Had a good time at the GDC?

hey y'all,
the last couple of days have been just awsome...hmmm, hope i'm not understating that! For all of u people who could not make it to the GDC, too bad, hope u can make it next year.GDC 2005 just rocked! I'm mean for whatever lil bit i saw, which was quite a BIT.Let me start off talking about the EXPO,well since i had the EXPO Pass (FYI, i was not too thrilled about that) i attended just 5 tutorials and the IGDA/GDC and the IGF award shows.The EXPO had most of the 'who's who' in the game industry and u could c all of them booth crawl.BLIZZARD, SONY Online.,HIGH MOON Studios,UBI-Soft and many others had set up their booths at the EXPO, excepting resumes,talking to students,reviewing demo reels, u know how it works rite.Anyway, Once that was over, i mean how long r u gonna crawl around in an expo! I was there for a while though, then had lunch (accident) lolz.The next day i realised it was not for the EXPO guys...well,boho, as u can see i'm flushed with shame! :0) anyway,comming back to the point of this topic, yes, the CLASSES :

Use of openMP in Games : well, dunno where to start for this one, was in there for an hr. and understood just 15 min. of it, yep being a programmer myself! the gist of this talk was how openMP (which is kind of a plugin -if u may for c program users) a 'library' that includes all the functions that apparently speed up your processing speed during multithreding by 70% (thats a lot)Unless your not gonna be using multithreding this should not make that much of a difference to your script during compilation.well, thats that!

Bonus or Bogus : Dealing with Hollywood Production Companies : This talk explaind how the game industry is a lot similar to the film industry (or atleast is getting there).Rosanna Sun who's credits include , casting the crew of matrix reloded and matrix revolutions, titanic and producing the game 'Enter the Matrix' was hosting the talk for the evening.She ran us through the whole process of production rite from piching an idea to a potential investor upto why exactly the production companies pay tank loads of money 'invest' into a perticular idea.How profitable is an idea? who decides that? Why did projects like polar express, 'enter the matrix' and mercury rising, bomb at the box office?

Quest : Why do you think did polar express bomb at the box office?
Ans: The problem with polar express was just that they made what should have been a 20 min. short into a full length feature, its that simple!

Quest : Why hire actors like tom hanks to do the mo-cap and voice over as it increases the budget of the movie substantically?why not just hire a good actor who does not charge as much and spend more on the movie, and in the case of a game , the actual game play?
Ans : The production companies when dealing with such huge projects dont really look at the cost anymore, well, atleast not as much as they normally would. They wanna make the movie as true to life, or authentic if u may, as possible, hence the above is done.

all in all it was a good talk and quite informative.

Attack of the Design Directors : This was probably one of the best talks i got to attend, which as u can c were not many :),'neways, getting straight to the point, this talk was about again, the pitching of an idea (but from a design directors) point of view, the disagreement that goes into ideas between various departments and the final product which includes the crunch times, and how every company likes to clame that their crunch time is not as bad, or as frequent, as the company next to them.Its the same evrywhere and the key here is organisingyour time and what he discribed as having a point system where insted of calculating the hours that some one has worked, u allot certain number of points to evry sub project and evrytime a department completes a certain task they earn some points, and they need to earn a certain number of points per week, wierd! i know, but wht the heck, he said it works!!! another importaint thing to note while designing or pitching ideas is "ALWAYS ALWAYS, HAVE A PLAN B" .

The game load (working 40 hours per week) : This talk was given by David Howie, MD of blue fang studios.A cool guy and really witty! He was talking all about the crunch time in the game industry and again to elaborate on the points i mentiond above, its in the organisational skills.He told us this one incedent about how he had his crew work for 27 straight days ,CRUNH TIME! Its the same every where people, just to pin down a perticular company (y'all know which one i'm talking abt rite...sure u do! ) is unfair i think.