5 Challenges Feedback

Thanks again to everyone that contributed feedback to my 5 Challenges in Interactive Rendering talk in the Beyond Programmable Shading course! Had a lot of fun discussions and pretty much all of the feedback fit nicely into the selected challenges and topics.

Feels great that we as an industry are not completely trying to go in different directions and actually seem to care the most about many of the same topics. If you don't agree, please leave a comment :)

Will follow up with some of you that sent long detailed emails of your inner wishes & secrets next week now that I'm back from Siggraph.


Here is a list of everyone (I hope!) that directly gave feedback on what the challenges should be or topics of interests, thanks! This is a great list of people to follow on twitter as well.

Christina Coffin (@christinacoffin)
Colin Barré-Brisebois (@ZigguratVertigo)
Daniel Collin (@daniel_collin)
Flavius Alecu (@flawe)
Sander van Rossen (@logicalerror)
Rob Jones (@bobvodka)
Steven Tovey (@nonchaotic)
Colin Riley (@domipheus)
Joe Tidmarsh (@mrjovis)
Stephen Hill (@self_shadow)
Federico Bianco Prevot (@nocturndragon)
Stefan Boberg (@bionicbeagle)
Noel Llopis (@snappytouch)
Björn Knafla (@bjoernknafla)
Andrew Richards (@codeandrew)
Juan Manuel Alvarez (@the_naicigam)
David Luebke (@davedotluebke)
Jonathan Ragan-Kelley (@jrk)
Pat Wilson (@pat_wilson)
Rachel Blum (@groby)
Brian Karis (@briankaris)
Matt Collins (@matt_c_)
Sam Martin (@palgorithm)
Aaron Lefohn
Andrew Lauritzen
Luca Fascione
Steve Anichini
Simon Taylor
Matt Swoboda
Cody Ritchie
Mattias Kylen
Oscar Carlén


Oh and if you still have thoughts about what the 5 major challenges are and/or didn't have time to discuss it before, please do send a tweet (@repi), post a comment or send an email. Always interesting to discuss & hear people's thoughts and ideas on the topic!

See you, if not sooner, at GDC 2011 (San Francisco) and SIGGRAPH 2011 (Vancouver).

SIGGRAPH 2010 talks by DICE

SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles was great! Lots of good real-time talks & research this year as well as a huge amount of old friends & new people to meet up with and talk to.

Many of the courses now also have course sites set up for them now the material for the talks can be found, highly recommended reading:

• Advances in Real-time Rendering


• Beyond Programmable Shading ("my" course)


• Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production


• Stylized Rendering in Games

We had a big presence at SIGGRAPH this year and all the DICE talks, except for the Mirror's Edge one, can now be found on both publications.dice.se (including the .ppt files for them) as well as embedded in this post.

Hope to upload the Mirror's Edge talk by Henrik Halén from the Stylized Rendering in Games course later on, we need to sort out some permissions for that one first.

Here are the slides for 5 of the 6 DICE talks at SIGGRAPH 2010 embedded:

5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering

Bending the Graphics Pipeline

Destruction Masking in Frostbite 2 using Volume Distance Fields

A Real-time Radiosity Architecture

Stylized Rendering in Battlefield Heroes

DICE talk schedule for Siggraph'10

We have a record amount of DICE-related talks at Siggraph this year, 6 of them to be precise!



Stylized Rendering in Games course (Monday, 26 July):

• Cartoon 3D for Battlefield Heroes - Henrik Halén


• Style and Gameplay in Mirror's Edge - Henrik Halén

Advanced Techniques in Real-Time Hair Rendering and Simulation course (Wednesday, 28 July):

• Destruction Masking in Frostbite 2 using Volume Distance Fields - Robert Kihl


• A Real Time Radiosity Architecture for Video Games - Per Einarsson

Beyond Programmable Shading course (Thursday, 29 July):

• 5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering - Johan Andersson


• Bending the Graphics Pipeline - Johan Andersson

The slides & material for these presentations will be posted directly after Siggraph ends on http://publications.dice.se as well as on this blog.


