August 7, 2013 at 16:33UNIGINE Open Air 2013. Photo report
240 participants, 2 days, 12 lectures, 3 buckets of whiskey, 63 kilograms of kebabs, 5 kW of sound - UNIGINE Open Air 2013 was held near Tomsk . This is an open-air conference dedicated to 3D graphics technology and the development of computer games.
This year we held open air for the second time, and it became even larger and more versatile: the number of participants increased, their geography expanded, there were more reports. We were happy to chat with game developers from Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Barnaul, Biysk, Krasnoyarsk, Kemerovo, Voronezh and other cities!
Participants were reluctant to leave, and then they wrote to us that the city is missing the atmosphere of open air. Damn nice, of course.
The highlight of the program were the reports of Sphinx Technologies CEO Andrei Aksenov shodan (Voronezh). On the first day, Andrei was very inspiring to prove that in fact there are no difficult tasks, in the worst case tasks can be long or tedious. Among other things, he argued that a programmer needs a brain at all, he only needs “a slight natural inclination and 10-15 years of training”. The second report was about low-level code optimizations (by the way, it had to be split into two parts, because all the useful information in the allotted time did not fit).
Ivan Avdeev w23 (Novosibirsk) spoke about the secrets of the demoscene, telling about the technologies for creating 3D demos of 64 KB, 4 KB and even 256 bytes in size!
The report smoothly flowed into the “half-drunk coding of shaders”, as one of the open-air participants put it. It looked like this: in the light of stars and monitors, Ivan wrote a 3D demo from scratch, shodan commented on what was happening: “in my opinion, someone is now reinventing the bilinear filtering of textures ...”, the audience was fascinated to see what was happening.
Alawar Entertainment Technical Director Alexander Pogrebnyak (Novosibirsk) talked about casual games technologies and how to make money with them.
The programmer of the server part of Genius Games Ruslan Mashukov (Krasnoyarsk) spoke about the technical stages of the development of Action MMO.
Multiple programmer Pavel Nakaznenko (Krasnoyarsk) shared the experience, pain and joys of porting Unreal Engine 3 to FLASH.
UNIGINE specialists, of course, also shared their knowledge and experience. Our technical director Alexander Zapryagaev (Frustum) spoke about the specifics of creating a 3D engine for huge virtual worlds.
CEO Denis Shergin binstream introduced participants to the basics of “on the fingers” 3D graphics.
Anna Chaplinskaya spoke about the role and pain of a build engineer in game development.
3D artist Davyd Widiger plucked a standing ovation by telling and showing voxel modeling in 3D-Coat. The case was not limited to reports, the guys were caught with different questions during the breaks.
The open air reports were not only on technical topics. Andrey Viktorov, co-founder of Fate Studio (Novosibirsk), spoke about the difficult life of small studios that independently develop games.
Alawar Stargaze CEO Natalya Ogloblina (Barnaul) talks about how gaming techniques can be used in project management.
Presentations of reports, shown and not shown on open air due to the bright sun, can be viewed here .
In their free time, participants unloaded the brain, playing volleyball / badminton / frisbee or simply sunbathing.
Closer to the night of the first day, when all the reports were over, the whiskey party began, which continued with a drum'n'bass party. Those who didn’t want to dance left to watch the shader coding, draw pictures with freeze light or scattered around the bonfires of interest.
For example, by the evening of the first day I looked something like this ...
This year, as an experiment, we organized a new venue - a fun zone where you could plunge into virtual reality using Oculus Rift, play Battle City, Super Mario Bros or Contra on the NES emulator, chopped up with friends in Mortal Kombat 9 on the PlayStation 3.
By the way, MK fans took part in the mini-tournament on the second day, its winner received a cool open-air T-shirt as a prize.
The experiment with the fun zone was a success: it was almost always crowded and fun. We’ll come up with something else for the next open-air!
For the photos used in this post, thanks to Masha Anikina, Lesha Lavrenkov, Alexander Kachkin, Sergey Larin, Maria Kryvda, Sergey Gray, Daniil Tutubalin, Alexander Panichev.
We are already making grandiose plans for next year! The main idea is to make open-air cover the entire production cycle of games. To do this, we are going to organize several lecture venues and increase the number of reports that would be of interest to artists and QA engineers.
Plan your trip to Tomsk in July 2014!
