GameFest is a conference for developers who build games on Xbox, Windows and Windows Phone. It is delivered in three cities across the world – London, Seattle and Tokyo – I got to attend the London event. Given the much publicised migration of AAA games studios to Canada I’m surprised a Canadian city doesn’t feature in the tour – maybe Seattle is close enough.
I like to attend Gamefest because it is here you get to learn some of the dark secrets of game development covering technologies like Kinect, as well as skills such as production and business development. There is a wealth of ‘Post Mortems’ with games studios sharing their learning from recent game implementations. Also a load of stuff on programming techniques for graphics and audio and a strong focus on performance tuning. This year I stayed close to my current technology focus and attended the Windows Phone conference stream. This covered a lot of the basics for Mango development but also had gems such as the newly exposed SIMD support.
Abhinaba Basu, senior software engineer on the CLR team at Microsoft, explains:
‘ARM processors support SIMD (Single Instructions Multiple Data) instructions through the ARM® NEON™technology that is available on ARMV7 ISA. SIMD allows parallelization/HW-acceleration of some operations and hence performance gains. Since the Windows Phone 7 chassis specification requires ARMV7-A; NEON is available by default on all WP7 devices. However, the CLR on Windows Phone 7 (NETCF) did not utilize this hardware functionality and hence it was not available to the managed application developers.’
We announced at Mix 11 that the Mango CLR would support SIMD, and at GameFest Ivan Nevraev, of the Advance Technology Group at Microsoft (the really cool geeks who help amazing game developers achieve even greater heights of technology utilisation), gave a session entitled ‘Windows Phone CPU Performance Update’ where he demonstrated a staggering 50% reduction in execution time for SIMD optimised code providing 50% improvement in FPS in the examples shown.
As you can probably already tell – GameFest is deep, serious deep and technical. No longer coding for long periods of every day, it was a challenge for me to keep up. Everyone appears to have a PHD in applied mathematics and can converse fluently in C++ and HLSL. I keep my head down and try to keep up with my note taking.
A core theme of this year’s event was that of multiple screens and the cloud. The idea of games being delivered on different platforms but being connected by Cloud based services. This was good, far more my current level of application architecture.
Obviously Xbox LIVE is a leading demonstration of this concept and a number of sessions took us deep into the opportunities Xbox LIVE services offer the professional game developer. Windows Phone Mango adds to the level of support for Xbox LIVE services and after my small insight at GameFest 2011, I can’t wait to see Windows Phone Mango games – they are going to rock!
Paul has been programming computers and building bits of kit for over 27 years, of which 15 have been with Microsoft in a variety of technology evangelist roles. Always looking to build with the latest and greatest technology available, Paul spends his time sharing his activities and creations online via his blog or in person. Paul is a keen dinghy sailor, and for a short time was a member of a circus flying trapeze troupe.
