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View, browse and sort the ever-growing list of sessions by day, pass type, topic, and format. With this Session Viewer, you can view GDC 2023 session details and speakers, and share your favorites via social media. You will be able to build your schedule and access it during the show via export or Mobile App, once live. Sessions do fill up and seating is first come, first serve, so arrive early to sessions that you would like to attend.

Scaling Tools for Millions of Assets for 'Horizon Forbidden West'

David Marcelis  (Senior Tools Programmer, Guerrilla)

Location: Room 2002, West Hall

Date: Wednesday, March 22

Time: 11:30 am - 12:30 pm

Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass

Topic: Programming

Format: Lecture

Vault Recording: Video

Horizon Forbidden West is Guerrilla's biggest game to date. Keeping up with the rapidly increasing size of the content required significant improvements to our tooling.

This talk will explain how we redesigned the asset database and content loading in the Decima engine to scale to millions of files. These new tools are so powerful that it fundamentally changed the way we work with content at scale. By streaming all content from a single server and maintaining metadata of all assets in memory we can make sure our editor, game and other tools remain performant and responsive while working with huge numbers of assets. This led to a solution where we can work on the game without needing to read any files.

Takeaway

Attendees will learn about the technology behind the tools for a large open-world game. They will get an insight in how content in Decima is stored, indexed, and loaded in a way that works at scale.

Intended Audience

This talk is for programmers and anyone with a technical background who are interested in evolving their own tools, especially for larger projects. An intermediate understanding of programming and content pipelines will increase what you take away from this talk.