A Recipe for Mixed Reality in 'Mario Kart Live'
Speaker(s): Ed Tumbusch
Company Name(s): Velan Studios
Track / Format: Programming
Overview: Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit brings the thrill of Mario Kart racing to real life with a remote controlled kart connected to a Nintendo Switch. While a live video feed from the kart captures a first person view of the driving, the software overlays digital content that enhances the gameplay experience. This presentation will describe the tools and techniques used to convincingly fuse the physical world w
AI Summit: Squad Coordination in 'Days Gone'
Speaker(s): Tobias Karlsson
Company Name(s): Sony Bend Studio
Track / Format: AI Summit
Overview: Coordinating groups of AI in combat is a hard problem, coordinating groups of AI in an open world game where the enemy can come from any direction is harder yet. This talk details how groups of AI were coordinate in combat in Sony's Days Gone. This includes how squads are dynamically created, how the positions of friendly and enemy units are analyzed to identify friendly and enemy space and how this
AI Summit: Steering, Formations, and a Trail of Blood
Speaker(s): Daniel Dolui, James Hancox
Company Name(s): Wolcen Studio, Kythera AI
Track / Format: AI Summit
Overview: In this rapid-fire post-mortem of the AI for "Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem" and its most recent chronicle "Bloodtrail" we discuss what went right, what went wrong, and what lessons were learned. We discuss Bloodtrail generation, a novel approach to pathfinding that selects a route based on aesthetics and player experience, rather than length. We present Contextual Steering, a new appr
AI x Game Environment Guardian
Speaker(s): Wuhe Zou
Company Name(s): Netease Game
Track / Format: Programming
Overview: This presentation consists of two parts, Game Environment Guardian and Game Public Opinion Analysis System. Game Environment Guardian includes text detection algorithm, voice detection algorithm and illegal expression mining algorithm. The user expression can be quite different between games. And the user expression change as the system evolves. The presentation introduces how they solve above problem with t
AI Action Planning on Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Speaker(s): Simon Girard
Company Name(s): Ubisoft
Track / Format: Design
Overview: With open-world games becoming more and more dynamic and giving ever-increasing freedom to players, there is increasing pressure for the NPCs populating those worlds to act and react intelligently. In order to meet these demands, Assassin's Creed Odyssey moved away from a traditional scripted decision making system towards a GOAP-based planner. The team had an opportunity to apply the learnings from Odyssey to del
'Ori Will of the Wisps': Narrative Design and Visual
Speaker(s): Jeremy Gritton, Chris McEntee
Company Name(s): Moon Studios, Moon Studios
Track / Format: Design
Overview: Attendees can expect a wide-ranging discussion of the storytelling techniques behind Moon Studios' critically acclaimed Ori and the Will of the Wisps. This talk will focus on conveying themes through visual storytelling, and how narrative moments are integrated into a seamless gameplay experience for the player. nnMoon will elaborate on the inherent obstacles of writing a sequel
'Genshin Impact': Building a Scalable AI System
Speaker(s): Shuo Xu
Company Name(s): miHoYo
Track / Format: Programming
Overview: This session reviews some of AI programming challenges in developing open-world game 'Genshin Impact' and describes several handful methods to improve AI system scalability. It details an AI framework and production pipeline that allow designers to craft huge amount of AI archetypes quickly and flexibly. Next, Genshin's pathfinding service is introduced, an approach to reduce NavMesh disk and memory space overhead,
'Final Fantasy VII' Remake: Automating Quality Assurance
Speaker(s): Fabien Gravot
Company Name(s): SQUARE-ENIX
Track / Format: Programming
Overview: As games become more complex QA cost increases dramatically. To mitigate this, QA automation can be used, but most impressive systems still rely heavily on engine specific implementation. For FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE we have developed a new replay system which can reduce greatly the cost of supporting new project. Moreover this replay system is able to build its own map from player movement and also can
'Disco Elysium': Meaningless Choices and Impractical Advice
Speaker(s): Justin Keenan
Company Name(s): ZA/UM Studio
Track / Format: Design
Overview: A writer from ZA/UM Studio (makers of Disco Elysium) shares some practical advice the writing team received along the way and how they disregarded it to produce one of the best and most critically acclaimed RPGs of this century. This talk covers some of the most time-consuming and difficult aspects of Disco Elysium's dialogue and narrative design, and why they were absolutely worth the time, money, and effor
Crafting an Interactive Guitar in 'The Last of Us: Part II'
Session Name: "Swiping on the Six Strings": Crafting an Interactive Guitar in 'The Last of Us: Part II'
Speaker(s): Mark Burroughs, Grant Hoechst
Company Name(s): Naughty Dog, Naughty Dog
Track / Format: Design
Overview: This talk covers the design goals, challenges, and lessons from designing the interactive guitar mechanic in The Last of Us: Part II, both from a musical and technical perspective. The system's designers will discuss developing a flexible but approachable guitar minigame that al
#GDC2018 NVIDIA Vulkan Update - GDC 2018.pdf
Session Description: Two years after release, Vulkan is a mature and full-featured low-level graphics API, with significant adoption in the developer community.
