Friday was the last day. I got myself into the exhibition hall early with a bit of badge swapping and installed the ZMan demo on the booth machine. Brian told me that people were playing it a lot of Friday afternoon. Sadly I missed all the publicity that's life eh ?

The day started out with Practical Parallax bump mapping. Another chance to watch the awesome toyshop demo and see Natalya Tatarchuk speak again. This isn't your grandmas bump mapping. Each pixel ray traces the bump map to calculate which real pixel is visible and which is in shadow.

Next up, Eric Lengyel and a talk entitled 'Advance light and shadow culling methods'. The general problem is - how to you know which objects a light can strike and how do you know which objects outside your view frustum could be casting shadows form these lights. He showed a nice extension to a portal based system that covered all of this nicely.

Last but one, back to ATI for Shadow Mapping tricks and tips. I would have liked to have seen this talk before Tom Forsyth's talk from yesterday as John Isidoro explained some of the things Tom skipped over such as surface acne, 'peter pan'ing and smoothies.

And finally for this year what turned out to be one of the best talks I have seen. Sebastien DeGuy from Allegorithmic and Joshua Glazer from Naked Sky Entertainment answered the questions 'how do you fit a multi level 3rd person 3d game into the required 50Mb specified by Xbox Live Arcade?'. The answer is to use Allegorithmic's patented procedural generation of textures. Procedural generation is nothing new, but their patents cover the ability for an artist to move things around in the generated texture and have it still be procedurally generated. Their upcoming game RoboBlitz has 80Mb of textures represented by 280Kb of data and that's just one level of the game. It takes about 4s to generate them which is comparable with the time it would take to pull the textures from a DVD.