Sat
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Mar 2020

March is an important time of year for game developers, as that's when Game Developers Conference (GDC) takes place - the most important conference of the industry. This year's edition has been cancelled because of coronavirus pandemic, just like all other events, or rather postponed to a later date. But many companies prepared their talks anyway. Surely, they had to submit their talks long time ago, plus any preparation, internal technical and legal reviews... The time spent on this shouldn't be wasted. That's why many of them shared their talks online as videos and/or slides. Below, I try to gather links to these materials with a full list of titles, with special focus on programming talks.

GDC

They organized multi-day "Virtual Talks" event presented on Twitch, with replays now available to watch and slides accessible on their website.

GDC Videos @ Twitch
GDC 2020 Virtual Talks (agenda)
GDC Vault - GDC 2020 (slides)

Monday, March 16

The 'Kine' Postmortem
Storytelling with Verbs: Integrating Gameplay and Narrative
Intrinsically Motivated Teams: The Manager's Toolbox
From 'Assassin's Creed' to 'The Dark Eye': The Importance of Themes
Representing LGBT+ Characters in Games: Two Case Studies
The Sound of Anthem
Is Your Game Cross-Platform Ready?
Forgiveness Mechanics: Reading Minds for Responsive Gameplay
Experimental AI Lightning Talk: Hyper Realistic Artificial Voices for Games

Tuesday, March 17

What to Write So People Buy: Selling Your Game Without Feeling Sleazy
Failure Workshop: FutureGrind: How To Make A 6-Month Game In Only 4.5 Years
Stress-Free Game Development: Powering Up Your Studio With DevOps
Baked in Accessibility: How Features Were Approached in 'Borderlands 3'
Matchmaking for Engagement: Lessons from 'Halo 5'
Forget CPI: Dynamic Mobile Marketing
Integrating Sound Healing Methodologies Into Your Workflow
From 0-1000: A Test Driven Approach to Tools Development
Overcoming Creative Block on 'Super Crush KO'
When Film, Games, and Theatre Collide

Wednesday, March 18

Bringing Replays to 'World of Tanks: Mercenaries'
Developing and Running Neural Audio in Constrained Environments
Mental Health State of the Industry: Past, Present & Future
Empathizing with Steam: How People Shop for Your Game
Scaling to 10 Concurrent Users: Online Infrastructure as an Indie
Crafting A Tiny Open World: 'A Short Hike' Postmortem
Indie Soapbox: UI design is fun!
Don't Ship a Product, Ship Value: Start Your Minimum Viable Product With a Solution
Day of the Devs: GDC Edition Direct
Independent Games Festival & Game Developers Choice Awards

Thursday, March 19

Machine Learning for Optimal Matchmaking
Skill Progression, Visual Attention, and Efficiently Getting Good at Esports
Making Your Game Influencer Ready: A Marketing Wishlist for Developers
How to Run Your Own Career Fair on a Tiny Budget
Making a Healthy Social Impact in Commercial Games
'Forza' Monthly: Live Streaming a Franchise
Aesthetic Driven Development: Choosing Your Art Before Making a Game
Reading the Rules of 'Baba Is You'

Friday, March 20

Beyond Games as a Service with Live Ops
Kill the Hero, Save the (Narrative) World
'Void Bastards' Art Style Origin Story
Writing Tools Faster: Design Decisions to Accelerate Tool Development
Face-to-Parameter Translation via Neural Network Renderer
The Forest Paths Method for Accessible Narrative Design
'Gears 5' Real-Time Character Dynamics
Stop & Think: Teaching Players About Media Manipulation in 'Headliner'

Microsoft

They organized "DirectX Developer Day" where they announced DirectX 12 Ultimate - a fancy name for the updated Direc3D 12_2 with new major features including DXR (Ray Tracing), Variable Rate Shading, and Mesh Shaders.

DirectX Developer Blog
Microsoft DirectX 12 and Graphics Education @ YouTube
DirectX Developer Day 2020 #DXDevDay @ Mixer (talks as one long stream)

DXR 1.1 Inline Raytracing
Advanced Mesh Shaders
Reinventing the Geometry Pipeline: Mesh Shaders in DirectX 12
DirectX 12 Sampler Feedback
PIX on Windows
HLSL Compiler

NVIDIA

That's actually GPU Technology Conference (GTC) - a separate event. Their biggest announcement this month was probably DLSS 2.0.

