More talks from day 2 and presentation by Clive Bakers Jericho

Jesús Santos García, head of technology at Pyro Estudios, gave us a fairly technical talk about hardware titled ‘New technological challenges in video games’, explaining the specifications, shortcomings and virtues of all current systems.

The truth is that I didn’t get too many things clear from this talk, since it was too technical for my taste. Apparently, what current games aspire to is achieve the quality of Pixar’s graphic rendering system, called RenderMan.

Quake 3 was the first game to use shaders, a technology that would later be implemented in hardware by almost all consoles in future generations. The critical moment of the talk (at least for me) was when Jesus said that to implement A.I. In some games Prolog was used as a programming language. It made me want to leave the room crying and shouting: P.

He also said that it was urgently necessary to devise some way to support all multi-core processors since a limit had been reached in the power of computers as we know it until now, and to find a way to take advantage of a two-core processor as well as an 8-core one.

At the end of the talk, he showed us a technical demo of a game they have in development for PS3 at Pyro Studios.

Next, a round table took place in which Gonzo Suárez, Victor González Marroquín (General Director of the Institute of Economic Development of the Principality of Asturias) and Enric Alvarez (Designer of MercurySteam) participated.

The round table talked about business opportunities in the video game sector, and I think it was a bit heavy for the younger ones who were there, since the topics were quite dry and distant for us.

The highlight of the afternoon came later, when we went by bus to the Los Prados shopping center, where we had the machine room at our disposal (we had to pay off the €200 registration fee well). Furthermore, at 8 something, the presentation of Clive Bakers Jericho took place, a game I already talked about a while ago and which looks great for a Spanish game, although I thought the framerate was not the best in the world.