SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
August 22 and 23, 2011
Washington State Convention Center

2011 Presentations and Audio Recordings

To access the 2011 Gamefest Europe presentations and audio recordings, click here.

Audio
Graphics
Kinect
LIVE and Network Technology
Producer and Business Development
Quality Assurance and Certification
System, CPU, and Development Tools
Windows Phone

Conference Content Legend: We’ve placed these icons under the session titles to let you know, at a glance, if the session content is focused on Games for Windows, Xbox 360, Windows Phone or a combination of the three:

AUDIO

What's the sound of success? Come to the audio track to find out! Topics range from advanced acoustic simulation research to creative and logistical audio  implementation challenges, with an eye (and an ear) toward the latest tools, formats, and libraries comprising Microsoft platform offerings. Learn from platform developers as well as from game developers in the field about the latest in perceptual audio compression, speech recognition, performance optimization, Kinect audio input, and a broad (and dynamic) range of other topics.

Session Title	Speaker(s)	Description
An Array of Options: Driving Gameplay with Kinect Audio Input	Scott Selfon	The microphone array within the Kinect sensor opens a new axis of input for titles to take advantage of. Kinect also features sophisticated hardware and software processing to support spoken interactions as natural user input. This talk covers relevant sound features of the Kinect hardware and software pipelines, including echo cancellation, speech recognition, chat, sound position tracking, and other areas. Both technical and design implications for supporting verbal engagement are addressed.  (Kinect-relevant talks)
Audio Talks Pitch Shifted: Three Lectures in One	Scott Selfon	TOPIC 1: Codecs Decoded: Understanding Audio Compression Options on Microsoft Platforms (20-minute lecture) With an alphabet soup of formats to choose between, how do you choose the most appropriate balance of performance and quality? In this talk, we will discuss the various formats available to title developers on Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Windows, with critical listening examples of each, as well as their capabilities, strengths, and potential limitations. Learn to maximize both the quality and quantity of content that can be delivered. TOPIC 2: The Soundtrack of Our Lives: Leveraging User Music in Game Titles (20-minute lecture) How can titles more compellingly embrace the uniquely personalized content of a player's music collection while maintaining an intelligible and virtual universe-appropriate soundscape? In this talk, we discuss the capabilities of the XMP (Xbox Music Player) library on Xbox 360, which allows titles to play, analyze, and manipulate user music to seamlessly apply it to in-game scenarios. TOPIC 3: Duck! Balancing Game Audio with Voice Chat (20-minute lecture) Voice chat provides one of the most visceral interactions with other players. If the player is listening to chat through speakers (or even through a headset with shared other audio data), then how is intelligible voice maintained while continuing to provide an immersive mix? The Xbox 360 exposes a consumer option for ducking game audio for party and private chat channels, and titles may opt to implement similar (or more sophisticated) functionality. Options and best practice recommendations will be provided here.
Audio Tools of the Trade (Panel)	Moderator: Scott Selfon; Panelists: John Byrd, Wayne Johnson and Xavier Buffoni	A rich variety of middleware offerings in the audio space allows you to concentrate not only on making great audio, but also on using audio to create innovative gameplay. Join us for a panel discussion and open Q&A with representatives from companies focused on audio signal processing, speech processing and recognition, audio mixing, production pipelines, and interactive dynamic audio implementations. We plan to talk about hot topics in the industry today, future game audio industry directions, and establishing best practices for audio middleware integration with other game engines. We also encourage you to visit our middleware providers' Gamefest Expo Booths throughout the conference to discuss your title's specific needs and detailed solutions.
Higher-Performance XAudio2	Duncan McKay	XAudio2 does much more than just mix and route a game's sound effects and music. In this talk, we explore some of its more advanced features, including digital signal processing routing, running multirate audio graphs, using per-voice and per-send filtering, and getting the most out of XAudio2 performance.
Making the Most of XAudio2’s xAPO Framework	Tom Mathews	Ever had an annoying glitch in your pipeline that needed to be tracked down? Custom xAPOs can provide an additional tool in your toolbox. Really two talks in one, we begin with the best practices for creating performance-oriented xAPOs. Once this groundwork is covered, we then dive into using your own xAPOs for diagnostic purposes. Track down glitches, create offline logs from portions of the audio graph, and do it all with minimal system impact.
The Modern Dr. Dolittle: Talking to the Kinectimals with NuiSpeech	Mike Froggatt	Speech is perhaps the most natural form of human communication, yet our games remain largely deaf to our entreaties! Taking the Kinect launch title Kinectimals as a case study, this talk explores speech recognition on Kinect and shows that developers can embrace speech recognition. Attendees will come away with an understanding of how speech can be used to augment Kinect titles, the problem space it can address, and the real-world implementation and testing costs. (Kinect-relevant talks)
Sound Synthesis in Crackdown 2	Nikunj Raghuvanshi	The power of procedurally reconstructed sound, with the force of nearly unlimited variations during playback. Come see a presentation about the technique pioneered by the Crackdown 2 team. Using a procedural model created from an impact sound, audio engineers can determine valid variation ranges for components of the model to achieve the desired effects for a given scenario.
Sounds Great! Lessons Learned in Microsoft Studios Central Audio, from AAA to XBLA	Kristofor Mellroth and Mark Yeend	As a publisher, how does the Microsoft Studios central Audio team make games sound their best? How do they support internal and external developer partners? What are the team structure, budgets, timelines, and middleware? This talk will help you build your game by advocating best practices in audio production, as illustrated by post-mortem examples like Fable III, Toy Soldiers, Crackdown 2, Alan Wake, Kinectimals, and more.
Voice and "Other Sounds" Interaction: Beyond Simple Speech Recognition	Pedro Miguel Dias Cardoso	Thinking beyond speech itself, how can we create more natural-seeming voice interfaces and new gameplay mechanics? With a realistic approach to what speech recognition technologies allow us to do, and an emphasis on the Kinect hardware, we present several methods of interaction, including vocal and pre-vocal, speaker identification, and other acoustic events. (Kinect-relevant talks)
“Xbox, Listen”: Using Speech Recognition with Kinect	Scott Selfon	Voice offers a powerful natural user input mechanism, offering the possibility of completely intuitive and seemingly omnipotent control to the player. How should speech be designed to best take advantage of this capability, to set up the player for maximum success, and to create magical experiences even when the player’s spoken word isn’t always perfectly understood? In this talk, we discuss not only the technical aspects of implementing speech recognition by using Kinect audio libraries, but also best practices for designing, testing, and tuning grammars for intuitive and successful speech recognition experiences across languages and locales.  (Kinect-relevant talks)

