly complex core game design, and making all of it happen in an architecturally coherent and visually stunning space. Early applications of the more conventional industry approach—in which designers create "pure gameplay" spaces with visual polish added further down an assembly line—failed to produce workable results. The initial layout of spaces became a tighter collaboration, some responsibilities shifted between departments, and eventually the process grew to accommodate the needs of art and design with minimal compromise.

Eric Bibeau, Animation Engineer, Ubisoft and Jason Walter, Autodesk Consulting

Autodesk HumanIK is one of the core pieces of technology that allowed Ubisoft to bring Assassin’s Creed to life. In this detailed technical session, Eric Bibeau of Ubisoft talks about how HumanIK was implemented in specific areas such as climbing, pushing through crowds, and quadruped IK. Most of today’s game animation systems are driven by forward kinematic animation. HumanIK is a standalone library that has been extracted from the Autodesk MotionBuilder animation engine. Using HumanIK allows developers to add inverse kinematics to game play. Eric discusses why Ubisoft chose to use HumanIK, how and where it was implemented, and provides a post-mortem of the process. He is joined by Jason Walter, from Autodesk Consulting, who provides a detailed breakdown of the technology and offers more insight into how you can incorporate HumanIK into your game engine.

Matt Taylor, Midway Games

Central Groups are Midway Games’ answer to the expanding challenge of creating art for next-gen titles. With many projects using different software packages—Maya here, 3ds Max there, MotionBuilder in between—every game pipeline seemed completely custom. Midway realized that a more effective and efficient organization was needed. By creating versatile Central Art Groups, art assets can be quickly shared to allow artists to focus on the creation of the high-impact artwork that sells games. This talk focuses on providing an overview of Midway’s creation of these teams and the immediate benefits seen for content creation.

Simon Mack, NaturalMotion

This session looks at how you can use procedural animation and euphoria, in particular, to best effect in real games. We begin by outlining what you can achieve now with character simulation and motion synthesis at run time. We then examine the design and gameplay possibilities of the technology as well as some of the potential issues of integrating procedural motion. We also look at how simulation-based animation works alongside traditional approaches to character motion. Finally, we discuss how to achieve artistic direction over procedural animation, and how this may impact development teams. Throughout the session, the focus is on examining real case studies from games using euphoria as well as looking at the tools used to author animation content.

David Larsson, Illuminate Labs, and

Kyle Davis, Gearbox Software

Moving from Unreal Engine’s static lighting solution to a global illumination–based system affects both your game’s visual quality and your artists' workflow. We introduce Illuminate Labs' Beast for Unreal Engine and share experiences on how it affected the workflow on Gearbox Software.

Jentzen Mooney, Softimage

This session discusses how to create a complete shader authoring pipeline that targets the Direct3D 10 platform. See how to create and modify Direct3D 10 shaders using the FX framework inside of a content creation tool. We follow up by showing how to write shaders so that they can work inside of both the content creation tool and the game runtime. We then show how you can effectively transport the shaders and their parameters from the content creation tool to the game title.

Jentzen Mooney, Softimage

This session presents the Interactive Creative Environment (ICE) introduced in XSI 7. ICE is a new platform that enables the creation and deployment of effects for film and games using a graphical node-based user interface. The ICE platform, with its visual programming interface and its integration inside of the XSI content creation tool, enables technical artists to design and implement these effects without the need to write and compile code, thus making it particularly suitable for rapid prototyping. ICE node graphs can be compounded, allowing functionality refactoring as well as easy deployment. Particles, fluids, vertex-based deformations, and crowd simulation are just a few of the effects you can create with ICE. The presentation focuses on a high-level overview of the platform. We then showcase and demonstrate real-world examples of effects designed in ICE. We conclude the presentation with discussions of potential expansion and usage scenarios in games productions.

Successful creative content has more structure and process behind it than most people think; this is particularly true in the digital world. However, it's structure and process with a "twist." This presentation approaches the task of creating relevant and compelling user experiences in the context of the special needs of creative personnel.  One of the first steps is for successful managers to recognize and accept  how creative teams are different, and to realize that managing these teams often involves as much art as science. We also explore organizational design paradigms and elements of the asset production process, with case studies from feature film animation, motion picture visual effects, and games in order to identify best practices and common threads that can be applied in the interactive space.

Given the capabilities of the newest gaming consoles like the Xbox 360, neither consumers nor developers remain satisfied with low-polygon characters staring back at them from the game. That is why developers like Rockstar Games have turned to Image Metrics. Image Metrics provides the industry’s first and only marker and makeup-free facial animation solution. Its technology converts video input of an actor’s facial performance to animation data, and in doing so, captures the subtleties and nuances that bring game characters to life. The technology was recently used to produce more than 80 characters in the cut scenes of the year’s biggest blockbuster title, Grand Theft Auto IV by Rockstar Games. Working closely with Rockstar Games, Image Metrics developed facial animation that has been getting accolades from gamers.  But Image Metrics not only delivers realistic characters—it does so faster and more cost-effectively than other solutions, enabling Rockstar to produce more than 300 minutes of animation over a six month period with a staff of about thirty artists.

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What’s New in XNA Game Studio 3.0

Mitch Walker

XNA Game Studio 3.0 is just around the corner. Come get an inside look at creating games for Zune, new XNA Framework features, and Visual Studio 2008 support. We also cover best practices for making a great community game using XNA Game Studio 3.0!

Building Worlds with the Content Pipeline

Shawn Hargreaves

Real games need more than just one mesh. They require spawn points, trigger boxes, and collision skins. A game level is not just an input to the graphics engine, but must also contain information about collision detection, sound, game logic, and AI. Most games also contain more than one level. This talk discusses how to extract rich level metadata using the XNA Framework Content Pipeline, and how to drop down to the underlying MSBuild technology when you need to build large amounts of content in a scalable and performant manner.

Real World Content Pipeline Examples

Eli Tayrien

The XNA Framework Content Pipeline provides a standardized way to massage content data, turning raw source assets into whatever specialized formats are required for your game. This talk demonstrates several practical examples of such processing, showing how custom processors can be used to build cube maps, normal maps, and sprite sheets, to apply new shaders to a model, to extract collision data from meshes, and to programmatically create new geometry.

Networking, Traffic Jams, and Schrödinger's Cat

Shawn Hargreaves

The XNA Framework networking API makes it easy to join a session and exchange data packets. But what exactly should you put in those packets? This talk explains how to overcome the challenges posed by limited bandwidth (if you send too much data, or fail to properly compress it, your game could end up even slower than my morning commute) and delivery latency (when packets arrive late, you must use prediction algorithms to smooth things out, creating a strange quantum world where each object has more than one state being simulated in parallel).

XNA Game Studio Performance 2008: Multithreading and GPU

Frank Savage

This presentation explains how to take advantage of.NET Framework and XNA Framework features to split processing load onto multiple cores and the GPU. This presentation focuses primarily on Xbox 360 performance techniques, but may also include information relevant to XNA Game Studio developers on Windows.

Creating Great Community Games

Mitch Walker

The ability to distribute your games through Xbox LIVE Marketplace is coming. Are you ready? This talk focuses on what it takes to create great community games that everyone will want to play. We discuss best practices for creating good user experiences, dealing with multiple profiles, multiplayer searching and lobbies, save games, performance, content, and more! We also take a look at several games that get it right and a few that don’t, so you’ll have the information you need to create that next great game!

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