Gamefest 2008

Well managed to go! It was great, well the bits I saw as I didn't get there till around 11:00, but got to see most of Frank Savages talk on Threading in XNA which was interesting and threw up a few tips, also the talk on Live networking by Mitch Walker was very insightful.

Now one talk that I did find changed my out look on an area of XNA was Frank Savages talk on the Content Pipeline. Now I knew you could do a fair bit with it, have played a little with it my self, but WOW! There is SO much in there to play with. An example he gave was when creating your levels in your modelling tool, use spheres for markers in the level for things like spawn points, event triggers etc.. label these spheres so you know what they are pertaining to, then you can write your own content override to get this data out of the model, use the centre of the sphere to mark the point, store it in an array of points and then store it in the tag of the Model (remember to remove this excess data prior to passing it on to the base class) It was so obvious yet I had not even thought about it, so much other stuff we could do in there too, I have been using it to store bounding box data as well as vertex data (not needed since 2.0 I don't think), but this could also include collision normals, further bounding data, breaking the model up into a number of spheres for greater collision accuracy, and that's just models, anything else that falls under the content project can be manipulated, this is still all pretty basic stuff, but I am sure you can imagine how much control we now have over our content.

Well after all that exciting stuff, we had a break for lunch, I then went to the Community Games on XBox Live talk (after debating with myself if I should stay for the XBLA talk) and it was quite informative, nothing there I didn't really know or heard about already, other than the, "If your games kills anyone who plays it, it's your fault!" bit, well they didn't put it quite like that, but you are liable for your game I guess, being the publisher and the developer all in one... As you can imagine a lot of people in the room seemed to be industry folk and so there questions were more around the realms of IPR infringement and how they will now stop there developers moon lighting to make money with XNA. Oh and someone asked about people writing XBox time bomb's, malicious code that would get through the peer review as it only goes off at Christmas or Halloween, what I find odd about that is the limited access you have to both the network and the hardware on the 360, guess you could fill a hard drive or maybe flash up naughty pictures for a day, but I guess that's going to get you and your 360's mac address banned for life....but then I guess there are some odd folk out there...you know who I mean....yes you there...no, not you, you...

So then came the party after....I say party, but was just a gathering of the attendees for free booze and food, oh a blast on Geometry Wars and other titles around the room to, no Schitzoid which I found odd, would have thought they would have had a copy of that running at an XNA conference. Met some guys from Beatnick Games Ltd (Hi Robin) who are a start up writing a game in XNA, think they want us to play test the beta, so guess we are waiting for them to give us access now so we can rip it apart...

Shame I missed the keynote and the What's new in XNA 3.0 talk, would have been good to catch those.

All in all good stuff, I think I may now have an addiction to games dev conferences....ah, my personality flaws shining out again, first XNA now this....

Thanks to Leaf and Robin for sorting stuff out and making sure I did not get lost on the tube ride back to St Pancs...