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GRAPHICS

Sometimes Graphics is more than meets the eye. Behind the final images lie many insights, inspirations, and engineering hours. Join us to peel back the layers, see what was occluded, and explore the latest techniques in-depth! What is the state of the art in graphics research? What methods have top titles employed to continue raising the bar on graphics quality? What is the latest word on tiled resources (megatextures), procedural content, and stereoscopic 3D? How do we fit all these new bells and whistles into our games without blowing our frame rate budgets? And where are we headed in the future?

Session Title	Speaker(s)	Description
The Blood and Guts of Mortal Kombat (2011)	Jonathan Greenberg	A mandate for the reboot of Mortal Kombat onto Xbox 360 and PS3 was to significantly update the visualization of blood and gore in the game, along with the image quality in general. The requirement to maintain a solid 60 Hz during gameplay put significant limitations on possible approaches. This talk will focus on the game's gore system, which is quite extensive and had to allow for an unbounded amount of blood to be displayed. We had to support the damaging and dismemberment of characters, as well as the rendering of their internal musculature and skeletons. Additionally, the game had to support blood interacting with the environment, characters, and their dismembered limbs in a consistent way. Methods and optimizations employed to get this all practically working and extremely fast will be described in detail.
Efficient Shadow Mapping	Ari Silvennoinen	Shadow mapping is a well-known technique for rendering shadows in 3D scenes. For highly complex scenes, however, shadow map creation can consume a big portion of the rendering budget. A naive solution to this problem would use occlusion culling from the light source to reduce the amount of rendered shadow casters. In this talk, we describe a method for solving this problem by using knowledge of visibility from the main view for culling shadow casters. First, we use occlusion culling for the camera view to identify visible shadow receivers. Second, when rendering into the shadow map, we use only those shadow casters that cast shadows on visible shadow receivers. All other shadow casters are culled, leading to significant improvements in the total frame rendering time.
Feature Adaptive GPU Rendering of Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces	Charles Loop	We present a novel method for high-performance, GPU-based rendering of Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces.  Unlike previous methods, our algorithm computes the true limit surface up to machine precision, and is capable of rendering surfaces that conform to the full RenderMan specification for Catmull-Clark surfaces. Specifically, our algorithm can accommodate base meshes consisting of arbitrary valence vertices and faces, and the surface can contain any number and arrangement of semi-sharp creases and hierarchically defined detail.  We also present a variant of the algorithm that guarantees watertight positions and normals, meaning that even displaced surfaces can be rendered in a crack-free manner.  Finally, we describe a view dependent level-of-detail scheme that adapts to both the depth of subdivision and the patch tessellation density. Though considerably more general, the performance of our algorithm is comparable to the best approximating method, and is considerably faster than Stam's exact method.
Measuring the Immeasurable: Using Xbox 360 GPU Performance Counters for Fun and Profit	Cody Pritchard	The first step to tackling any performance problem is to profile and measure. PIX provides an excellent tool for finding GPU performance bottlenecks; however, it is not necessarily the best tool for all situations. Perhaps you want to create a simple and quick interface for your art asset pipeline or a fancy real time in game overlay. By using the D3D performance counter APIs, we can develop custom tools to measure the GPU's performance and present the information in the way that best suits our needs. This talk covers how to obtain solid measurements for many common GPU bottlenecks so that you can create tools to match your workflow.
Modern Texture Content Pipelines	Chuck Walbourn	There's more to texture resources than just a file an artist creates in Photoshop. This talk will cover DirectX 11 and Xbox 360 block compression, the modern DDS file format, and the latest tools for processing textures for Windows and Xbox 360 games.
Precompiled Command Buffers: Care and Feeding	Ivan Nevraev	In this talk, we discuss the use of precompiled command buffers (PCBs) on Xbox 360. We explain what PCBs are, and when to use them. We also explain the interaction of the D3D shadow state with PCBs, including how the inheritance and persist flags work. Learn about important points of PCB memory management, and get a walkthrough of the different ways of managing render state with PCBs.
Rethinking Game Lighting Pipelines	Michael Balzer	Many urban myths surround game lighting technology: baking lighting into textures is slow, high-quality real-time radiosity is not affordable, most lighting research is not practical for games, hardware is not yet fast enough for complex lighting, etc. This talk challenges these myths, showing that considerable, unexploited potential still exists on current consoles. An argument is made for why the static/real-time divide no longer is relevant, and how rethinking the way lighting is generated can provide higher quality, more iterative lighting. Examples are provided for what alternative lighting pipelines are possible today with existing techniques, and what considerations should be made to prepare for the next generation.
Stereoscopic 3D Capture for Rendered Worlds	Mike Robinson, PhD	Creating a stereoscopic 3D (S3D) world requires more than just a second camera. This talk will cover the basics of S3D rendering, look at some of the pitfalls, and identify how to avoid them.
Stereoscopic 3D Fundamentals for Xbox 360	Quais Taraki	The talk focuses on the fundamentals of stereoscopic 3D on the Xbox 360 platform. It covers Xbox platform support for 3D, display capabilities, the proper usage of hardware scalers with 3D modes, the changes to Direct3D, upcoming technical certifications, Xbox 360 Development Kit components, and other details for delivering 3D titles on Xbox 360. Stereoscopic 3D rendering techniques are not covered in this talk.
Symbolic Differentiation in HLSL	Brian Guenter and Mark Finch	Derivatives arise frequently in graphics and scientific computation applications. As GPUs become more widely used for scientific computation, the need for derivatives can be expected to increase. To meet this need, we have added symbolic differentiation as a built-in language feature in the HLSL shading language. The symbolic derivative is computed at compile time so it is available in all types of shaders (geometry, pixel, vertex, etc.). The algorithm for computing the symbolic derivative is simple, and has reasonable compilation and run-time overhead.
Synchronous and Asynchronous Swaps on Xbox 360	Claude Marais	A typical game renders frames that are presented on a display device such as a TV. On the Xbox 360, the Swap or Present (which calls Swap internally) functions handle the presentation of the frame to the display device. The Swap function lets the system know that the newly rendered frame is ready to become the front buffer. The execution of the Swap function can either be synchronous or asynchronous. This presentation explains how synchronous and asynchronous swaps work, how to use both appropriately, and what asynchronous swaps can be used for.
Tiled Resources for Xbox 360 and Direct3D 11	Matt Lee	Come see over 180 GB of textures running live within a sample implementation of "tiled-resources" technology for Xbox 360 and Direct3D 11. Tiled resources are also known as megatextures, virtual textures, sparse textures, and partially resident textures. In addition to enabling groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting changes to game content production, tiled resources also have the benefit of supporting much tighter control and predictability of texture memory budgets in game titles, even when using traditionally produced texture content.
What's in a Frame: Latency, Tearing, Jitter, and Frame Rate	David Cook	An old developer joke goes:  "Q:  How do you keep your publisher happy?  A:  Always render the words '60 fps' somewhere on the screen."  If frame rate is so important, why do we need an on-screen monitor to tell us what it is?  Surprisingly, "sluggish" or "chugging" performance doesn't always correlate with dropped frames. Why is it, for instance, that 24 fps movies can play smoothly on your TV, but 24 fps games cannot?  Most titles must occasionally exceed their processing budget. How should they react? Drop frames, tear, add extra latency?  Maybe all three?  We present strategies for making the best of a bad situation.

