Back From GDC 2008!

2008, March 23

This year's edition of the Game Developers Conference was a milestone for Allegorithmic. After months of hard work to prepare the show, we were pretty excited to unveil our latest developments and have the opportunity to meet most of the key players in the industry. Now the show is over and it went really well for us so we wanted to share a bit of all the things that happened during these 3 crazy days.

Substance presentation during Allegorithmic's Sponsored Session

After months of underground development (we used to work in what can only be considered as a cave), the GDC was our greatest possible occasion to publicly unveil our new generation of middleware for authoring and generating procedural textures, named Substance.

For that matter, we hosted a Sponsored Session where Dr Sebastien Deguy, President and Founder of Allegorithmic, explained what the vision for the future of texturing was behind Substance and what benefits it would bring to the video games industry. He was accompanied on stage by three of our most prestigious supporters and clients, Thomas Bidaux, Director of Product Development at NCSoft Europe, Jay Koottarappallil, CEO & Artist at WhiteMoon Dreams Inc., and Brennan Priest, former Production Expert at Ubisoft and CEO of Priest Consulting.

Among other things, Jay made a particularly clever demonstration on how MaPZone Pro, the authoring tool included in our current middleware, ProFX Online, was saving him and his studio tremendous amount of time by creating seamlessly tiling variations of a same texture (in this case to make a large terrain) in just a few clicks! As we are talking about productivity, we will soon add some information on the ProFX Online webpage with preliminary results of a study conducted by Brennan Priest that is already showing our middleware is a very effective solution to reduce the texture production time in the course of a game development. Stay tune!

Namacius exposed at our booth

This GDC was also the opportunity for us to showcase our latest in-house demo, Namacius. Instead of simply making a video showing how great the textures created with ProFX Online look, we wanted to create a visually stunning game with a texture package that is so small you considerably reduce the size of the game and optimize it for digital distribution.

So we used our own tools, MapZone Pro and ProFX Engine, and the Unreal Engine 3 to create an exclusive map for the Capture-the-Flag mod of Unreal Tournament 3. Characters and weapons are taken from the game, but all the textures of the map are procedural. So what you actually download is a pack that contains 270KB of textures instead of the 257MB of DXT5 compressed bitmaps.

The best part for us was not to tell about those figures before people would actually take the time to admire the visual quality of the map displayed on a large and gorgeous flat screen. The image was superb so the figures were all the more impressive to everyone. And we were quite happy about this of course!

Namacius will be released very soon so you will be able to see for yourself what you can get for 270KB of textures...

Pictures from the expo floor