The Game Developer Conference came and went in a hurry. I was severely disappointed to find that Emily Short's talk was on Tuesday, before I arrived. Likewise there was a physics panel on Tuesday or Wednesday featuring folks like Erin Catto and Erwin Coumans who I would have liked to meet.
The one talk I attended that really enthused me was a half-hour introduction to R-Trees, an adaptation of B-Trees to spatial indexing. Sebastian Sylvan's main point was that our current situation, with processor speeds greatly outstripping memory access speeds (particularly random access due to cache misses) is exactly analogous to the old days of database programming where disk access was very slow. Many algorithms (like B-Trees) that were developed to mitigate disk-access problems are useful in avoiding cache misses.
There wasn't time to do much networking at the conference but I did manage to meet Andy Korth and Scott Lembcke, the duo forming Howling Moon Software and the creators of the Chipmunk 2D dynamics library that I use in my lunar-lander program. They just announced a space game under development titled “Solaro”. I'm looking forward to seeing that one.
1 comment:
That's it. Next year I'm going to GDC if I have to walk there.
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