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KINECT

Kinect opens a new frontier to human-to-computer interaction for games and potentially for many applications in the future. We will explore how to create the “Magic of Kinect,” and what paradigms have worked well, and not so well, in shipped Kinect titles. Topics range from Kinect hardware and software details, to machine learning approaches to gesture detection, to creative uses of the technology and design approaches. Join us in exploring the Kinect technology to its fullest through a series of deep technical presentations!

Session Title	Speaker(s)	Description
Augmented Animation, Camera, and Controls	Lewey Geselowitz	Achieving oneness with Kinect requires tight connection among physical analysis of the player, augmented character animation, cinematography, and game mechanics. This talk covers the tools, technologies, and practices that were developed for our title, our steps along the way, and how you can get stylization to augment and never dampen the user's physical experience.
Avatar Navigation with Kinect	Todd Heckel	We will explore an approach to navigating an open environment with Kinect. Using a walking-in-place paradigm, the system transforms the player's movement into natural looking locomotion on their avatar. Various techniques for detecting and analyzing rhythmic motion are covered, including power calculation, zero-crossing detection, auto-correlation, and Fourier analysis (FFT and DFT).
Designing Compelling Player Experiences with Kinect Identity	Eric Langlois	It doesn't matter how many Kinect games you have played, the instant Kinect identity recognizes you always feels magical. This talk looks at best practices that will allow your next titles to perpetuate the magic and to meet or surpass Technical Certification Requirements. Expect to learn how to push your designs beyond the basic implementation of NUI Identity and provide a compelling player experience customized to your title. Also expect to take an in-depth look at the NUI Identity API usage strategies, including the new automatic mode.
Gesture Detection Using Machine Learning	Claude Marais	One of the biggest challenges when developing gesture detection for Kinect titles is to fine-tune all the input parameters, weights, and thresholds for each gesture so that it works reliably for a wide variety of different players. This talk presents a case study in which the time-consuming art of tuning gesture detection is replaced by a machine-learning algorithm. Implementation details, results, and recommendations are discussed in this presentation.
Heuristic Based Gesture Detection Techniques	Eric Langlois	Can you build a complete gesture detection system for your next Kinect title that can recognize a wide array of gestures, can work with side poses and self-occluded joints, and that doesn't require a large database of prerecorded gestures or training? This talk presents the outcomes from a series of experiments in heuristic-based gesture detection using Kinect, and uses the lessons learned to lay the fundamentals of a practical heuristic-based gesture detection system for your next Kinect game.
Kinect and Kids: Pitfalls and Pleasantries	Deborah Hendersen	As Soho Studios and Microsoft Studios User Research delve into the arena of developing educational products for preschoolers, we've run into a lot of curious things that games aimed at adults don't have to consider. In this talk, we'll cover the best practices of developing for, designing for, and conducting research with preschool (3- to 6-year-old) players. These practices will be benched within the context of developing educational games, and we'll look at assessment models using Kinect. The presentation will be an overview of things that we—as designers, researchers, and developers—think are the most important considerations when developing experiences for this age group. Finally, we'll share some fun video highlights from our experiments that highlight the pitfalls and pleasantries of working with kids.
Kinect Hands: Finger Tracking and Voxel UI	Abdulwajid Mohamed and Tony Ambrus	Kinect volume data can be exploited to extend and refine user interactions. This talk presents methods of constructing hand and finger representations, and building more direct physical UI interactions. In particular, it will cover the benefits, applications, and challenges of these solutions.
The Magic Behind Kinect	Zsolt Mathe	Understanding how Kinect works and what it does well is key to making great games that utilize the hardware and software to the fullest. Join us for an all-inclusive discussion on how the Kinect sensor, skeletal tracking, identity and speech recognition work together to create the magic behind Kinect. Also, we will cover the latest Kinect updates and developments in the Xbox 360 Software Development Kit.
Making a Five Star Kinect Game	Jason Hewitt	Do you want to make a premium Kinect title? We will explore experiences in shipped Kinect titles that have frustrated players, and present easy to implement solutions. With these tricks, your title will shine, improving the gamer's experience and feedback about your title.
Natural User Input Joint Filtering Best Practices	Mehran Azimi	This talk discusses best practices for dealing with NUI noisy joint position data in Kinect titles. Our goal is to help Kinect developers in this regard by showing how to choose an appropriate filtering technique and fine tune its parameters to match the specific needs of their titles. We discuss many topics, including the noise characteristics, noise propagation, latency versus smoothness tradeoff, and using forecasting to reduce latency. We also discuss the most useful filtering techniques for NUI joint data.
Real-Time Classification of Gestures Using Kinect, with Emphasis on Dance	Darko Kirovski and Joel Pritchett	We developed a system to quickly recognize dance gestures by using Kinect skeletal motion. Key components include a low-dimensional angular representation of the skeleton, a cascaded correlation-based classifier for multivariate time-series data, and a distance metric based on dynamic time-warping. We train the classifier on a benchmark comprising 28 gesture classes and hundreds of recorded gesture instances, and obtain an average accuracy of 95 percent for approximately 4-second skeletal motion recordings. Most gestures can be distinguished in 1 to 2 seconds.
Tips for Raw Image Manipulation with Kinect	Allan Murphy and David Cook	Kinect titles often rely on the end product of the Kinect system pipeline—the skeleton. Many Kinect titles, however, enhance that data or improve gameplay and visuals by going back to the source—the depth and color images. These images can be noisy and difficult to work with, and even simple processing can quickly grow expensive. Also, image calculations can be implemented either on the CPU or on the GPU, and the choice of processor has implications for performance and latency. We present a selection of tips for efficiently and effectively manipulating raw image data by using lessons learned from developing the AdvancedSegmentation, DepthVisualizer, and FastUntile samples in the Xbox 360 Development Kit.

