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It's a new year, which means the Game Developers Conference is right around the corner! (Well, nearly - it takes place in mid-March.) Sessions are now online, and five of them feature Bungie employees this year:
If you're going to be near San Francisco in March, put this on your calendar!
A couple of years ago, we mentioned a GDC talk given by Bungie's Justin Truman about the network architecture in Destiny, and how it tied together the spatial structure of the game. The GDC Vault has now posted that talk for public viewing - if reading the PDF didn't do it for you then, you can watch Justin give it in video form now! Thanks, INSANEdrive.
It's been a while since we've seen a Bungie presentation from the GDC (David Candland's UI talk back in April of last year was our most recent one), but a new one has been uploaded to the GDC's Youtube page. In their own words:
"Bungie's Barry Genova explains how Bungie turned almost every part of Destiny's engine into a job graph, with only limited use of thread-based pre-emption."
Sounds like valuable insight into Destiny's engine and the testing that goes into it, especially for those who think that making a change to the game is as simple as "changing a few values", or "adding if/then scripts".
Thanks, INSANEdrive, for the heads up!
Edit: Pyromancy highlighted a previous GDC talk that is referenced in the above presentation, where former Bungie employee Natalya Tatarchuk discusses Destiny's Multithreaded Rendering Architecture, which has been reported on before in a different capacity. Lots of neat stuff to read and watch!
One of the Bungie talks to be given at GDC this year is a look at the UI design of Destiny, presented by longtime UI guru Dave Candland. The preview vid released to promote this is really fun (and contains lots of tidbits showing the evolution of the interface, for folks who want to pore over details) - go give it a look! Thanks, breitzen.
GDC recently posted Justin Truman's talk from GDC 2015 on their website in PDF form (with transcription included). This one is titled: Shared World Shooter: Destiny's Networked Mission Architecture and covers how Bungie handled the complicated networking to handle matchmaking as seamlessly as possible. Go give it a read!
The GDC Vault, an archive of GDC presentations, has released 7 (!) Bungie presentations from this year's conference - go peruse them for some insight into the building of Destiny:
The last one is a video of a panel discussion, but the rest are all Powerpoint presentations (and text transcripts). Thanks to INSANEdrive for pointing these out!
Gamespot has posted the recording of Chris Butcher's talk at GDC this year titled "Destiny: Six Years in the Making." You can watch it over on their site or on their Youtube channel, and here is Bungie's own description of the talk:
At Bungie, we built games based on the Halo engine for ten years. However, by 2008 it was beginning to show its age and there were many core systems that were ill-suited to a modern game development environment. For our new game, Destiny, we sought to develop an engine that would last us just as long as the Halo engine had. This talk will cover the six-year development arc of the Destiny engine, from inception to ship.
(Thanks to uberfoop for posting about it on the forum, even if I didn't notice until after the fact!)
Polygon has as a nice article on one of the Destiny-related talks given at GDC this year. David Helsby, Destiny's Senior Animator, went in-depth on how the first-person animations were created to be smooth but realistic, and at the same time, not induce motion sickness in the player. Interesting read! VG24/7 also has an article on the talk. Thanks CruelLEGACY.
Scott Shepherd (Technical Art Lead for Bungie's 3D Department) presented this year at GDC. The talk, Building Customizable Characters for Bungie's Destiny, is now available on the GDC Vault. In this hour-long presentation, Scott presents a ton of information about the vision and implementation of the character appearance and customization that we will experience in Destiny. The talk itself is about 40 minutes long, with another 20 minutes of Q&A afterward. Very interesting! (Thanks to Xenos for the heads-up!)
Over at reddit, AgriosEndendros has linked to a Japanese article with screencaps from Scott Shepherd's GDC talk. That talk will likely be available on Bungie.net (or maybe Gamasutra) at some point in the future - but if you're dying to see new images RIGHT NOW, this is the place to go. Even if you don't read Japanese, the pictures do a decent job of showing the overview of Destiny's Gear System, at least as presented in this talk. Some really interesting tidbits in there!