This year we held open air for the second time, and it became even larger and more versatile: the number of participants increased, their geography expanded, there were more reports. We were happy to chat with game developers from Tomsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Barnaul, Biysk, Krasnoyarsk, Kemerovo, Voronezh and other cities!
Participants were reluctant to leave, and then they wrote to us that the city is missing the atmosphere of open air. Damn nice, of course.
What were they talking about?
The highlight of the program were the reports of Sphinx Technologies CEO Andrei Aksenov shodan (Voronezh). On the first day, Andrei was very inspiring to prove that in fact there are no difficult tasks, in the worst case tasks can be long or tedious. Among other things, he argued that a programmer needs a brain at all, he only needs “a slight natural inclination and 10-15 years of training”. The second report was about low-level code optimizations (by the way, it had to be split into two parts, because all the useful information in the allotted time did not fit).
Ivan Avdeev w23 (Novosibirsk) spoke about the secrets of the demoscene, telling about the technologies for creating 3D demos of 64 KB, 4 KB and even 256 bytes in size!
The report smoothly flowed into the “half-drunk coding of shaders”, as one of the open-air participants put it. It looked like this: in the light of stars and monitors, Ivan wrote a 3D demo from scratch, shodan commented on what was happening: “in my opinion, someone is now reinventing the bilinear filtering of textures ...”, the audience was fascinated to see what was happening.
Alawar Entertainment Technical Director Alexander Pogrebnyak (Novosibirsk) talked about casual games technologies and how to make money with them.
The programmer of the server part of Genius Games Ruslan Mashukov (Krasnoyarsk) spoke about the technical stages of the development of Action MMO.
Multiple programmer Pavel Nakaznenko (Krasnoyarsk) shared the experience, pain and joys of porting Unreal Engine 3 to FLASH.
UNIGINE specialists, of course, also shared their knowledge and experience. Our technical director Alexander Zapryagaev (Frustum) spoke about the specifics of creating a 3D engine for huge virtual worlds.
CEO Denis Shergin binstream introduced participants to the basics of “on the fingers” 3D graphics.
Anna Chaplinskaya spoke about the role and pain of a build engineer in game development.
3D artist Davyd Widiger plucked a standing ovation by telling and showing voxel modeling in 3D-Coat. The case was not limited to reports, the guys were caught with different questions during the breaks.
The open air reports were not only on technical topics. Andrey Viktorov, co-founder of Fate Studio (Novosibirsk), spoke about the difficult life of small studios that independently develop games.
Alawar Stargaze CEO Natalya Ogloblina (Barnaul) talks about how gaming techniques can be used in project management.
Presentations of reports, shown and not shown on open air due to the bright sun, can be viewed here .
Fun part
In their free time, participants unloaded the brain, playing volleyball / badminton / frisbee or simply sunbathing.
Closer to the night of the first day, when all the reports were over, the whiskey party began, which continued with a drum'n'bass party. Those who didn’t want to dance left to watch the shader coding, draw pictures with freeze light or scattered around the bonfires of interest.
For example, by the evening of the first day I looked something like this ...
This year, as an experiment, we organized a new venue - a fun zone where you could plunge into virtual reality using Oculus Rift, play Battle City, Super Mario Bros or Contra on the NES emulator, chopped up with friends in Mortal Kombat 9 on the PlayStation 3.
By the way, MK fans took part in the mini-tournament on the second day, its winner received a cool open-air T-shirt as a prize.
The experiment with the fun zone was a success: it was almost always crowded and fun. We’ll come up with something else for the next open-air!
Reviews, photo and video reports
- Detailed Dipp review on Habrahabr (thanks for the kind words!).
- Comments of participants on twitter .
- Vkontakte event group (replenished with photo and video reports).
- Video on vimeo by Rumble.
- A bunch of photos in our flickr account .
- Photos of Sergey Larin on flickr .
- UPD Video of Nikita Kukanov on vimeo .
For the photos used in this post, thanks to Masha Anikina, Lesha Lavrenkov, Alexander Kachkin, Sergey Larin, Maria Kryvda, Sergey Gray, Daniil Tutubalin, Alexander Panichev.
UNIGINE Open Air 2014
We are already making grandiose plans for next year! The main idea is to make open-air cover the entire production cycle of games. To do this, we are going to organize several lecture venues and increase the number of reports that would be of interest to artists and QA engineers.
Plan your trip to Tomsk in July 2014!
