Which Game Development Site is Right For You?

Windows 8 delivers the opportunity for you to create engaging games that reach the broadest audience, and run across a wide range of devices. In this session, learn the essentials of the new Windows 8 game development and application environment, including the Windows Runtime, CoreWindow, DirectX 11.1, Process Lifetime Management, asynchronous execution, and C++/Cx. We will also demonstrate Visual Studio capabilities for debugging 3-D applications, managing code and basic content types like shaders, textures, and meshes in both design-time and run-time formats. Each key step will be illustrated with code from a Windows 8 SDK sample app such as MarbleMaze or Simple3DGame.

Windows 8 runs on the broadest range of form factors, from super-light, low-power tablet devices to high-end gaming rigs with 3D displays. This session teaches you essential techniques for getting the most out of the GPU across the full range of form factors. This is a must-attend session for developers who want to reach the broadest possible market for their games.

Xbox LIVE on Windows 8 provides a rich and robust set of APIs that enable game developers to accelerate the integration of Xbox LIVE services. This session is for developers who want to understand how we've taken advantage of the new Windows Runtime model to provide quick and easy access to Xbox LIVE services such as profile, achievements and leaderboards as well as value added scenarios, such as offline support, authentication and Windows integration. We dive into the code and design to ensure you walk away with the knowledge you need to quickly enable your Windows Store games with Xbox LIVE.

This talk describes how developers can create compelling entertainment experiences on any device using Xbox LIVE Services by way of our new RESTful APIs. Learn how your application can obtain secure access to our service, make HTTPS API calls from a variety of clients, as well as how to use the expansive set of Xbox LIVE services, including some new services, to keep your customers engaged with your experiences. This session provides you with a broad understanding of Xbox LIVE from a platform perspective, as well as insights into the API roadmap.

With gaming capabilities spreading rapidly across devices, there is an ever-increasing need to have service-based data sharing support. With our new scalable and flexible title storage service, developers enjoy the ability to persist user and game-specific data to the Xbox LIVE cloud! Come learn how to leverage these new RESTful APIs to enable cloud-based data storage and sharing for your cross-device game titles.

Multiplayer features make a game more fun, and are the driving force behind many successful games today. Cross-device gameplay provides publishers with a unique opportunity to delight players on any device, at any time, wherever they are. But how can a game have compelling multiplayer experiences when a player may be interrupted at any time by a phone call or a business meeting? With Asynchronous Gaming! Learn how you can use Xbox LIVE Services to create the best possible end-to-end asynchronous gaming experience on a single device or across multiple devices!

If you're not building games for the web, you're not capitalizing a captive audience. Web games are an easy way to reach millions and millions of eyeballs and integrating Xbox LIVE services keeps customers engaged and allows them to truly play anywhere at any time. Learn how your web games can be even better with Xbox LIVE Achievements, Title Managed Storage, Multiplayer Services and more!

Visual Studio 2010 is a huge release for C++ developers. We have rebuilt the IDE to scale to huge source bases spanning tens of thousands of files and millions of lines of code all while providing new code-focused productivity boosts. We’ll show it in action!

DXT style block compression has become a de facto standard for most textures in games. We will cover several topics of recent interest in this area: 1. Fast block compression. With some optimization effort, real-time block compression is feasible, on either the CPU or the GPU. Real-time compression opens up a host of possibilities for disk space reduction and dynamic texture updates.2. Normal map compression. Block compression was designed for color data but adapted for use with normal maps. The results are not always pretty. What usage patterns should be favored, or avoided, in this context?3. New block compression formats. DirectX 11 introduced two brand new formats: BC6H for HDR textures and BC7 for high quality LDR textures. We discuss how and when these formats should be employed, and how to handle the enormous search space for compression.

Direct3D 11 is out and ready for use by your game today to exploit the latest in video hardware features as well as current generation machines. This talk brings you up to speed with the API, offers tips on how to get your renderer up and running, presents key feature overviews, and shows how to deploy your application. Attending this talk is highly recommended if you are attending other DirectX 11 presentations.

This talk provides an overview of the Games for Windows - LIVE Anti-Cheat and Anti-Hack mechanisms. Attendees will learn about these features, and how they can be leveraged to save revenue with minimal investment.

