It's Thursday morning and I made it in for the 9am talk, even after the late night of drinking. In fact I'm a little early so time to recap a little more from day 1. They have a wireless LAN at the conference so Hopefully you'll get to read this before tomorrow morning.

TrayGames After playing hide and seek all day with Joe and Paul from TrayGames I discovered that they were not actually hiding at all, they were just on a different floor. We had a good chat about their SDK and what kind of games they are looking for. I think there's a great opportunity for small part time indie game developers to get games published. They only gave me access to the SDK just before I left for San Francisco so I've not had time to look deeply into it. However, even with the limited documentation they currently have I had a working client and server up and running in a couple of hours. The game will be entitled "Attack of the killer debug messages" since thats all that it does. The architecture they have setup up means you start out multi player, so I could even run 2 clients. Watch for a more detailed look at the SDK in the next few weeks. Now that I'm a member I can issue invites to other wannabe developers so drop me an email if you would like to get involved, or even if you just want to play the couple of games they have online.

Talks In addition to the NVidia mobile chip talk I talked about last night I attended a talk about optimizing DirectX by Richard Huddy from ATI and a session about how ATI made the Ruby shorts. The latter was very interesting. ATI approached a film company that produce CG type films and (with some constraints on model size etc) asked them to produce a pre rendered movie. Then the ATI guys set about producing the same thing but in realtime. They talked about the shaders and techniques they used to emulate the things that are normally done in a slow rendering pass. They showed the before and after movies and my non critical eye really couldn't tell the difference. Well until the speaker paused the realtime one and started moving the camera around the scene.

The day ended with a booth crawl around the exhibitors, where we were provided with beer, snacks and piles of plastic rubbish that seems like a great idea to pick up at conferences but in reality just clutters up your office at work or your home. I resisted most of the swag, but I did get a nice freezer beer mug from Sun and 5 T-shirts. After doing the math I figure if I can get 50 nice t-shirts or 100 not so nice ones I will break even on the conference!