NVIDIA will present a status update on our Vulkan software stack. We will cover latest Vulkan developments, including extensions, software libraries and tools. We will also cover best practices and lessons learned from our own work with the Vulkan API in the past year.
Speaker: Nuno Subtil, Senior Developer Technology Engineer
#GDC2018 Ray Tracing in Games with NVIDIA RTX - GDC 2018.pdf
Session Description: NVIDIA will show how RTX, DXR along with GameWorks, Ray Tracing can revolutionize gaming by significantly boosting the real-time rendering quality as well as accelerating the content creating process. In particular, NVIDIA will show state of the art real-time denoising technologies from GameWorks that will drastically bring down the cost of ray traced rendering of area light soft shadows, ambient occlusions, and glossy reflections so they become practical for real-time rendering. In addition NVIDIA will showcase how RTX and DXR can be used to conveniently implement offline light transport algorithms like path tracing in your game engine, and show the power of that for content creation process. Finally NVIDIA will also provide some tips and guideline for integrating DXR into your engine, and discuss open challenges.
Speakers: Ignacio Llamas, Senior Manager, Real Time Rendering Software & Edward Liu, Senior Real Time Rendering Engineer
#GDC2018 Advances in the HDR Eco-System_GDC2018.pdf
Session Description: HDR display devices have received much attention recently. However, most of the focus has been on TVs, making it difficult for production pipelines and PC gamers. With desktop HDR such as G-SYNC HDR becoming mass market, now is a great time to take a fresh look at our pipelines. This talk will cover the standards and technologies behind HDR from a PC perspective with a dive into some color science to help understand the complexity of it all. Ultimately, it will boil this down to practical advice for game developers.
Speaker: Evan Hart, Principal Engineer
#GDC2018 GFE Ansel_Highlights - GDC 2018.pdf
Session Description:In this talk, we will show how to easily integrate GeForce Experience platform features like NVIDIA Ansel photo mode and NVIDIA Highlights video recording.
NVIDIA Ansel allows gamers to compose and style photos as well as capture 360 photospheres and HDR images. NVIDIA Highlights allows gamers to automatically capture their best moments through developer-defined game events.
Speaker: Bryan Dudash, Senior Manager Developer Technology
#GDC2018 gdc18_aftermath_Adunn.pdf
Session Description: An update on what’s been happening in the world of TDR debugging and NVIDIA’s ‘Aftermath’ technology. With the increasing complexity of rendering APIs and GPU technology, we need to find a better way of debugging issues that present on the GPU. Since the release of Aftermath last year there has been many changes and improvements in this pivotal area; in this session we’ll recap where we are and review the latest and greatest!
Speaker: Alex Dunn, Senior Developer Technology Engineer
#GDC18 - DevTools Sponsored Session.pdf
Session Description: In this session, the Developer Tools team at NVIDIA will present a powerful new tool for graphics debugging and profiling. We’ll demonstrate features like Pixel History, Events Viewer and Resource Viewer, as well as advanced profiling functionality like the Range Profiler. In addition, we’ll have some exciting new features to show that we hope will become an essential part of every programmers arsenal for debugging graphics applications. The key takeaway will be a strong understanding of our tools and how to make them an everyday part of your development process.
Speakers: Aurelio Reis, Director of Graphics Developer Tools & Dan Price Engineering Manager, Graphics Developer Tools
#GDC2018 Fixing_The_Hyperdrive_GDC_2018.pdf
Session Description: With the release of Nsight 5.5, a subset of the key GPU hardware metrics we have been using at NVIDIA to come up with driver-side and application-side optimizations are finally available to all DX11 and DX12 developers.
This talk will start with a general theoretical overview of our performance triage method. It will then show examples of how our method can be applied to triage and speedup various GPU workloads that suffer from non-obvious pathologies, such as suboptimal resource binding on DX12 impacting the latencies of texture fetch instructions.
Speaker: Louis Bavoil, Principal engineer
#GDC2018 FINAL FANTASY XV_Behind_the_Scene_GDC2018.pdf
Session Description: Improving visual fidelity in modern games is a challenging task and Final Fantasy XV was not an exception. Doing this requires detailed analysis of the game engine to come up with a list of technologies which would naturally fit into existing content. The existing game was already very high fidelity. With all the resources and excellent cooperation from Square Enix Business Division 2 we were ready to take risks and tried to utilize every single piece from GameWorks to make the fantasy become a bit more real.