Adding shadows depth maps to a title is straightforward and simple. Making the shadows look good while staying within artistic, performance, and memory constraints can be very difficult. This talk explains how common shadow mapping artifacts occur and gives some basic guidelines that should be followed at all times. Next, the talk explains advanced techniques that benefit shadow maps, such as cascaded shadow maps, filtering, pancaking, and deferred shadows. Finally, the intricacies and caveats of combining these techniques are described. Attendees should come away understanding how to identify artifacts, which techniques will mitigate them, and at what cost.

Tessellation is one of the most exciting new features in D3D11. It makes real-time film quality rendering possible for games. With the availability of D3D11 hardware, there are several techniques you can use in your engine that take advantage of this feature. In this talk, we’ll walk through the D3D11 tessellation pipeline in detail, explain five different tessellation schemes, and discuss their feasibility for use in games.

Your XNA Game Studio game doesn’t run as well as you expected, and you have no idea why.  The first step towards fixing your title is to first understand your title: how it allocates memory, and how it uses the CPU and GPU.  This talk demonstrates several of the tools and techniques available to XNA Game Studio developers to analyze their title’s performance shortfalls.

The XNA Framework networking API makes it easy to join a session and exchange data packets. But what exactly should you put in those packets? This talk explains how to overcome the challenges posed by limited bandwidth (if you send too much data, or fail to properly compress it, your game could end up even slower than my morning commute) and delivery latency (when packets arrive late, you must use prediction algorithms to smooth things out, creating a strange quantum world where each object has more than one state being simulated in parallel).

The XNA Platform and Tools team has been hard at work delivering updates to PIX for both Xbox 360 and Windows. This session brings you up to speed on the new features and improvements made to this critical toolset for performance investigation and analysis of your title.

You’ve got gigabytes of juicy game content --- now where are you going to put it all?  Preparing game content packages will soon become easier and more flexible due to new tools arriving in the XDK.  We will present the available means of preparing your data: for emulation during development and testing, for placement on optical disc, and for play from hard drive.  Through engagement with many real-world titles, we have developed a list of best practices for content management and production.  This talk will discuss how to fit data into limited disc space and how to physically arrange data for optimal user experience.

XNA Game Studio has come a long way from XNA Game Studio Express 1.0.  Learn about the new features in XNA Game Studio 3.0 and how to publish your game with the XNA Community Games publishing program.  We are also unveiling the XNA Game Studio XDK Extensions, a new SDK that enables Xbox LIVE Arcade and retail game development with the XNA Framework on the Xbox 360.

The Windows 7 public Beta is out and getting a lot of technical press attention, but what exactly does it mean for game developers?  This talk will summarize the new platform features, and detail the technical differences between Windows Vista and the upcoming new release. We’ll also review some of the common issues encountered moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 for code that’s not up to speed on Windows Vista.

Direct3D 11 introduces three new graphics pipeline stages designed for flexible tessellation.  This talk will summarize the design of the hull shader, tessellator, and domain shader pipeline stages, and outline their intended usage.  The second half of the talk will describe in depth and demonstrate the real-time Catmull-Clark subdivision surface approximation algorithm developed by Microsoft Research and implemented in the DirectX SDK samples.

Game Developers need to write multi-threaded code in order to make full use of today’s multi-core CPUs. In order to get maximum performance these threads must sometimes communicate without using locks. However lockless programming comes with significant challenges which must first be understood and overcome. This talk will explain the problems with locks and how lockless programming can avoid those limitations. It will then cover some of the challenges with lockless programming and how to manage them. Finally the talk will present some lockless techniques that have been successfully used in games. Concrete examples and performance measurements will be shown.

C++ destructors are the most important feature of C++. The power wielded through deterministic object unwinding cannot be underestimated. Resource leaks are the bane of games, and destructors are an essential part of the solution. But destructors provide much more than simple object cleanup. This presentation will cover all aspects of C++ object destruction, ranging from destructor performance to best practices. Topics include order of destruction, implicit destructors, and details around how destructors are affected by exception handling, polymorphism, and partially constructed objects. This also covers related topics like the delete operator, STL allocator::deallocate, and shared_ptr deletors.