Tuesday was spent at the Direct3D day, the alternative Microsoft Gameday sounded a little too much like last years Meltdown for my liking. A whole day filled with talks from NVidia and ATI about cool graphics effects. Some interesting facts about Direct3D10 including a way to emulate some of the new features on current hardware (its slower but you can try things out) including an ATI demo animating >10,000 characters at the same time, a talk about how they did the water effects in the toyshop demo (did you know that in Hollywood to make rain seem stronger they add milk so that it just shows up better?) and a talk from NVidia on creating metaballs entirely on a D3D10 GPU.

In the evening I headed off to the IGDA reception, seems like unless you have big sponsors you cant get a decent bar or food. We got 1 drink and some pizza..... Since I am a cheapskate who has a cheap hotel out by the airport I had to leave before 8:30 to get the bus back so maybe it got better later.