You may also want to check out these Kinect-relevant talks in other Gamefest tracks:

An Array of Options: Driving Gameplay with Kinect Audio Input
Certification Q&A
Emerging Markets for Motion Games: How to Maximize Your Market Share for Kinect Titles
The Evolution of User Generated Content (UGC)
Feedback, Feedback, Feedback: Good Kinect UI Design
Kinect Certification: Lessons Learned and Best Practices
The Modern Dr. Dolittle: Talking to the Kinectimals with NuiSpeech
New and Improved: Functional Certification for Kinect
Planning for Success: Kinect Compliance Certification
Voice and "Other Sounds" Interaction: Beyond Simple Speech Recognition
“Xbox, Listen”: Using Speech Recognition with Kinect

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LIVE AND NETWORK TECHNOLOGY

The Xbox LIVE service provides compelling and exciting user experiences for your games and businesses. This year, the LIVE service offers several new features and enhancements such as social integration, matchmaking techniques, user generated content, providing a scalable title storage service, and more. LIVE encompasses a wide variety of experiences for drawing players together from around the world. Come have a peek at what’s coming next and hear about how to best use these technologies to drive innovation in your Xbox 360 titles as well as to explore security, design, and potential pitfalls to avoid during your development cycle.

Session Title	Speaker(s)	Description
Accessing Xbox LIVE Using RESTful Web Services	Martin Sleeman	This talk will describe how developers can create compelling companion websites, applications, and games that take advantage of our new RESTful Xbox LIVE Web Services from console and non-console platforms (Windows Phone, websites, etc.). You will learn how your application can obtain secure access to our service, as well as how to use the expansive set of Xbox LIVE services, including Profile and Storage, to keep your customers engaged through your websites and companion applications even after they’ve stopped playing your game.
Advanced Topics in Game Configuration	James Jacoby	Dive deep into validation, updates, and other advanced usages of game configuration. Understand what goes on behind the scenes and what might be causing those pesky problems you see with your achievements, leaderboards, and matchmaking. Learn valuable tips and tricks for managing game configurations—all of the things we have learned over the past year.
Asynchronous Gaming with Xbox LIVE	Jeff Braunstein	Multiplayer makes a game more fun, and is the driving force behind many successful games today. Cross-platform gameplay provides publishers with a unique opportunity to delight players on any device, at any time, wherever they are. But how can a game have compelling multiplayer experiences when a player may be interrupted at any time by a phone call or a business meeting? With Asynchronous Gaming! This talk will describe how you can use Xbox LIVE Services to manage multiplayer, matchmaking, and messaging to provide the best possible end-to-end asynchronous gaming experience.
Cheaters Shall Not Pass: Cheat-Resistant Network Protocol Design	Ferdinand Schober	A recurring problem with online gaming is cheating. Strong system security makes games resistant to cheaters locally, so cheaters instead use aspects of game network protocols to gain unfair advantages. Even with encryption and authenticated messages, traffic shaping and traffic characteristics can provide information to cheaters. Inappropriate protocol design can aid cheaters and diminish the value of a game for honest players. This talk will present the most common pitfalls for game network protocols that facilitate cheating, and will show you how to avoid them. The talk will also introduce you to inherently cheat-resistant protocol designs and the proper test methodology for such designs.
Connecting and Publishing to Facebook Through Xbox LIVE	John Bruno and Steven Trombetta	Learn how to leverage single sign on to Facebook to unlock your users' ability to broadcast exciting moments from your game to friends and family. The presentation will cover how to register your application to support single sign on to Facebook, and how to best use the new Facebook wall-posting APIs available from Xbox LIVE in an upcoming release.
Defense Against the Dark Arts of Piracy and Cheating with Games for Windows - LIVE	Arka Ray	Piracy and cheating are two of the top concerns for PC game developers. Not only can piracy impact the profitability of your title, but cheating and hacking can drive away the game's community and additional sales. It is important to plan and implement security measures for PC games during design and development, rather than as a reaction after release. Games for Windows – LIVE provides a robust set of features to help protect your game and its community. Many of these features are flexible, and can be omitted or modified to best suit your game and community needs. Included are new features implemented from developer and customer feedback received since last year. There is better support for additional third-party protections and a more flexible activation solution, as well as new methods to leverage these features for different business models such as free-to-play or online focused. Learn how to leverage these features with little effort to protect your game, and why Games for Windows – LIVE provides the best solution over other platforms.
Delivering Gaming at Scale on Xbox LIVE	Eric Neustadter	Millions of users play on Xbox LIVE every day, and your title is going to be their next serious addiction. Together we can plan for your success and sleep soundly, no matter how many millions of copies you sell. Gain the benefit of our years of experience running the Xbox LIVE service as we dive into details about how to plan for, and successfully manage, high volumes of game traffic in real time.
Getting the Most Out of Xbox LIVE Matchmaking	Sean Haneberg and Theo Michel	Robust matchmaking that can orchestrate fair and fun multiplayer sessions is a key way to differentiate your title from others on Xbox LIVE or other platforms. In this talk, we discuss some of the fundamental challenges around getting high-quality matches, explore the existing Xbox LIVE matchmaking mechanisms in detail, and introduce Weighted Search—a new way of performing matchmaking that allows developers more control over result ordering. A preview of Weighted Search was used by Bungie to create the matchmaking system in Halo Reach, and the core technology is now available in the Xbox 360 Developer Kit. We'll discuss how Weighted Search works, and how game developers can most effectively consume this technology.
Look Ma, No XLSP: The Future of Connecting to Web Resources from Your Xbox 360 Console	Robert Sanchez	Today’s Xbox 360 titles must use the Xbox LIVE Server Platform technology set to connect to services outside of Xbox LIVE. In upcoming versions of the Xbox 360 SDK, Microsoft is providing new technology to enable HTTP and HTTPS communications to web servers. In this talk, we will review this exciting new feature, including the scenarios it will enable and the limits on its use.
Platform Visible Leaderboards: Viewing Leaderboards Outside of the Game	Joel Wiljanen	Platform Visible Leaderboards enable game developers to have their leaderboards viewable outside of the title and inside the core platform experiences such as Xbox.com, Windows Phone, or the Xbox 360 Dashboard. These viewable leaderboards let users compare their leaderboard rank with their friends, which will encourage them to keep coming back to your games on Xbox LIVE. Join us for this talk where we will show you how to configure your existing leaderboards within your current titles to enable this functionality, as well as how to add this functionality to new title leaderboards.
The Power of the Crowd on Xbox LIVE	Emily Price and Scott Longstreet	Harvesting the collective wisdom of a community is one of the most powerful experiences in online gaming. Imagine highlighting what's hot with the community in real time, polling the crowd for which game to play next, or voting for the winner (or loser!) of a match. This talk will cover using the Xbox Aggregation Game Service to capture aggregated, community data that can be used to add another layer to your interactive experiences to unleash the power of the crowd!
Social Integration: Policies, Privacy, and Fun	Doug Park	Today, social integration is nearly a must-have for titles and applications. Learn how best to connect with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other sites. Join our presenters as they walk through current trends, discuss relevant policies, and provide examples and best practices of good and "interesting" social integration.
Xbox LIVE Cloud Storage Evolved	Christopher Boedigheimer	With gaming spreading rapidly across devices, there is an ever increasing need to have service-based data sharing support. With our new, scalable, and flexible title storage service, developers will enjoy the ability to persist user-specific game data in the Xbox LIVE cloud! Come learn how to leverage these new RESTful APIs to enable cloud-based data storage for your cross-platform game titles.