Bungie's Scott Shepherd discussed Destiny's character creation system in a GDC panel this morning - Polygon has the details. Go read! Thanks again, Xenos.
A couple of weeks ago, we summarized all of the Bungie-related GDC talks coming up in March at this year's Game Developer Conference. Looks like we missed one! Senior FX Art Lead Steve Scott will participate in a panel entitled 'Killer Portfolio or Portfolio Killer: Part 1 - Advice from Industry Artists'. He will be joined by 343's Nicolas 'Sparth' Bouvier - Halo and Destiny artists sharing their experience! Thanks, Kermit.
Sure, Claude already made a post about the 2014 Game Developers Conference today, but it looks like one more presentation snuck onto the schedule:
Face Animation Retargeting in Destiny
Jason Garris Jones | Character Technical Artist, Bungie
Tom Sanocki | Character Technical Lead, BungieIn Face Animation Retargeting in Destiny, we'll explain how we were able to achieve high-quality face animation in our real-time cinematics.
- We'll show how 42 player-selectable heads shared one animation across different alien/robot races and genders.
- We'll explain how the way we parameterized our data allowed us to future-proof our rigs, giving our animators and performance-capture technology more flexibility to grow in the future.
- We'll explain the philosophy that influenced our topology design and bone layout.
- We'll cover the tools and rig controls we built for our animators.
- We'll cover some early approaches we tried and why they didn't work for us.
- Lastly, we'll demonstrate art techniques and processes adapted from computer animated film that were instrumental for achieving higher-quality face rigging.
Very cool. (If that last bullet point sounds intriguing, remember that Tom Sanocki spent 11 years working for Pixar!) GDC also updated each session listing with the proper date and time, so if you're lucky enough to attend the conference be sure to check out all four of Bungie's panels:
This is pretty exciting when you consider the plethora of Destiny teases we got from last year's presentation! (By the way, if you need extra help remembering the dates posted above, the new DBO Calendar might prove useful.)
The number of Bungie-given talks at this year's GDC continues to rise - it was announced today that Executive Producer Mark Noseworthy will be talking about Upgrading Bungie's Production Practices for a Brave New World as part of the Production talks track. He'll look at how Bungie dealt with rapid expansion and the tools that came out of it. Sounds pretty interesting! This showed up on both Gamasutra and Polygon today.
We recently mentioned Scott Shepherd's upcoming GDC presentation "Building Customizable Characters for Bungie's Destiny", but Scott isn't the only one sharing secret Bungie sauce this March - animator Richard Lico will give a talk on "Designing the Bungie Animation Workflow".The full description of the session promises that attendees will "get to see footage in raw form before it becomes the shiny, polished game released into the wild." Neat!
We've mentioned this tech before in the context of Destiny and GDC, but now you can watch the session in its entirety. It's a fairly technical presentation, but is certainly interesting if you want to dig into some of the finer points about what's required to bring a modern game title to life.
Bnet user thesharpspoon pointed out a few screenshots of some characters that you may have missed (I know I did) from the GDC Character Development trailer.
It's a few weeks later than others, but AusGamers.com has posted their GDC interview with Christopher Barrett and Joseph Staten today. While it touches on many elements we've already heard about in other GDC interviews, they certainly cover a few fresh angles that make it an interesting read.
Gamasutra has posted their version of the Destiny talk Bungie gave at GDC this year, in their GDCVault - for free. It's a different layout than the Gamespot vid we've all seen - it allowed me to grab a few better concept art shots for our GDC Concept Art Gallery, and it's never a bad thing to have multiple sources of great content. Go take a look!
We've added the Destiny Character Development video unveiled at GDC 2013 last week to our Official Videos collection - it's available in a million places today, but who knows about 5 years from now? Don't worry - we'll still have it then, too.
Joseph Staten and Christopher Barrett weren't the only Bungie presenters at GDC - Hao Chen was also on a panel with Umbra employee Otso Makinen. Polygon has an article summarizing the talk; it's a neat look into how Umbra and Bungie optimized the rendering techniques in Destiny's engine. (Thanks, Xenos.)