NVIDIA GTC Sessions

RTX-Accelerated Hair Brought to Life with NVIDIA Iray
Material Interoperability Using MaterialX, Standard Surface, and MDL
The Future of GPU Raytracing
Visuals as a Service (VaaS): How Amazon and Others Create and Use Photoreal On-Demand Product Visuals with RTX Real-Time Raytracing and the Cloud
Next-Gen Rendering Technology at Pixar
New Features in OptiX 7
Production-Quality, Final-Frame Rendering on the GPU
Latest Advancements for Production Rendering with V-Ray GPU and Real-Time Raytracing with Project Lavina
Accelerated Light-Transport Simulation using Neural Networks
Bringing the Arnold Renderer to the GPU
Supercharging Adobe Dimension with RTX-Enabled GPU Raytracing
Sharing Physically Based Materials Between Renderers with MDL
Real-Time Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion of Complex Scenes using Spatial Hashing

I also found some other videos on Google:

DLSS - Image Reconstruction for Real-time Rendering with Deep Learning
NVIDIA Vulkan Features Update – including Vulkan 1.2 and Ray Tracing
3D Deep Learning in Function Space
Unleash Computer Vision at the Edge with Jetson Nano and Always AI
Optimized Image Classification on the Cheap
Cisco and Patriot One Technologies Bring Machine Learning Projects from Imagination to Realization (Presented by Cisco)
AI @ The Network Edge
Animation, Segmentation, and Statistical Modeling of Biological Cells Using Microscopy Imaging and GPU Compute
Improving CNN Performance with Spatial Context
Weakly Supervised Training to Achieve 99% Accuracy for Retail Asset Protection
Combating Problems Like Asteroid Detection, Climate Change, Security, and Disaster Recovery with GPU-Accelerated AI
Condensa: A Programming System for DNN Model Compression
AI/ML with vGPU on Openstack or RHV Using Kubernetes
CTR Inference Optimization on GPU
NVIDIA Tools to Train, Build, and Deploy Intelligent Vision Applications at the Edge
Leveraging NVIDIA’s Technology for the Ultimate Industrial Autonomous Transport Robot
How to Create Generalizable AI?
Isaac Sim 2020 Deep Dive

But somehow I can't find their full list with links to them anywhere on their website. More talks are accessible after free registration on the event website.

Intel

GDC 2020. A Repository for all Intel Technical Content prepared for GDC
Intel Software @ YouTube

Multi-Adapter with Integrated and Discrete GPUs
Optimizing World of Tanks*: from Laptops to High-End PCs
Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit and its Application to Games
Intel® ISPC in Unreal Engine 4: A Peek Behind the Curtain
Variable Rate Shading with Depth of Field
For the Alliance! World of Warcraft and Intel discuss an Optimized Azeroth
Intel® Open Image Denoise in Blender - GDC 2020
Variable Rate Shading Tier 1 with Microsoft DirectX* 12 from Theory to Practice
Does Your Game's Performance Spark Joy? Profiling with Intel® Graphics Performance Analyzers
Boost CPU performance with Intel® VTune Profiler
DeepMotion | Optimize CPU Performance with Intel VTune Profiler

Google

Google for Games Developer Summit 2020 @ YouTube (a collection of playlists)

Mobile Track

Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote
What's new in Android game development tools
What's new in Android graphics optimization tools
Android memory tools and best practices
Deliver higher quality games on more devices
Google Play Asset Delivery for games: Product deep dive and case studies
Protect your game's integrity on Google Play
Accelerate your business growth with leading ad strategies
Firebase games SDK news
Cloud Firestore for Game Developers

Clouds Track

Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote
Scaling globally with Game Servers and Agones (Google Games Dev Summit)
How to make multiplayer matchmaking easier and scalable with Open Match (Google Games Dev Summit)
Unity Game Simulation: Find the perfect balance with Unity and GCP (Google Games Dev Summit)
How Dragon Quest Walk handled millions of players using Cloud Spanner (Google Games Dev Summit)
Building gaming analytics online services with Google Cloud and Improbable (Google Games Dev Summit)

Stadia Track

Google for Games Developer Summit Keynote
Bringing Destiny to Stadia: A postmortem (Google Games Dev Summit)
Stadia Games & Entertainment presents: Creating for content creators (Google Games Dev Summit)
Empowering game developers with Stadia R&D (Google Games Dev Summit)
Stadia Games & Entertainment presents: Keys to a great game pitch (Google Games Dev Summit)
Supercharging discoverability with Stadia (Google Games Dev Summit)

Ubisoft

Ubisoft’s GDC 2020 Talks Online Now

Online Game Technology Summit: Start-And-Discard: A Unified Workflow for Development and Live
Finding Space for Sound: Environmental Acoustics
Game Server Performance
NPC Voice Design
Machine Learning Summit: Ragdoll Motion Matching
Machine Learning, Physics Simulation, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies

Khronos: I can't find any information about individual talks from them. There is only a note about GDC 2020 Live Streams pointing to GDC Twitch channel.

AMD: No information.

Sony: No information.

Consoles: Last but not least, March 2020 was also the time when the details of the upcoming new generation of consoles have been announced - Xbox Series S and PlayStation 5. You can easily find information about them by searching the Internet, so I won't recommend any links.

If you know about any more GDC 2020 or other important talks related to programming that have been released recently, please contact me or leave a comment below and I will add them!

Maybe there a positive side of this pandemic? With GDC taking place, developers had to pay $1000+ entrance fee for the event. They had to book a flight to California and a hotel in San Francisco, which was prohibitively expensive for many. They had to apply for ESTA or a vista to the US, which not everyone could get. And the talks eventually landed behind a paywall, scoring even more money to the organizers. Now we can educate ourselves for free from the safety and convenience of our offices and homes.

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