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PRODUCER AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Production and Business Development concerns are key factors in game development today, with large teams working for multiple years driving projects to completion. This track will cover all stages of development: opportunities surrounding a new hardware device to be released this holiday season, Kinect war stories, privacy issues, best practices and emerging markets, the new process for shepherding content into the Xbox LIVE Marketplace, reducing costs by going digital with your game manuals, and how to maximize ongoing revenue after your title has shipped.

Session Title	Speaker(s)	Description
The Digital Manual is Tomorrow’s Manual…Today!	Dana Ludwig	Eliminating print manuals isn't just about saving the environment; it's also about saving our users. Going digital offers us greater opportunities to educate our customers in ways that make sense for gamers in 2011. By adding interactivity and removing the constraints of the "printed page," designers have full access to meet the changing needs of their customers. Learn more about what Microsoft Studios is doing to take advantage of this interactive space. See design and engineering examples of an immersive digital-help system that serves Xbox 360, PC, and mobile platforms.
Emerging Markets for Motion Games: How to Maximize Your Market Share for Kinect Titles	Sheryl Flynn, PT, PhD and Tiffany E. Shubert, PT, PhD	Just as there are countless creative possibilities in games, there are inestimable types of gamers (young/old, tall/short, able/disabled) and unlimited reasons to playing games (just for fun, fitness, or function). Who are your games designed for? Are you missing out on emerging markets for your Kinect title? Have you considered ways to broaden your game's market share by changing a few key game features? Recent stories tell of children with autism, service members with brain injury, and aging baby boomers turning to Kinect for fun and for therapeutic purposes. All of these markets collectively offer a significant and important opportunity for developers who wish to take these key stakeholders' needs seriously. With just a few minor design modifications, game developers can widen their market share, and reach into this as yet untapped and immeasurable global opportunity that reaches to the end of the bell curve. Learn the best practices, review customer segments, and discover the most requested feature list that will greatly enhance the rehabilitation and wellness space. (Kinect-relevant talks)
The Evolution of User Generated Content (UGC)	Doug Park	User-generated content (UGC) is everywhere! This talk highlights some of the trends in UGC, as well as policies and best practices for implementing safe UGC features and functions. The basis for the presentation will be a newly updated UGC policy document that covers traditional UGC, as well as photo, video, and voice using the Kinect sensor. (Kinect-relevant talks)
Feedback, Feedback, Feedback: Good Kinect UI Design	Ben Board	Controller-free gaming affects menu design and in-game controls more than any other part of the game. This is new ground for most developers, and an art—the Xbox team has seen examples of success from across the spectrum. In this talk, we will explore some example paradigms from released games and elsewhere, and describe what we need to see during the concept approval and UI review stages before your title can ship. This information is valuable to Producers and Designers wanting to understand—and to improve upon—current best practices in the crucial area of player feedback. (Kinect-relevant talks)
Game and Hardware Co-Development Best Practices	Dennis Tom and Eva Moy	Come and learn about the Xbox Accessories team and the best practices to optimize the gameplay experience with any hardware. We discuss and demonstrate the technologies behind the newly announced Xbox 360 Wireless Speed Wheel launching this holiday, and how you can use this wheel in your game development. We also showcase new Xbox Accessories coming this holiday, including the art of customization and the technologies behind creating the art.
Game Developer Network Portal Tips & Tricks	Phil Smail	This session is intended for people who have seen or used the portal before and will discuss the recent changes to the Game Developer Network Portal (GDNP) as well as the future direction of the site, including a first look at some exciting future functionality. We will also cover some important Tips and Tricks to common issues to help ensure your content doesn’t get blocked and makes it through the pipeline as efficiently as possible.
Maximizing Digital Revenue for Arcade Titles	Alex Teodorescu-Badia and Wayne Kackley	When you create an Arcade title, how do you know if it's going to be a hit? Even better—what if we told you ways to improve your odds? We’re not going to give you a specific formula, but we can throw some hard statistics and proven strategies at you to get you thinking about the entire lifecycle of your game. We'll cover everything from title conception through to the long-tail: picking the right IP, how to increase overall sales and gamer awareness of your title, DLC, continued marketing, and how to turn a trial of your game into a sale. Our end goal? Having you walk away with knowledge about how to increase the potential revenue for your title by a factor of four.
Maximizing Digital Revenue for Retail Titles	Chad McFadden	Shipping your game on physical media? Unless you come up with a solid, digital strategy to go with it, you're leaving lots of money on the table. We'll use hard, cold, and distilled real-world data from Xbox LIVE Marketplace to show you how building a complete digital ecosystem around your title impacts your revenue. This includes looking at downloadable content and how to easily get it into gamers' hands, marketing your title with a prologue or demo, and identifying what kinds of downloadable content should be your focus and when to release them. For the last step in the retail lifecycle, we explore releasing your title in digital format via Games on Demand. By the end of this talk, you'll have detailed knowledge of how creating a digital roadmap can significantly increase your revenue potential.

