INTEL GROWING VISUAL COMPUTING DEVELOPER COMMUNITY
Intel’s Visual Computing Developer Community has a newly redesigned Web site that the company is recommending as a really helpful destination for game builders seeking advice or anxious to share their expertise.DAM took a few minutes to chat about the growing community with Joel De Guzman, marketing manager at Intel Software Network (ISN) in Sacramento, CA, and with Steve Pitzel, Visual Computing community manager at ISN in Hillsboro, OR.
DAM: I’m sure there are readers of the DAM e-newsletter who have never heard of the Intel Visual Computing Developer Community let alone know what it can do for them …
Steve Pitzel: Essentially it’s a place where game developers and anyone involved in developing software related to visual computing for the PC -- not consoles -- can come and discuss issues and get support. We’re offering a community -- at intel.com/software/graphics -- for folks to get together to find out what sort of technology is available on the Intel platform and to take advantage of it. Also, hopefully, it’s a feedback mechanism for them to get back to us and tell us what is and isn’t working … and to help us design the next platform for them. It’s pretty easy to navigate around the site, to look at the articles, the videos, and the white papers, and also to check out the blogs.
DAM: Is this something that’s brand new?
Pitzel: We actually started the graphics community back in October. We’re broadening it out now to more of a visual computing community because we’ve seen that we really need to get people involved in using the entire platform to build their games. So now we’re not just talking about wedding the graphics to the display but also focusing on such topics as sound modeling, physical modeling, AI, and anything that takes a high computing ability.
DAM: How large is the community as we speak?
Joel DeGuzman: I’m don’t have the exact numbers now but it’s at least a couple of thousand visitors on a weekly basis. It’s only been around for seven or eight months, but it is definitely a growing community.
DAM: So what this project does for you is that it promotes the Intel platform. What does it do for game developers?
Pitzel: We want to get people who are out there developing games to make sure they’re using …
… the software to take advantage of our technology to its full potential. There is a lot of technology on Intel platforms that developers might not know about. If they did, and they optimized for it, they could make their games perform even better. We want everyone to know about that.
DeGuzman: We can bring the developers and ISVs in, show them how to make their games run better and, for some, also help them market their game titles. We have hardware that essentially gives developers several computing cores to work with. If they build a game to take advantage of those cores, then they’ll get better physics, better AI, and better gameplay overall because their code can take advantage of parallel processing. This is information the developers might know but aren’t sure how to apply, and we’re set up to give it to them.
Our site also has discussion forums where developers can ask their questions from their peers and Intel engineers to get support. For example, we have one on integrated graphics software development where developers can communicate with apps and driver engineers to learn how to get code to run on Intel Graphics. And everything we’re offering is completely free.
DAM: Can you give me an example of where Intel and game developers have worked together …
DeGuzman: We have quite a few success stories on our site. For example, we worked with Flagship Studios on Hellgate London to make sure that the game was threaded really well to work on our processors and also to work with our integrated graphics for great frame rates and fine levels of detail. This really expands the market for game developers as they can now market their game to a large amount of mainstream platforms. We’re trying to bring developers into our community to give their testimonials, showcase their demos, and to allow their peers to learn from them. It’s a great way to showcase and learn from the work of some of the top developers worldwide.
We also have a partner program where we’re working with hundreds of the midsized and indie developers worldwide where they can take advantage of our tools, our white papers, and so on. Once their applications are completed, we can then certify them to verify that they meet our optimization requirements. And then some of the selected, most promising applications in our partner program get to appear in our developer events and in success stories that we put online in our community. This helps them market their applications to both end customers as well as to potential publishers.
Pitzel: We also have contests going on -- game demo contests and game modding contests -- where programmers can showcase what they can do. The contests, and also the blogs and forums, gives the developer a platform to get their name out there as an expert in their particular field and gives them a chance to promote themselves to a broad audience. It’s great, free publicity for them.
DeGuzman: Yeah, the contest has been running since February and anyone who wants to enter should move fast since the submission period ends July 28. We’ll be announcing the winners at the GDC Austin conference in September.
DAM: What would you say to game developers who might want to become part of your community? How do they go about that?
Pitzel: It’s simple. Go to our Web sites, join in on the technical forums, read the blogs where we have people writing about such topics as CPU/GPU discussions, what makes a game a good game, and so on. If you’re having problems coding one thing or another or if you’re getting errors or if you have a really good method for doing something, you’re free to post any of that up on one of the forums and you’re sure to get feedback.
We just redesigned and relaunched the site a few weeks ago and it’s attracting lots of people.
DAM: Is there anything else that the community offers that we haven’t discussed?
Pitzel: I should mention that we’re always looking for good content. If people are particularly good at writing about graphics or game development, perhaps on such topics as ray tracing, they ought to contact us. We often hire technical writers! So that’s another possibility for people who want to be noticed; probably not a bad thing to have on a resume. Anyone who is interested should send a note to the support forum and someone will get back to them.
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