ACES presentations at GDC

I was browsing the Game Developers Conference sessions for familiar names from the ACES camp, and low and behold, I found two! The conference will be March 20-24 in San Jose, California.

Adam Szofran will be speaking about "Global Terrain Technology for Flight Simulation"

This talk presents some of the terrain engine technology developed by Microsoft Game Studios. Of particular interest are techniques for handling the large amount of geospatial data required to represent the Earth from the surface up to orbital altitudes. Also discussed are fiber- and thread-based technologies for composing surface textures on the fly at run-time using a variety of geospatial data. The last part of the presentation focuses on how to triangulate a global, multiresolution terrain mesh requiring double-precision coordinates when the rendering hardware only supports single-precision coordinates.

Graphics guru, Adrian Woods, will be speaking about "The Make Art Button: Batches, Actions, and Scripts"

Do something once, it's creative. Do something twice, it's repetitive. Do something three times, you can probably automate it.

This session gives artists tools they can use to help minimize repetitive tasks and maximize creativity and iteration. Using the dreaded DOS prompt, Photoshop actions and droplets, and MaxScript, the speaker shows how technical ability can actually unleash creativity. For example, you can use MaxScript to enable in-game visuals never seen before. You can use Photoshop actions to speed up production time. And you can use the DOS prompt. Spend less time getting carpal tunnel syndrome, and more time creating beautiful artwork.

Since this year's GDC is in California and I am in South Carolina, I will not get the opportunity to attend. I really would be interested in seeing Adrian's session, as it is geared exactly toward what I do as a third party content creator. A lot of the work I do is quite repetitive in nature, and having tools that streamline tedious tasks is exactly what I've been looking for!

I hope that these guys post transcripts, or perhaps powerpoint presentations of their sessions after the conference. Adrian has his own blog - seems like a great place to post it *hint, hint*. :-)