Keynote: Star Wreck - and more!

The creators of Star Wreck take you on a guided tour through the production phases of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, and then lead you to the world of Internet film industry. Star Wreck took a huge advantage of the Internet, and the guys behind the film shed light into the things they learned from their experiences. Raven's Nest is a production platform they are working on, which focuses on communal film production over the Internet, and will be open for everyone.

Energia Productions will also reveal exclusive information on the future productions, so come along, meet the Stars of Wreck and join the creation of the future filmmaking.

Linux 4k coding

The presentation deals with the different optimization techniques used in Linux 4k intro coding such as compression, tools and code level tricks. By knowing the tricks of the trade you can save several hundreds of bytes leaving more space for the actual content. The presentation is based on the observations Markku and Antti Silvast made during the making of three 4k intros: Yellow Rose of Texas, Je Regrette and Make It 4k.

Mobility with MUPE - developer's point of view

MUPE (Multi-User Publishing Environment) is an open source client-server architecture developed by Nokia. It provides a fast developing environment - specially for multi-player games. The scope of this presentation is to evaluate the pros and cons of MUPE and also the developing of MUPE-applications.

The Art of Pixels: from sprites to Photoshop

This presentation is the introduction of the new volume of Freax, the Freax Art Album. This year Tomcat is to give you a glance of how 2D computer art evolved from the first, primitive single-color sprites to today's masterful digital paintings, and how different styles influenced artists on the demoscene.

The Neglected Art of Fixed Point Arithmetic

Even if floating point is nowadays the typical way to do your math, you will learn when and why fixed point arithmetic is still relevant. In addition to covering the essentials of coping with fixed point, also a few tricks of the trade and other useful implementation tips will be shared.

Cutting corners, not polygons

The presentation will deal with the different aspects of crossdeveloping content for platforms such as mobile phones and handheld gaming consoles, where hardware resources are scarce and dedicated development > tools might be non-existant.

Using examples from the development of their much appraised demos on Game Boy Advance, Erik & Eivind will demonstrate what one can achieve with good ideas and some well-directed optimizations. Topics include such things as:

• Doing accurate, efficient fixed-point 3D computations on CPUs without floating point support.
• Paletted graphics modes can be limiting, but also enable neat tricks, such as extremely efficient HDR-rendering.
• "The human eye simplifies your job." How to improve *perceived* framerates and rendering quality.
• Tuning your toolchain so your artists can easily get an impression of the limitations and possibilities of the platform
• How to optimize your problem rather than shaving a cycle off of your mainloop.
• Working with the quirks of your platform rather than against them.

   

Games development using Microsoft XNA Studio

We will discuss what Microsoft is going to do to make games development easier in the near future. XNA Studio is based on existing development environment and extends games development to Windows as well as XBOX platform.

Direct3D 10 essentials

As the release of Microsoft's newest graphics programming interface is nearing, we will take a practical look at some of it's new features, flexibility and performance enhancements and briefly discuss about migration to it from older interfaces such as Direct3D 9.

The New Procedure

The abundance of CPU based power in next generation console systems has led to a recent growth of procedural technologies. Ranging from animation to textures to L systems, these new tools aim to provide developers with the facilities to rapidly create and iterate content. This presentation seeks to examine the potential of these new tools to the gaming experience, and how they will fundamentally alter the nature of games from "static" products to evolving and fluid "platforms" which for the first time will add the "4th dimension" to the gaming experience.

Mobile 3D hardware

Preliminary information: this session will provide information on the latest trends in the mobile 3D hardware.

"It ain't 1996 anymore" - entry into today's games industry

So you want to start up your own company and make AAA hit games? After all, many of today's leading developers started this way. But we cannot apply the methods of yesterday successfully to a changed environment. The games industry has changed significantly in the past ten years since Remedy was set up. The barriers and stakes are higher. I'd like to briefly talk about the changes of the past years and explore the underlying trends. There are advantages to be found. I don't have silver bullets but will elaborate on some chances and openings that have become available through this change.

History and Future of 3D audio

Preliminary information: This session will touch upon the use of 3D audio on computers, its history and its future. High quality demonstrations of what 3D audio really can be are provided using a 5.1 surround sound system. Hearing is believing!