We'll have a contingent of 4-5 DICE people at Siggraph + hopefully some EA friends, send me a tweet (@repi) or a mail (repi at dice.se) if you want to meet up for some interesting technical discussions and food/beer!

Gathering feedback: 5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering

One of the talks I'm doing for the Beyond Programmable Shading course at Siggraph 2010 is about 5 Major Challenges in Interactive Rendering. And to be able to give good examples of major challenges we have going forward for the next 5 or even 10 years, I thought it could be a good idea to gather some feedback & content from the internets.

In other words, I'm lazy and crowdsourcing parts of the presentation :)

Getting broad feedback would be very useful to get a better understanding of how we as an industry would like to go forward and what problems & challenges are the most important to solve first.

If you are a game developer or working with interactive rendering in any other field, I would very much appreciate any feedback you have on the topic and specific challenges you would like to solve in the next 5-10 years and why those challenges are important for you, and I'll try to include that in the talk.

If you also have ideas of how it should be solved or pictures/movies that clearly demonstrate what you would like to achieve - that would be even better!

The challenges can be anything from rather small things such as the lack of a programmable blending stage that makes rendering decals together with Deferred Shading more difficult, expensive and awkward.

Or things like the major challenge of doing full-scene dynamic glossy reflections in arbitrary environments which can't be done accurately & generally today at all and where different types of raytracing may or may not be the way forward in the long term (with their own set of issues and problems of course).



Feedback about challenges is also not limited to only 'rendering features' per say, for example another key challenge is to develop great programming models for these massive data-parallel machines to empower developers broadly & utilize future hardware efficiently.

If you have any feedback - please either post in the comments here, tweet to me at @repi or mail comments/feedback/examples to me at repi (at) dice.se.

Thanks!

STHLM Game Developer Forum talk

I held a talk at the new Stockholm Game Developer Forum mini-conference yesterday, did an updated version of my "Parallel Futures of a Game Engine" (v2.0).

Quite a lot have happened within 6 months since the first version of the talk; such as us having released Battlefield: Bad Company 2 with great success (5 million copies sold!), Intel killed Larrabee as a discrete GPU, AMD released more details of Fusion as well as interesting work experiences that I myself & our team have had. For example: porting DX11 compute shader to pipelined SPU SoA vector intrinsics.

So just had to update the presentation a bit and gear it towards the senior game developers in the audience instead of IHVs / platform providers that were the main audience in the first one.

Parallel Futures of a Game Engine (v2.0)

View more presentations from repii.

(.ppt version to download is available on http://publications.dice.se)

Thanks to The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) here in Stockholm for hosting the new conference and to everyone helped organized it. Was a great show up of world class senior game programmers here around the Stockholm region and think this was the start for something big.

See you next year!


BTW, don't miss Niklas Frykholm's (Bitsquid) slides from the same conference about Practical Examples in Data Oriented Design, very related and good stuff!

Battlefield guest blogging

Did a guest blog post on our much larger Battlefield franchise blog about the PC graphics features & workings of Battlefield Bad Company 2 that is in Beta and soon to be released.

Bad Company 2 PC Graphics Details

If you have any more hardcore tech questions or comments feel free to post them here on this blog instead of the BF blog.

The collected knowledge of DICE

We have created a page on the DICE homepage as a central repository of all of our publications, i.e. public talks, presentations, thesis papers and so on. It is available here:

http://publications.dice.se

I will continue to post my own talks here on this blog as well, ideally with some more detailed supplemental information. But is good to finally have a place where we can put content from all other talented people at DICE and from more disciplines.

Will tweet out and updates (@repi) and look into if it would make sense to add an RSS feed later.

Update: An RSS feed is now available on the site: http://publications.dice.se/rss/rss.xml