View, browse and sort the ever-growing list of sessions by pass type, topic, format and viewing experience. Use the experience filter to view sessions and roundtables that will be available on the virtual GDC event platform. Virtual sessions will be available to watch on-demand through April 1st, 2022 at 5pm PT. All days/times are displayed in Pacific Time.
Use the Viewing Experience filter to see which sessions will be available on-site, on the virtual platform, or both:
All registered attendees will be able to build their personal schedule in the virtual GDC event platform and mobile app. Download the Informa Tech Events app to gain access to the Game Developers Conference 2022 virtually. Login with the email address you used to register.
Chris McEvoy (Chief Programmer, Velan Studios)
Location: Room 3016, West Hall
Date: Thursday, March 24
Time: 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass - Get your pass now!
Topic: Programming
Format: Session
Viewing Experience: In-Person
Vault Recording: Video
Audience Level: No
We present a general-purpose game entity system that supports deterministic, parallel computation and the ability to rewind world state within a time window. Such a system can be used to support robust client-side prediction in a networked game, world state scrubbing at development time, and effective utilization of processing power on multi-core hardware. We discuss how the entity system, working together with our scripting language, ensures concurrent, deterministic, and efficient data flow, in a way that is largely transparent to users of the system. We show how this system was used on "Knockout City", an online multiplayer action game with dodgeball mechanics, to author everything from core gameplay to user interface and player progression.
An entity system is essentially a data organization problem coupled with a scheduling problem. While attendees will learn how we solved our data visibility, data lifetime, and compute scheduling challenges in the specific, the lessons described in this talk should be applicable to entity-data problems attendees will encounter elsewhere.
Programmers interested in entity systems. A working understanding of data visibility in a multithreaded context will be helpful for portions of the talk.