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QUALITY ASSURANCE AND CERTIFICATION

Game development increasingly presses technology and test resources to the limit. In addition, new technologies introduce fresh challenges, and create new opportunities. Faced with this, QA professionals must constantly adapt by keeping up-to-date on the latest testing techniques and platform Certification policies. Come explore approaches designed to increase your QA team’s efficiency, thoroughness, and impact on your Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Windows titles. Examine the tools and services that Certification provides, meet the people responsible for certifying your titles, and learn how they can help you get your product out the door quickly and easily. Get a better understanding of new and upcoming technologies and how they will impact your testing and Certification preparations. Jump in and ensure that you and your test team are at the top of your game!

Session Title	Speaker(s)	Description
Certifiable Success: Compliance Testing on Xbox 360	Brad Mues	The Compliance team verifies that your title adheres to the TCRs. Join us to learn more about TCRs, and get the inside scoop on how they are developed. This session will also include deep dives on two of the most common issues that are causing delays for titles in Cert. First, we will demystify Compliance requirements around downloadable content (DLC). Find out exactly what DLC you need to submit and why. Second, we will discuss the common pitfalls that we encounter with XLSP and how to mitigate them. Finally, discover more about how Microsoft can help you with issues in your title. Find out about the variety of support options available, and the types of query that are best suited for each.
Certification for Windows Phone: Year One and Beyond	Chris Wilson	The end of 2010 introduced the world to Windows Phone. As part of its launch portfolio, users gained access to games that connect to Xbox LIVE and the ability to score achievements. While this was a win for consumers and a great step forward for Microsoft, the launch of a new platform with a new type of LIVE-enabled games posed great challenges in Certification. This presentation reviews the lessons learned, examines the current state of affairs, and looks to the future of certification on a mobile platform.
Certification Q&A	Brad Mues, Chris Wilson, Daniel Jacobs, David Watkins, Eric Odell-Hein, Ethan Coyle and Nancy Clark	Come join our Q&A session specifically designed to provide an open discussion about all Certification-related topics. Representatives from the Microsoft Certification Group will be on hand to field your questions about Certification on Xbox 360, Windows Phone, and Windows. (Kinect-relevant talks)
EA and Certification Testing	Andrew Pritchard	At Electronic Arts, we have our own internal Certification team, partnering with multiple worldwide studios to ensure quality products are submitted to Microsoft Certification. This talk aims to share the advantages of having an internal Certification team. We will discuss topics such as how we interact with QA teams and internal and external development partners, and what services we provide to them. We will share some of the processes we employ in order to align with Microsoft Certification, and to ensure that all EA Xbox 360 titles are fit for submission to Microsoft and release to the consumer. Learn how we work within the dynamic world of Certification, how we respond to fails from First Party, and what we do to ensure that we do not experience repeat failures.
Games for Windows - LIVE: Offering More Paths to Success	Eric Odell-Hein	Games for Windows – LIVE continues to evolve by using an improved marketplace, offering a variety of copy protection options, and allowing the freedom to play without being tied to a client. Its connection to Xbox LIVE for DLC and achievements further enhances its value, brand awareness, and a title's potential for increased revenue. This presentation covers recent data, customer feedback, and improvements in a variety of areas regarding the certification process, including a streamlined submission model and the platinum title update program—all designed to get your title through certification with greater efficiency and offer more ways to a successful launch.
Going Platinum: A Microsoft Studios Tale	Joe Whitman	When the Certification team gave out the initial Platinum Publisher status, Microsoft Studios did not qualify. Over the last 12 months, however, we have changed our processes and those changes enabled us to become a Platinum Publisher. Come to this talk if you want to learn what we did to make this happen, and how we are preparing for the time when Kinect titles will count toward the Platinum Publisher status.
Kinect Certification: Lessons Learned and Best Practices	Jean-Marc Goulet	It’s been almost a year since the launch of Kinect and the learning process still continues, but experience has proven to be very important because testing Kinect titles is a challenging task. Adjusting to the experience of using your body as the input device, creating test-cases, adapting to procedures and managing resources in the given conditions are aspects that will be discussed in Ubisoft’s presentation.  (Kinect-relevant talks)
New and Improved: Functional Certification for Kinect	Daniel Jacobs	Join the Certification Group's Functional Kinect presentation where a Functional Kinect lead will run through the latest developments and updates from the Functional labs. Join us as we delve into new features, test case updates, and common issues and hints/tips about how the Functional labs test your Kinect titles and find the issues that matter most to you. You will gain an insight into the most common Kinect failing issues, and pick up hints and tips to potentially improve your pass rate. You will see how we are evolving the Certification process in Functional to be simpler and easier for publishers and developers by giving you exclusive access to the all-new Kinect Certification training videos. If you expect to submit a title to Kinect Certification or Xbox 360 this is a must see! (Kinect-relevant talks)
Planning for Success: Kinect Compliance Certification	Brad Mues	Now that Kinect has launched to great success, it's time to look back and reflect on the things that went well and to learn from the things that didn't. This talk will start with a primer about the basics of Kinect Compliance and how we get the best out of our lab space. We then cover deep dives about the hot topics of Identity and hybrid submissions. The Identity section will explain the common pitfalls that tend to complicate compliance and how to avoid them. Finally, the hybrid section will describe our approach to submissions that use a mix of controller and Kinect gameplay. (Kinect-relevant talks)
Submission through RTM: Preparing for Success	Ethan Coyle and Nancy Clark	Are you new to Certification Submissions? Do you want to better understand what your submission teams need for preparing your title for Cert? Is there anxiety around what happens to your title once it leaves your hands? Or perhaps you know those answers, but really need help in navigating tricky requirements for the portal submissions? Our talk at Gamefest 2011, Submission through RTM: Preparing for Success, will answer all those questions, catch pesky blind spots, and more. Spend an hour with us and you will walk out of the room with an understanding of Certification process and timelines, as well as how to confidently submit the right content at the right time via the Game Developer Network portal. We recommend this talk for anyone new to submissions or new to the portal, or anyone who has a title that goes to our Certification team for testing and would like to understand the process better.
The Zen of Functional Testing on Xbox 360	Daniel Jacobs	Join us in the Functional Certification presentation while we examine the two major types of Functional testing. We will cover the most common failing FTC issues, and then learn about how we catch the most common non-FTC issues with our test planning process. We will cover topics like passing/failing scenarios, FAQs, the Optional Final/Final testing process and what is involved. Our Functional lead also will take you on a deep dive into our top 10 game-failing issues. You will have the opportunity to view some of the all new Xbox 360 Functional Certification training videos. Most importantly, we will give you an insight into how you can use all this information and more with any future submission planned for Certification.

