E-Mail This Article to a Friend The insider A report from the Game Developers Conference

The Game Developers Conference taking place this week is known to most industry people simply as GDC, and if you've ever met a game developer you know why. Acronyms are as easy to find in the industry as ladies are difficult to, and the annual industry trade show (well, meta-industry trade show ... MITS? Never mind) is no exception. Indeed, sometimes it seems like the point of game technology shows is simply to ensure that everyone knows what everyone else's implementation of a particular graphical effect is called. Again, small wonder there's never a line at the women's bathroom.

But what an interesting sausage party it is. GDC attendance has absolutely exploded over the past few years, and now fills fully three floors of San Francisco's Moscone Center. Two floors are dedicated to lectures, panels and conferences of all flavors, ranging from the now-public Microsoft keynote from J. Allard which dropped a few Xbox 2 details (probably to be called "Xbox 360," will contain three PowerPC processors, will require all games to be Live-enabled, etc.), to a talk on the audio production process for Halo 2, to the most esoteric possible minutiae related to graphics card programming. One gets the feeling that if evil robots spontaneously arose a la The Matrix — a popular film here, as you may imagine — they could power their ghastly bioharvesters using the brainpower in this convention center alone.

Because so much technical knowledge is swimming around here, the scheduled talks have actually become a rich resource for ferreting out details regarding unannounced technology. Rarely are the brilliant minds at the heart of major consumer electronics companies put on a stage to talk about what they do, so when that does occur they can't contain their enthusiasm for new, secret toys. For example, since I signed no non-disclosure agreement on my way into the show, I can cheerfully mention that Creative Labs' unannounced new sound card will contain at least 50MB of audio RAM, hardware Ogg Vorbis decoders, and four-zone multi-environment reverb. Technical gobbledygook, to be sure, but all this means that the upcoming Sound Blaster-powered Doom 3 has a 50% higher minimum frame rate than the normal one, and sounds better. That's seriously impressive.

Oh, and Xbox 2 will have 156MB of main RAM, an increase of almost 250%. Microsoft was really unhappy when that popped out during a Q&A.

However, anyone who's been to a trade show knows that the scheduled talks are just peripheral – the real meat is in the demos, and GDC is no exception. The show has a poster wall for emerging technologies and algorithms, an independent-games pavilion showing the best work of amateur developers, and of course the expo floor itself, which is one of the more amazing things I've seen lately.

The expo fills the lower floor of the convention center, and must suck at least half the city's power. All the major electronics players are present – from the console powers Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, to the heavyweight PC players AMD, Intel, nVidia and ATi, to the small (and not so small) middleware developers, hardware companies, and developer support firms that keep the average game shop running smoothly. And, since this is a trade show for game developers, everyone's busily showing off things they'd never take to showing at E3, the consumer-oriented trade show. Unreal Engine 3 games, pre-release Sony PSP systems, and new nVidia 3D hardware running on bare circuit boards are all proudly on display, enticing the assembled crowds to develop for it. It is electronic heaven.

This is my first GDC, so I'm not familiar with the mood of past years, but people seem to be a bit uncertain this year. The developers I spoke with are currently plugging away at their last few Xbox titles, and aren't certain which console they'll be working with next. The new systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will clearly be more difficult and expensive to develop for, due to their significantly more complicated hardware, and that seems to be dampening the mood. One developer I spoke with, who is currently working on a Harvest Moon-esque Xbox title, said that he was utterly in the dark regarding Microsoft's next-gen hardware strategy. It's difficult to see how these systems will launch in December with any kind of major support behind them when it's clear that much of the industry doesn't even know what kind of processors to target yet. Don't expect a flood of launch titles.

Ultimately, the Game Developers Conference is a fascinating place for the technically inclined. However, it's also quite obvious that the game industry is now large enough for marketing to consider stifling the free flow of knowledge – making the prospects for a more E3 or CES-like GDC in the near future pretty good. That'll be positive for developers, because the environment will support more expensive and elaborate presentations, but it's also bad news because inevitably the show will begin to dumb down its level of discourse, and … holy shit, nVidia and ATi are rolling out kegs! Gotta go.