talks & publications

Our goals for the mobile version of Broken Age were to deliver a very polished experience that is optimized for a wide range of different iOS and Android devices. We quickly realized, however, that iterating on a mobile application with more than 1 GB of game assets is quite challenging, since it can take up to 20 minutes to update and reboot an app after a code or data change. This talk describes in detail how we reduced the turnaround time on iOS and Android to an average of 40 seconds. The topic of the second part of the presentation is the design and implementation of our file streaming system that allowed us to update game assets such as Lua scripts, shaders and effects in real-time on a mobile device running Broken Age.

Bay Area game developers unite in collaboration with Intel Corporation for a full day of sessions learning from the experts in the game industry. The topics will range from Ideation, Design, Build, and Launch!

Bringing the beautiful and lively world of Broken Age simultaneously to five different platforms ranging from older mobile devices to state-of-the-art PCs was a great challenge. This talk will describe the key decisions made to achieve the necessary scalability, and will detail the authoring process of flexible 2D characters and parallaxing environments, the data build pipeline, as well as run-time techniques such as advanced 2D lighting and shadows. Several practical solutions for maximizing rendering performance on mobile GPUs as well as other challenges associated with mobile/PC cross-platform game development will be presented in detail.

After the success of their record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, Tim Schafer and the team at Double Fine were tasked with developing a brand new point-and-click adventure game in the vein of Tim's early work at Lucas Arts. The demand for this type of game was clear, but much has changed in the 15 years since Tim last visited the genre. In this talk, we'll hear a multidisciplinary panel of members from the Broken Age team discuss ways in which they leveraged modern technology and methodologies to deliver a game that preserves the ideas and experiences core to the traditional adventure game.

Bringing the beautiful and lively world of Broken Age simultaneously to five different platforms ranging from older mobile devices to state of the art PCs with only a small team of programmers was a great challenge. This talk will describe the key decisions made to achieve the necessary scalability, and detail the authoring process for characters and environments, the data build pipeline, and run-time techniques such as rendering tricks for rapid iteration and debugging. Several practical solutions for the many challenges associated with mobile/PC cross-platform game development will be presented in detail.

The data pipeline is an very important part of game development that is very often overlooked, because it's not as glamorous as game-play programming or writing an engine. In a nutshell the data pipeline is responsible to prepare the assets created by our awesome artists to run optimally on the different hardware platforms.

This overview of the fur pipeline used to create loveable muppets and monsters in "Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster" explains the authoring pipeline, simulation, tessellation, shading, lighting, and shadowing techniques used to create and render a wide variety of fur styles in real time.

More than ever before it is important to improve the quality of our tools and editors in order to support next-gen game projects. This doesn't necessarily mean you have to rewrite a lot of code, because even some simple changes can improve your applications quite a bit. In this article I want to share a few ideas about how to make game development tools better with very little effort.

Even though 'next-gen' consoles have the potential for amazing games it is by no means easy to create entertaining and immersive experiences. This presentation sheds light on some of the challenges developers of AAA games are facing and describes techniques how to overcome them.

We present techniques for realistic real-time rendering of complex landscapes that consist of many highly detailed plant models. The plants are approximated by dynamically changing sets of billboards. Realistic illumination is approximated using spherical harmonics. Since even the rendering of simple billboard cloud plants is too time consuming, the landscape in the background is approximated with shell textures. The combination of these techniques allows us to render large scenes in real-time with varying illumination, which is interesting for computer games and interactive visualization in landscaping and architecture as well as modelling.

A new method to render large landscapes that are covered by thousands of trees in a dynamic lighting environment. The billboard plants are illuminated using a special texture.

Die Computergrafik, als spezieller Fachbereich der Informatik, beinhaltet viele interessante Forschungsgebiete. Ein Aufgabenbereich stellt die realistische Darstellung von natürlichen Umgebungen dar. In der Regel ist eine solche Landschaft mit vielen verschiedenen Pflanzen bevölkert. Soll ein computergeneriertes Abbild einer natürlichen Szene erstellt werden, dann müssen also auch diese organischen Objekte realistisch visualisiert werden. Doch gerade die Darstellung von virtuellen Pflanzen ist mit vielen Problemen verbunden. Diese Diplomarbeit ist deshalb der photorealistischen Visualisierung komplexer Pflanzenmodelle gewidmet.

Die realistische Darstellung von natürlichen Phänomenen war schon immer ein wichtiges Ziel der Computergrafik. Dies ist jedoch keine leichte Aufgabe. Diese Arbeit fasst die Entwicklungen der letzen Jahre zusammen, die im Bereich der gasförmigen Objekte gemacht wurden.

We present a simple and practical method for rendering leaves and other translucent parts of plants. In contrast to other translucent materials, plant leaves usually are thin, though highly textured. An adaptation of rendering methods for translucent materials in combination with a set of predefined textures allows us to represent plants realistically. A hardware-based approximation of the shading-method enables us to render even highly complex plants efficiently.

An approach for improved representation of translucency in plants, based on a set of textures that are combined with a biological leaf model.

Die Bedeutung von computergenerierten Bildern und Animationen ist in den letzen Jahren explosionsartig gestiegen. Eine gängige Methode photorealistische Bilder zu erzeugen ist das so genannte „Raytracing". Hierbei werden virtuelle Lichtstrahlen in die Szene geschossen und dann bei ihrer Interaktion mit den Objekten beobachtet, wodurch der Farbwert eines Pixels berechnet wird.