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SYSTEM, CPU, AND DEVELOPMENT TOOLS

Are you the engineer on your team responsible for squeezing out the last bit of performance from your code? Are you concerned about security? We’ll be discussing these topics and more in the System, CPU, and Development Tools track. We’ll learn about a range of topics including the latest Visual Studio features, new and interesting ways to leverage consumables for LIVE Marketplace transactions, as well as leveraging /analyze and SAL to your advantage. Come join us for these topics and more!

Session Title	Speaker(s)	Description
Agile C++ Game Development with Visual Studio	Boris Jabes	Productivity in the era of agile development no longer is something we can count with lines of code. Visual Studio brings together a slew of lifecycle management tools—from architecture analysis to unit testing—that dramatically improve the productivity of C++ developers everywhere. Come learn how the next version Visual Studio will help you embrace agile methodologies like never before!
How Valve Makes Games Better with XPerf (Windows Performance Toolkit)	Bruce Dawson	Xperf can be a powerful profiling tool, making otherwise invisible performance problems easy to find. There are, however, numerous challenges in using it effectively. This talk will explain the techniques used at Valve to record and analyze Xperf traces, with case studies showing some of the performance problems found in Valve games. Attendees will learn to integrate Xperf into their profiling life cycle in order to discover the secrets of their own Windows games.
Making the Compiler Do the Work for You with Code Analysis	Steven Hammond	Projects are steadily growing in size and complexity. As the size of your code base increases, debugging problems by hand becomes more expensive in time and money. Using the C/C++ Code Analysis tool with Visual Studio can greatly reduce the number of resources spent on debugging code by finding problems before your code is executed. Using the compiler’s /analyze switch and the Source Annotation Language (SAL), learn how to harness the compiler to debug your code for you.
Modern C++(0x) Programming with Visual Studio	Boris Jabes	With a new standard (C++0x) almost complete, the largest in over a decade, C++ is poised for renewed importance. C++0x brings improvements in expressiveness and performance that are too numerous to cover. In this talk, we'll highlight mind-bending examples on the bleeding edge that give you an insight into the unique capabilities of C++ in the twenty-first century. Language geeks: join us for a lively conversation about the most ubiquitous game programming language in the world.
Populating the Grid: Digital Extras in Tron: Evolution	Paul Kruszewski	This talk describes the system used to create the digital extras in Tron: Evolution. We cover both the core architectural components (how extras are different from regular NPCs) and the tool chain that allows game level editors to "cast" their own extras. We specifically address why a navigation mesh is inappropriate for ambient movement, and why a behavior tree is not overkill for an extra. All concepts will be made concrete via focused examples running in our Unreal 3 integration.
Scaling Your Game to N Cores: A Deep Dive on Tasking	Yannis Minadakis	Working on a bleeding-edge PC title releasing in 2013 or beyond? By 2013, the average PC will have four cores, and systems will ship with six cores or more. Get the most out of the latest hardware, and scale efficiently between two and six (or more) CPU cores by using Tasking. Tasking decouples algorithmic parallelism from implementation, allowing your technology to scale to N cores. Together we will explore the parallel-ization of rendering, animation logic, and MLAA post-processing, investigating the implementation and performance pitfalls we encounter along the way.
Securing Your Xbox 360 Title	Greg Pettyjohn	Come learn about the latest security-related Xbox 360 XDK features, and take away best practices in building a solid defense against pirates, hackers and cheaters. This talk provides an overview of Xbox 360 security features such as XGD3/CIV, runtime memory protection, and XEX security, as well as offline storage and multiplayer security.
Taming GPU Compute with C++ AMP	Daniel Moth	It's 2011 and a TeraFLOP has never been cheaper. If, that is, you can make your code run on the GPU… The last few years have spurred unbelievable advances in GPU hardware—all while developers struggle to write effective, correct, and fast programs for these devices. This talk will present new extensions to the C++ language shipping in an upcoming version of Visual Studio that promise to unlock the potential of the GPU for a broad set of C++ developers.
Transacting with Consumables	Greg Pettyjohn	This talk is for the software design engineer implementing a premium experience that relies on a service component on the Xbox LIVE Server Platform (XLSP). Let's face it, downloadable content isn't always downloaded anymore. Cutting-edge titles are implementing innovative, premium online services with consumable assets that may be purchased multiple times and that are tracked, per player, on the title's XLSP service. The purchase flow for these premium services is a critical part of the player's experience, and is essential for collecting revenue. A purchase flow implementation based on a naïve design will work under ideal conditions, but can fail after deployment, possibly depriving legitimate customers of their purchases or allowing cheaters to exploit the system to get the experience for free. This talk will take a detailed look at purchase transactions for consumable items and services, and will present a design methodology that will enable you to create a robust purchase flow that provides a high-quality player experience and resists exploitation.

