This year is different for me, since I have meetings about my studio.  Normally, I am there representing EA or Sony, so I am approaching things from the publisher or platform side, instead of as a developer.  As it is, I have meetings every day, all day, which will make for a great E3!

However, one of the coolest moments of the trip had nothing to do with the new studio.

Late Tuesday night, we came back from a business dinner after all day meetings.  Our hotel had a pub which was open all night for people who were staying there and my co-studio head and I wanted a final pint before crashing for the night.  As we were talking about the day’s events, two young men walked in (we had been the only people in the pub until then).  After chatting with them for a little bit, we reached the part of the conversation when you ask why someone is traveling…turns out that one of them is an artist from South Africa named Nicholas Hlobo.  He has an exhibition opening at the Tate Modern and was installing his sculpture.  After chatting for a bit, he invited us to see his work while he was setting it up on Saturday (the exhibition opened on Monday).

On Saturday afternoon, we stopped by the Tate and visited with Nicholas.  Amazing art and an amazing artist.  It was truly fascinating to listen to him discuss his work and the thoughts behind it.  There are so many different threads in his background that it makes the work come alive.  It is also wonderful that even without all of the explanation from Nicholas, the sculpture is still incredibly interesting and compelling.

If you are in London before March 1, 2009, I highly recommend stopping by.

My work tends to be around making the SPUs easier for developers to use.  Software caching (like libswcache) are ways to deal with non-uniform memory systems and making the architectural complexities more transparent to the end programmer.  I have a lot of experience with C++, so I have been looking at how templates and auto_ptr’s can help.  Libraries like these do not give you the peak performance, but it makes it much easier for the general gameplay programmers to work on the SPUs.  I have found that game development is a constant trade off between easy to use architectures which any generalist programmer can code for and extremely high performance architectures which require a specialist.

I have noticed an interesting way that I play games these days.  Keep in mind, I have children and interests outside of the games industry.

On my home consoles (which include a PS3, XBox 360, and Wii), I tend to play games which are pick up and play, usually with no story.  This includes Boom Blox, The Last Guy, Eden, and Braid.  Basically, all games which I can play for 15-30 minutes and then turn off the console.  Also, I don’t have to worry about remembering some involved story to get back into the game.

On my portables, I am playing the long, involved story games.  I just finished Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII and it looks like I’m going to get back to The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass soon.

The interesting thing to me is this is completely backwards to how people are “supposed” to play games.  My pickup games are on my home system with the big plasma TV, while the long session games are on my portable systems.  It reflects my life these days…I have very little time at home to play games, but when I travel, I’m trapped on an airplane for ten hours at a time.

Short form:

• 18 dives
• 6 days
• 1 shark dive
• 1 dolphin dive
• 2 night dives
• nitrox certification

While the diving was not as good as Curacao, it was a great vacation and a break from the game industry. I had no cell nor email access all week.

We stayed at Anthony’s Key Resort, which is a really nice location. My girls spent the week at Kids Sea Camp, which means that the adults could dive guilt free. The coral reef was not the best that I have seen…it was often very bleached out. Also, there was not as much sea life as I would have hoped. But of course, 85 degree water and 80 foot viz is still a great vacation.

Bliss.

After wandering around for a while, I went to get breakfast. The best breakfast around the fish market?  Sushi!  At 7am, I was eating maguro, saba, uni, and other wonderful raw food.  Got to love Tokyo!

More later…

We always stay at the New Otani Hotel. It is extremely close to the SCEI offices and I have a nice corner room with a view this time.