On October 28. Zhong and I attended a game workshop hosted by Intel in Shanghai.
The show is mainly for the indie gaming developers and Html5.
First, Intel demonstrated their XDK, which is pretty impressive for cross-platform Html5 development. It is based on Apache Cordova and has an optimized game browser: crosswalk.
The improvement of crosswalk is significant, its performance is closing to the native games. Using Html5 to develop mobile games or apps becomes promising.
Later, Cocos studio presented their solution for the Html5 game development.
The most interesting part is they have a complete distribution channel. It allows developer publish their game on multiple stores and provides an asset streaming library. In China, since the Google Play is absent, there are hundreds of android app store. This feature could help indie developers in China a lot. They also provided a Html 5 browser called Tizen for mobile web gaming.
The rest shows in the morning is about VR. Unity came to play and shared a lesson about how to create a VR cardboard app in Unity: they used a drone with six camera mounted on it to take the pictures as textures.
In Unity, they had put a stereo camera inside a sphere, where is acting as a skybox. When the player is moving, the camera is still inside the sphere while the sphere is moving and updating the texture. It showed how simple a VR application could be and we could expect that more and more VR apps will be coming in the future.
In the afternoon, Intel showed their 3d camera. Like Kinect, it has a depth inferred camera. It is not as big as Kinect and could be used as a face camera on your laptop or tablet. They demonstrated an app called Facerig using realsense technology.
I saw several webcasters on the twitch is using this app before. It can replace your face with other avatars, like raccoon. Maybe someday, we can see Galaxy guardians playing on twitchJ. Intel also brought their GPU profiler to the meeting and demonstrated it.
After Intel, EasyAR demonstrated their AR engine; it is cross-platform and has better recognition ratio; the result is more consistent, unlike several open libraries, it merely flicks. The most interesting part is once a mark is recognized, you can cover most parts of it without affecting the result. I am very excited with this engine, one more AR library for LMV.
Microsoft promotes their indie project – ID@Xbox again and donated 300+ indie games as prize for the indie developer in the show. The project has included a free unity license and a free Xbox one devkit also. Pretty good start for indie developers.
I think the most interesting topic in the afternoon for me is last one – A 2d artist shared his experience on pixelated drawing.
The image above shows how to deal with curves and below is the drawing versus generated image.
There are lots of popular indie games today are using such nostalgic style of art, like Miami hotline, Shovel knight, etc. The most interesting part is they are using some of the 3d rendering concept in a 2d game. Like deferred lighting and SSAO. They put height info in the scene and added several lights in it. Result is great: shadow is generated dynamic, day and night is switched beautifully.
It is a good event, I hope Intel could come next year and bring us more interesting topics.
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