Over the past few days, I’ve been going over some of the presentations that were given at GDC 2008, which you can download here. The presentations are in PowerPoint 2007 format, but if you have an older version you should be able to find a compatibility pack somewhere, and if you don’t have it at all, you should be able to find a free viewer. Each presentation also comes with a WMA recording of the actual talk given.

All in all, the presentations that I’ve listened to have been very interesting. There’s a handful that I haven’t paid much attention to, just for general lack of interest, but there’s a lot of good stuff there. Here’s some comments about some of what I’ve listened to:

“CLR Performance” and “Understanding XNA Framework Performance” are both somewhat technical in nature, but certainly interesting information to keep in mind while programming. Of course, any performance issues are going to be more of an issue in a larger project, rather than a smaller one, it’s always good to get into good habits.

“The Evolving Windows Game Platform” does not address XNA specifically, but rather Windows game programming in general. Still, it’s got some good thoughts to keep in mind, especially since I’d like to move to DirectX in C++ at some point… As far as I can tell, that’s still the industry standard.

“Getting More from Multicore” is a bit above what I’m ready for, given my extremely limited parallel programming experience (all of one semester), but I’m definitely holding on to this one for reference later. After I’ve tackled a few game projects, I will ideally move to a project where multi-threading really makes sense, due to size, and have a chance to put some of the methodology presented here in place.

“Advanced Debugging with Managed Code” was a real treat to find. Since I’m very much self taught, and the programming I’ve been doing in school has been almost entirely in a Unix environment, I’ve missed a lot of what Windows based tools have to offer. I have a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional (free, from Dreamspark. The joys of being a student…), but this presentation gave a good primer  in some of the Visual Studio debugging tools available to me. Hopefully, when I actually sit down and write some more code, this will make things a bit more efficient.

Tomorrow, I’m hoping to actually finalize a plan on paper, and get to coding SDH v2.