ARM Community: Game Developer Conference 2012 - Mali Cometh... - ARM Community

Now the dust has settled after a hectic week in sunny San Francisco, I thought I should take some time out to update everyone on this hugely successful event for ARM and for ARM® Mali™ technology in particular. The Game Developers Conference, held at the start of March, has come a long way in 24 years, from the first gathering of 25 game developers in a living room, to GDC 2012 where 22,500 industry insiders descended upon the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco for a week long gathering to discuss ideas and to define the future of the gaming industry. This is now the single biggest gaming conference of its type in the world and features over 400 lectures, panels, tutorials and round-tables covering topics ranging from desktop console and mobile, as well as over 300 exhibitors.

This year there was a definite step up in mobile gaming interest, with not only the Smartphone and Tablet Summit, but a lot of tracks in the main conference covering the bringing of Triple-A content to mobile from the likes of Epic, Guild Software, etc... There are mobile developers already creating console quality content, such as Shadowgun from Madfinger, Galaxy on Fire 2 from Fishlabs and Real Racing 2 from Firemint. And now some of the desktop and console developers are seeing the quality of performance in mobile and are taking interest; EA have already created versions of Dead Space and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit for example. I think it is safe to say that this year will see the rise of serious gaming on mobile platforms.

We started the GDC week off with a tabletop display at the Smartphone and Tablet Summit showing a plethora of Mali GPU-enabled devices from smartphones, to tablets, to a Samsung DTV, all showing various demos with content created by ARM and our Mali Ecosystem Partners (more on these later). We also announced the ARM DS-5™ v5.9 Toolchain with Mali graphics support at the conference, holding a session to cover how the new toolset enables developers to optimize the performance and efficiency of gaming applications across both the CPU and GPU, allowing for a more immersive experience and longer gameplay.

We then moved onto the main exhibition for the Wednesday through to the Friday, and this year we showed up in force putting Mali firmly in the developer’s minds. To start with we had a wall of screens not only showing our internally created content, but also Partner content such as Vendetta Online from Guild Software, a popular desktop space MMO stunningly rendered on Mali, Aztech from Outracks built with their new Realtime Studio tool, and iiSU gesture recognition from SoftKinetic showing skeletal tracking with 3D time of flight camera technology. We also had a large pedestal at the front showing various devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy SII, Samsung Galaxy Note, Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, HTC Sensation, FXI Cotton Candy, and a Samsung DTV...all running Mali and showing a whole range of great content from various developers.




But the highlight was down to the great Partners we had on our booth showing their content and middleware: from Geomerics, Havok, SiXiTS and Unity in the gaming arena to Aurasma and Metaio showing their Augmented Reality (AR) wares. Geomerics had a great demo showing their dynamic lighting middleware, Enlighten, running on a Mali powered tablet; these are the guys responsible for lighting up Battlefield 3 (DICE), Eve Online (CCP) and Need for Speed: The Run (EA). Havok, the leading game technology company for Physics, AI, Behaviour, etc... on desktop and console, were showing off two of their products on our booth: Physics, with various demos showing off collision, and rigid bodies etc., and the Vision Engine - their Fantasy demo running on a Mali tablet showing a medieval town scene with characters and touch picking on objects within the scene. Fantasy was a demo that really showed off the complexity in content that Mali can handle. SiXiTS and Unity also paired up on our booth to show off the latest version of Eon Sky, and their latest creation, Robota. Both of the SiXiTS games were built on the Unity Game Engine (Unity 3.5), the most popular game engine with mobile developers today, used to power over 2000 games. Also with AR gaming gathering momentum, we had a good showing from AR Partners; with Metaio showing their cutting edge tracking technology with high end graphics on the Augmented City; and Aurasma showing AR browser-based gaming.








Our own internal department have not stood still either. After we showed TrueForce last year, the stereoscopic space racer, we knew we had to really push the boat out this year. So our internal demo team got to work on a demo to show off all the advanced features that could be brought to mobile via Mali, and I have to say they outdid themselves this year. Their creation was a tech demo/game called Timbuktu, a racing game based in the desert using our own internal demo framework and the Bullet Physics Engine. The key here though, was that we could show off advanced high end features currently only used on desktop and console, such as bloom and depth of field.




I would just like to say a big thank you to all our Mali Ecosystem Partners who helped make GDC the great success it was. Here’s to a great continuation throughout 2012, and we’re already looking forward to another, bigger and better GDC in 2013. See you there.

Check out more videos from ARM at GDC 2012, HERE.

Simon Hickman, Ecosystem Partner Manager, Media Processing Division, ARM. Simon has been around at ARM for more than 10 years now, remembering being a part of the team that ported Quake2 to the ARM926, then moving into management leading the Applied Systems Engineering team, and on to a Marketing role in the Mobile Computing team. Simon is now enjoying working with some of the most creative Game and Game Engine Developers throughout the world as MPDs Ecosystem Partner Manager, ensuring their content is running optimally on the many devices coming to the market with ARM Mali GPU technology.