Stephanie Brenham
Stephanie is a 3D Team Lead Programmer at Ubisoft Toronto. She most recently worked on Far Cry 6, which was the winner of the 2021 Navgtr award for Outstanding Graphics. In her role, she is responsible for the visual fidelity and performance of the graphic systems in games. Prior to joining Ubisoft Toronto, Stephanie spent six years at Autodesk and brought programming leadership to Maya, an Academy Award-winning software application used in movies like The Matrix, Monster’s Inc., and Avatar to name a few.
Stephanie is passionate about the importance of high-quality code and helping programmers write it, as demonstrated at GDC 2022 in her talk on hybrid ray traced reflections. In 2021, she was named to the Game Awards Future Class, which recognizes the inspiring individuals who represent the bright, bold, and inclusive future of video games.
Guy Davidson
Guy is the Head of Engineering Practice at Creative Assembly, which he first joined in June 1999 as a humble programmer. He wrote his first game in 1980 on an Acorn Atom. He has worked on nearly all the entries in the Total War franchise and watched C++ mature from its first standardization, introducing the programming team to each new standard as it appeared.
Guy has been participating in the standardization of C++ since 2015. He has particular interest in mathematics and is currently attempting to add a matrix class for linear algebra to the standard library. He teaches Tai Chi and plays the piano, as well as engages in a spot of political activism through the Green Party of England and Wales and the #include
Workshop
Game development is a broad field deployed to a broad range of devices, such as phones, laptops, desktop computers with custom GPU hardware and consoles. One feature of development that unites all deployments is the requirement to fit all computation within the amount of time taken to display a frame. This drives the requirement for low latency programming. This course will cover much of the lower-level hardware information required to successfully develop low latency applications by showing you how to get to the metal of the machine and the GPU, a task well suited to C++ deployment. It will also cover topics such as optimisation and profiling, debugging and assembly, multithreading, file IO and some of the fundamentals of programming such as abstraction and generic programming.
Target Audience
The target audience is developers who are looking to boost their careers in game development or other arenas requiring low-latency considerations such as high frequency trading, audio development and so on. Attendees should be quite familiar with C++ although not necessarily an expert. They should be seeking to magnify and amplify their expertise in order to solve more interesting problems and land more interesting contracts.
Approach
The workshop is a mix of lectures and exercises. Attendees should bring a laptop with a Windows IDE such as Visual Studio Community Edition. We will be touching on modern features from C++20, so the latest version would be useful. Although we will be covering GPU activities, this does not mean that you need a special graphics part in your device. This part of the workshop will be appropriate for all hardware.
Contents
- The Platform
- Memory Management
- File IO
- Floating Point Arithmetic
- GPU Optimisation and Profiling
- Understanding assembly
- Multithreading
- Visual Output
- Linear Algebra and Geometry
- Generic Programming
- API Design
- Debugging
- Static Analysis
- Abstraction
- Event Driven Programming
Dates
The workshop takes place on the weekend prior to the start of the conference (July 16 & July 17). Find out more details about fees and about the schedule here.