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WINDOWS PHONE

Mobile gaming meets Xbox LIVE with Windows Phone. Leveraging the power of XNA Game Studio and Xbox LIVE, developers can quickly create immersive, connected games that players can enjoy anytime, anywhere. We're ready to share in-depth info to help you make your mobile games even better, including deep dives into the recent updates to the Windows Phone tools that are bringing even more goodness for game developers. Come and learn gaming the Windows Phone way.

Session Title	Speaker(s)	Description
Ad-Ready Game Development on Windows Phone	Elbert Perez	This talk from an independent game developer explores new business models where games monetize users play through advertising. Come hear real-world revenue and download figures, proving that it is possible to give games to users for free and still make money! The developer will also discuss the philosophy behind game development and how tightly game-design points (highly addictive, highly replayable, ads not intrusive, etc.) are integrated with successful monetization through advertising. Historic data and quotes from reviews enforce the business model, detailing how the developer evolved the model from "menu-only ads" to "ads everywhere in the game." Finally, listen to thoughts about where the future of game advertising may go, along with other highly accessible monetization strategies.
Avatars Anywhere with Windows Phone	John Bruno	We’ve become accustomed to Xbox LIVE avatars in our living rooms and in our workplaces, but what about carrying them around in our pockets? Come explore what you can do today with avatars on mobile devices, and learn about the future of Xbox LIVE avatars on Windows Phone.
Best Practices for Windows Phone Quality Assurance	Chad Long	On any new platform, there usually exists a host of caveats, gotchas, and unique requirements that one needs to be cognizant of during development of a game. Any number of these, if not dealt with correctly, can prevent a game from shipping. Find out what some of these issues are, how to test for them, and how testing for Windows Phone differs from testing on other platforms.
CPU Performance Update for Windows Phone	Ivan Nevraev	Supercharge your CPU performance, including using SIMD instructions coming with the Windows Phone 7.5 OS tools update. CPU bound tasks such as physics and other math-heavy operations require careful attention to get the most out of the platform. This talk teaches you how to avoid performance pitfalls, and how to get the most out of the runtime updates provided with the Windows Phone 7.5 OS.
Developer Postmortem: Babaroga’s Experience with Windows Phone	Justin Magnini	This talk from veteran phone game developer Babaroga highlights the advantages of developing on the Windows Phone platform, as well as tips for transitioning from other platforms, and a collection of quirky lessons learned along the way.
From Start to Ship: Top Windows Phone Development Best Practices from the Trenches	Kevin Gee	The Microsoft Advanced Technology Group (ATG) works with game developers worldwide to put the final polish on their titles as they get ready to ship. This talk highlights the common developer pain points for getting Windows Phone games through release, and details best practices you can use to avoid hitting roadblocks in your own titles.
From the Ground Up: Windows Phone Game Development	Charles Cox	Get a game development jump-start for the Windows Phone platform. Learn how to develop games in managed code with the XNA Framework; take advantage of the graphics, input, and audio hardware capabilities on the phone; and get a look at the opportunities available in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Keep Them Coming Back: Downloadable Content on Windows Phone	Darryl Yust and Tim Gill	Come learn proven approaches for dealing with some of the toughest hurdles in adding downloadable content and microtransactions to your Windows Phone games! This talk introduces the new in-game purchase API for Xbox LIVE titles on Windows Phone. We'll get down to the nitty-gritty of how the API is used in Beards & Beaks, a shipped game title. We’ll delve into a sample code framework that helps you implement game-side functionality not included in the SDK library, including the handling of file transfers, tombstoning, serialization, offline scenarios, localization, content ingestion, and fast content iteration.
Performance Patterns and Pitfalls for Windows Phone Games	Tom Miller	This talk will discuss many performance issues that we've discovered during the course of building our games. It will focus on many of the more esoteric pieces of performance "gotchas" that we've encountered. We will discuss how you can improve your startup time, and why it matters (including details on tombstoning). Included will be other less obvious performance pitfalls such as threading, and the benefits and pitfalls of using them on the phone and why reading from the flash might not be the most ideal situation. Other common performance pitfalls such as garbage and the difference between GPU and CPU costs will also be discussed.
Preparing For Success: Building Windows Phone Content Offline Using the XNA Content Pipeline	Matthew Picioccio	In most games, the content created by artists and designers, and their tools must be significantly altered before it can be consumed by run-time systems. Preparing this content when the game project is built can result in faster and more efficient content loading at runtime. In this talk, we will demonstrate how to use the XNA Content Pipeline to prepare your content for run-time loading and for use in your XNA Game Studio game on Windows Phone.
Shiny New Features for Windows Phone Developers	Charles Cox	Learn about the game development features that are right around the corner for Windows Phone. Dive into new features like Silverlight integration, TCP/UDP sockets, and Gyro support, as well as performance and debugging tools like generational garbage collection, emulator enhancements, and a new code profiler.
A Tale of Two Platforms: Windows Phone and Azure Cloud Services	Allan Murphy	Learn everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask about building cloud services for your mobile title. This presentation will give an introduction to Azure development, concrete code, and examples showing "tracer bullet" approaches to working with cloud storage on Windows Phone. It also gives examples of how you can use Azure cloud services to add exciting and novel functionality to your mobile game.

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