Really interesting PDF from Valve explaining some of the AI and game design decisions going on in the Left For Dead games. Anyone know any other documents like this? : gamedev. Adrian Boeing: Blog: Game Developers Conference 2012 - Technical summary. GDC2012 is over, and this year there are a huge number of available presentations. You can download the Game Developer Conference 2012 presentations from the GDC vault, Jare / Iguana has also kept a link collection from GDC 2012.
I've looked over all the technical publications available and put together this summary post. (Edit: I've updated this to cover some maths, physics, and graphics material I missed on the first pass - thanks Johan & Eric) I'll start with graphics. Louis Bavoil / nVidia and Johan Andersson / DICE have a presentation on "Stable SSAO in Battlefield 3 with Selective Temporal Filtering", ambient occlusion is a well established technique now, but they apply a quick way to use past data and the differences in Z buffer states between frames to intelligently reuse the AO results.
They also look at filters and optimising blur functions. Similar to established tricks in the realtime raytracing demoscene. Jay McKee / AMD presents the "Technology Behind AMD’s Leo Demo". Web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear.pdf. Valve. Valve engineers and artists regularly contribute to industry and academic conferences, covering topics from the high level goals of our cabal development process to the inner workings of cutting-edge rendering algorithms.
All linked papers and slides below are in Adobe Acrobat format. Michael Booth, "The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead," Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference at Stanford. Slides Michael Booth, "Replayable Cooperative Game Design: Left 4 Dead," Game Developer's Conference, March 2009. Mike Ambinder, "Valve's Approach to Playtesting: The Application of Empiricism," Game Developer's Conference, March 2009.
Jason Mitchell, "Connecting Visuals to Gameplay at Valve," Montreal International Game Summit, 18 November 2008. Moby Francke and Randy Lundeen, "How Valve Connects Art Direction to Gameplay," Microsoft GameFest, July 2008. Alex Vlachos, "Post Processing in The Orange Box," Game Developer's Conference, February 2008. Insomniac @ GDC2012 : truegamedev. Rigid Body Dynamics - Chris Hecker's Website. Note: the text of this page is from my original website, and I haven't updated it in a while. Make sure you look at the physics category for all of the articles related to rigid body dynamics. I started getting interested in high end physical simulation for games sometime in 1995. Since I didn't know anything about physics or know any real math (I had calculus in high school and enjoyed it, but had forgotten most of it), I had to teach myself everything from scratch. Let me just say it was a total blast.
I highly recommend everyone taking the time to learn something really big and new every once in a while, in addition to all the little things we're all [hopefully] learning every day. As a bonus, it seems that the more we learn, the faster we're able to learn even newer things, which makes the whole process even more pleasurable. As much fun as I had figuring this stuff out, I sure would have appreciated some references and articles aimed at my level when I was starting. Physics Articles. Ducati.doc.ntu.ac.uk/uksim/uksim%2704/Papers/Simon Tomlinson- 04-20/paper04-20 CR.pdf. "Algorithm" is Not a Four-Letter Word. Step | run | reset |