Day 4 was the Microsoft party. No it wasn't all day, its just that because of that my memory isn't quite remembering what else I did!

New from the Microsoft booth, the only reason my demo wasn't running was due to lack of machines. I had several people tell me last night that they saw it running inside Microsoft's suite and meeting rooms. Brian Keller told me he might get it running today, and he will let me at least get a picture of it running at some point. Brian also told me they have had a lot of interest in the managed code stuff. I also talked to someone from Microsoft who is working on something that is related to managed code and gaming. Its something that is not yet announced, but I had heard of it while I was an employee so no official news here until I see a formal announcement.

First talk was called 'Sim, Render, Repeat - an analysis of game loop architecture'. The subject was a little dry but quite fascinating. 2 guys from EA (Madden) basically looked at game loops and the theory (yes there is theory) behind how to get them working and how this leads you to the correct (or at least alternative) solutions for running on multi core hardware.

Then a D3D10 talk with Microsoft and Ritual - obviously this is early days but they gave advice on how to hook a dD3D9 and 10 renderer into your code. They also had a nice geometry shader example doing cubic shadow maps in a single pass

The afternoon I attended 'global terrain technology for flight simulation' where one of the flight sim team talked us through how they do the terrain. Interesting stuff.

And finally, Tom Forsyth and 'extremely practical shadows'. Tom is right up there on my list of 'must see' presentations. He rips through the math and explains it so simply that even a really dumb chimp could understand. He explained all the problems with shadow mapping, presented his smart solutions and finally admitted that even his solution didn't quite work...