Speakers: Masaya Takeshige, Senior Development Technology Engineer & Evgeny Makarov, Senior Developer Technology Engineer
Advances in Real-Time Voxel-Based GI - GDC 2018.pdf
Session Description: Voxel based lighting has been around for a few years, but very few games have actually used it so far. In this session, we’re going to discuss VXGI, the Nvidia’s voxel based lighting solution, and uncover some recent improvements that aim to make it more practical and useful even for VR games on present day graphics hardware. We will also discuss how simple, planar area lights can be efficiently implemented with a combination of voxel-based occlusion and analytic irradiance calculations.
Speakers: Alexey Panteleev, Senior Developer Technology Engineer & Rahul Sathe, Senior Developer Technology Engineer
#GDC2017 NVIDIA Vulkan Update / Vulkan GPU Work Creation
Vulkan was released over a year ago. This sessions gives an update on the latest Vulkan developments from NVIDIA including our software libraries, developer tools and Vulkan driver extensions.
#GDC2017 NVIDIA GDC Presentations -- Accelerating your VR Games with VRWorks
Across graphics, audio, video, and physics, the NVIDIA VRWorks suite of technologies helps developers maximize performance and immersion for VR games and applications. This talk will explore the latest features of VRWorks, explain the VR-specific challenges they address, and provide application-level tips and tricks to take full advantage of these features. Special focus will be given to the details and inner workings of our latest VRWorks feature, Lens Matched Shading, along with the latest VRWorks integrations into Unreal Engine and Unity.
#GDC2017 VR Best Practices: Putting the fun in VR Funhouse
VR Funhouse is a high end experience using the latest in Gameworks technology. We will dive deep into the lessons learned through the production of VR Funhouse and how we tackled the many unique challenge of VR. We’ll cover performance, comfort, physics simulation, and visual effects. Further we’ll dive into the topic of modding in the VR space!
#GDC2017 NVIDIA GDC Presentations -- DirectX 12 Case Studies
This talk covers case studies from recent AAA PC games, explaining how porting from DX11 to DX12 worked out for the game studios. We will talk about key learnings, including things that worked well out of the box and also interesting problems solved along the way.
#GDC2017 Watch Dogs 2 PC Version Success Story with NVIDIA
The Watch Dogs 2 PC version was widely praised for doing a great job meeting PC gamer expectations. Performance and Image Quality opportunities are highest on the PC among all the platforms, but stability must not be compromised. Customization and visual versatility are also highly valued. Partnering up to make all this happen, NVIDIA and Ubisoft took a fresh look at PC Game Technical Requirements, and applied a new process of testing during development.
#GDC2017 Photogrammetry for Games
Photogrammetry, the creation of 3D assets from on-site photography and video, holds the promise of amazing, immersive worlds full of detail and organic believability. For studios, leveraging photogrammetry well requires planning, the right tools, and a carefully created pipeline to ensure that the final in-game assets achieve the quality and vibrancy of the original locale. This session brings together artists, photogrammetry technology experts and rendering pipeline engineers to present the challenges and solutions for each step in the process. The session includes real-world photogrammetry examples and demonstrates full integration between commercial photogrammetry tools like Reality Capture and game engine pipelines.
#GDC2017 Magic Image Upscaling and Material Synthesis using Deep Learning
Recently deep learning has revolutionized computer vision and other recognition problems. Everyday applications using such techniques are now commonplace with more advanced tasks being automated at a growing rate. During 2016, “image synthesis” techniques started to appear that used deep neural networks to apply style transfer algorithms for image restoration. The speakers review some of these techniques and demonstrate their application in image magnification to enable “super resolution” tools.
#GDC2017 NVIDIA GDC Presentations -- Introduction to Deep Learning
Deep learning, a branch of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), is changing the the entire computing industry. Learn how to leverage deep learning to create, develop, market, run and tune higher quality and more appealing games for mobile, console and PC.
#GDC2017 Cold, Hard Cache: Insomniac’s Cache Simulator"
“Cold, Hard Cache: Insomniac’s Cache Simulator” – Andreas Fredriksson (Insomniac Games)
#GDC2017 FrameGraph: Extensible Rendering Architecture in Frostbite
“FrameGraph: Extensible Rendering Architecture in Frostbite” – Yuriy O’Donnell (Frostbite / Electronic Arts)
#GDC2017 Insomniac’s Web Tools: A Postmortem
“Insomniac’s Web Tools: A Postmortem” – Andreas Fredriksson (Insomniac Games)