World of Viruses

In this presentation Mikko Hyppönen, who is the Chief Research Officer at F-Secure Corporation, discusses the Wolrd of Viruses covering the following intriguing topics:

• How criminals use the internet
• Underground economy
• Why Worms Shake the Society
• Worms and critical infrastructure
• Is cyberterrorims for real?
• Viruses on mobile phones
• Where is the network police?

Standards and Opera

An overview of why Opera is involved in Standards work and what it means - in particular, looking at how W3C works, and how and why Opera widgets are (mostly) based on W3C standards as a good way to enable cool stuff.

Opera Mini: coping with J2ME fragmentation

Opera Mini is a server-client based browsing solution from Opera Software. The client is written in J2ME, granting the majority of Java-enabled handsets available today access to the full World Wide Web. The wide array of CPU speeds, display sizes, supported APIs etc. makes the current mobile Java market very fragmented. This talk will focus on how to write a MIDlet with maximum compatibility, while utilizing as much as possible of the device's potential.

The Naked PSP

Delving into the inner workings of the Sony Playstation Portable handheld games console, an aid to demo coders or homebrew developers in understanding how the PSP's kernel operates, how to run code on the device and how to build your own software. The presentation will touch on the history of the PSP and free development, the modular structure Sony put in place for application devlopment, the kernel's threading primitives, application debugging as well as graphics support and audio programming. This will all be aided with real time demonstrations of the kernel's inner workings and structures.

Getting a job in games

The games industry employs tens of thousands of persons worldwide, and close to a 1000 persons in Finland alone. Making games might sound like a dream job, but it's a job nonetheless - hard work, blood, sweat and tears at times. If you are determined to give it a try and plan to get a job in games development, check out this session in which Jussi Laakkonen, business development director for Bugbear Entertainment, discusses how to get the right skills for making games, what education is available and how to land your first job in games development.

Bringing your first game to market

So you made your first game and it is really good and probably there should be somebody out there who would like to buy it, right! Or? This lecture gives you a crash course in how to bring a game to the market. We will look at what a publisher deal mean for you as a developer and what alternatives are there to sign with a publisher. Should you go for digital distribution and what are the pro's and con's with that. What is the difference between a distribution deal and license deal and what could you expect to get back in royalty on your game? We will also look at what you as a developer much think about getting into this competitive business. If you are working on a game that could be commercially viable this lecture is for you.

Experiences from 10 years of game development

Does games development always mean late nights, a lot of caffeine and broken deadlines? You will hear from an experienced game developer about ways to structure your development in order to the avoid problems that still haunts this business. You will also get to hear real world stories and examples from small productions and big AAA-games projects and learn about how different publishers view game development. You should attend this lecture if you like to learn some ways to structure your team and your project to be able to deliver best possible quality on time with out ending up burned.

Silent Grove Studios - a story of a start-up game developer

Silent Grove Studios started out as a group of hobbyists six years ago, and since four years time we've worked on one single product, Dawnspire: Prelude. This year Dawnspire: Prelude will be released as a commercial product. The presentation will cover the journey we've done from that go-lucky group of game-lovers to a young game development company that's about to launch its first title. I'll talk about the lessons we've learned along the road, how we've worked and share a few things about what our game is about.

Snowflake Studios & Online development

Snowflake Studios started as a mod development team in January 2003. At that time Snowflake was called only FinnWars dev team. It's first project was a Battlefield 1942 modification FinnWars. The first version of FinnWars was released in February 2004. After that, multiple versions of FinnWars has been released, and the last version "FinnWars Final Extended" was released in May 2006.

Now Snowflake Studios is developing it's own new generation game engine "Mammoth" and it's own game editor "Icebox". Snowflakes' first stand alone game "Battlegrounds of the West" has also been under development since August 2005.

In this presentation Lasse Liljedahl from Snowflake Studios tells the story of a small mod development team, which succeeded to make one of the biggest Battlefield 1942 modifications purely as web development and how Snowflake has now moved on to make it's own game engine, game editor and a stand alone games.

AMD

AMD's representative will highlight the latest developments in CPU hardware.