So … who’s going this year?
* blahblahblahh will be there again, speaking on ARGs
I wish I could be there, one of my lecturers from university is presenting a talk or seminar on virtiual worlds I do believe (Yusuf Pisan)
so, what is GDC 07, when and where is it going to be?
the annual Games Developers Conference - the main big event for professional games devs, where games get signed with pubs, devs swap techniques and rumours, lots of parties take place with huge amounts of networking, and you get a snapshot of every exciting thing going on in the industry at the moment.
Like E3, only good. High signal-to-noise ratio (unlike E3).
San Francisco, for the next 10 years…
Shame I can’t afford to come over. Funny, now I’m free of my shackles, I’m broke 
Cas 
Yo peeps…
Been kind of underground for a while… I tried the startup thing for the past 3 years and it’s a load of BS (or at least my run at it!)… That aside I’m quite lucky/happy to be successfully contracting via my own company EGR Software now…
I’ve decided to go to that Desktop Java 2 day conference in SJ instead of GDC, but I now live 3 blocks from Moscone at a super cool place where I’m setting up a “24.8” (32 speaker) 3D surround sound array (hemisphere of speakers) along with a new 1080P projector… Mmm… The space will hopefully be ready by JavaOne, but I’m totally down to provide crash space at any SF conference for those on a budget… I’ll have a nice 3D rendering soon… Oh heck… You guys can check out the straight up SketchUp preview version now: http://www.egrsoftware.com/about/space/ The rest of the site is down (images/CSS missing) while I slowly get a new fast file server up…
Getting this studio together is taking a while, but I’m quite optimistic in getting some of my longer running unreleased tech (Typhon/Scream/Auriga3D, etc.) out open source at some point…
Also March 8th is my b-day, so if you’re in town for GDC still I’m DJing at a chill/IDM/ambient event 3 blocks from Moscone that Thursday…
Hit me up for a beer… B^3. You got to check out this really cool place called City Beer… Very nice…
A couple of things:
That is friking awesome…I wonder if I can convince my wife to let me rewire the family room…
- I will be doing a live taping of GDC for the LevelUp program with a full crew in tow. Anyone who is at GDC that wants to be on the show, hit me in IM and let me know
Cheers!
-Chris
[quote=“ChrisM,post:8,topic:29248”]
I was thinking more along the lines of “ridiculous”… it’s not like you can get any source material with 32 channels of sound… it’s all for show… you could take away 75% of the speakers and probably improve the experience
Apologies for the thread hijack…
Yes you can get source material that works with N-speakers not just 32 (http://www.ambisonicbootlegs.net/ is getting things rolling)… The spatial technique I’m utilizing is Ambisonics. It is an encoded and decoded system… One can record a spatial performance via a mic (Soundfield mic) that can capture an acoustic 3D sound field or one can synthetically create a sound field and store it in a format that can be played back on any number of speakers. The more speakers you have the higher order math you can perform for the encoding / decoding; IE better resolution… With the array I’m building I’ll be able to do 2nd order horizontal for the subs and 3rd order horizontal/vertical for the hemisphere of 25 speakers (one more at the top). Standard Ambisonics is called b-format (1st order).
Full 3D spatialization is very possible. I’m also creating custom software and have since '03 for Ambisonic spatialization showing it off at JavaOne et al the past couple of years… And all this is very applicable to game development. I’m mixing Ambisonics with real time synthesis (procedural audio). IE automatic audio synthesized in real time in response to game events fully realized in a 3D context… The really cool stuff is that when the audio is in the encoded state you can apply any matrix rotation and that rotates the audio around the listener… For a 1st person shooter you can tell the audio engine where all the sound is in world coordinates and simply multiply the final mixed audio (in its encoded state) by the direction of the listener (1st person dude) and all of the audio in the scene is rotated 100% smoothly. It is quite realistic on 6 speakers plus (let alone 3D possibilities with a larger array; sound overhead and or below with spherical sound arrays; granted a spherical sound array is a little crazy, but the folks at UC Santa Barbara built one).
I’m also creating custom software with a 3D interface to control sound for live / music performance as well.
Another neat thing is that one can project stereo and the various discrete layouts (5.1, etc) into the sound array and it will sound far better than the discrete speaker layout. So there are benefits to discrete sources as well… I guess you just got to hear it to believe it…
In a way Ambisonics is quite amazing, but since it failed to make a commercial impact in the 70s and since most of the IP is out of patent protection now (awesome in most ways) no large corporation is going to get behind it since they can’t own it…
Super secret stuff… I formed a new company with a friend from Dolby and we are making a low cost audio hardware box in the $600-$800 range that will do a ton of Ambisonic spatial tasks, is network based w/ Open Sound Control interface that connects to fancy Java GUI / control oriented software based on Typhon… Maybe by the end of the year…
Interesting.
[quote]I guess you just got to hear it to believe it…
[/quote]
I have to strain to tell the difference between mono and stereo… so even if I heard it, I probably wouldn’t believe it ;D
– oh, and speaking of sound… sorry for the tone of my previous message 