2013 is where game industry veterans are going to be in a few short weeks. Besides the networking possibilities this event is a wonderful opportunity for developers to expand their knowledge as well.

The best of the best are going to speak about how they’ve built their successful project, what technology and approaches they used to do so. New GDC talks are added daily and it could be overwhelming for some of you to choose which you would like to attend. This is why we’ve decided to pick up and share 7 talks we believe programmers should consider going to.

Here are the sessions that our team is planning to attend and we recommend you see too:

Stoyan Nikolov, Software Architect at Coherent Labs

Static Lighting Tricks in Halo 4

Speaker: Mike Boulton, Principal Engineer, 343 Industries
Date: March 27
Time: 11:35AM – 12:00PM
Location: Room 307, South Hall

Halo 4 is one of the best looking games ever so an insight into the lighting techniques used is always very interesting. Especially GPU acceleration of static light calculations is a fascinating topic with many added aspects.

Job Graph: Task Graphing In Mortal Kombat

Speaker: Gavin Freyberg, Director of Engineering, NetherRealm Studios
Date: March 28
Time: 11:30AM – 12:30PM
Location: Room 2018, West Hall

In modern multiprocessor programming environments a good architecture is extremely important in order to gain the maximum performance from the hardware. As our product is also heavily multithreaded I look forward to gather insight about the approach taken by other companies.

Low-Level Thinking in High-Level Shading Languages

Speaker: Emil Persson, Head of Research, Avalanche Studios
Date: March 28
Time: 4:00PM – 5:00PM
Location: Room 2004, West Hall

All of Emil Persson’s talks and articles are gems. This particular one touches a topic very interesting to me as I’ve always liked the low-level optimization work usually required in graphics programming.

Next Generation Character Rendering

Speaker: Jorge Jimenez, Researcher, Activision Blizzard
Date: March 27
Time:  3:30PM – 4:30PM
Location: Room 304, South Hall

The many topics covered in this talk (SSS, eye shading, AA etc.) geared towards character rendering will give a very good overview of the current state of this particular field in games rendering. Jorge Jimenez as presenter is a guarantee that we’ll see interesting and powerful algorithms.

Dimitar Trendafilov, Technical Director at Coherent Labs

Horizon and Beyond: A Look into Tomb Raider’s Tools

Speaker: Jason Yao, Senior Software Engineer, Crystal Dynamics
Date: March 27
Time: 2:00PM – 3:00PM
Location: Room 3001, West Hall

Game editing tools define the workflow, dictate the tempo of the development process and make game development entertaining. I am especially interested in this C++ and WPF mix as I have been working on similar project in the past.

Under the Hood of Blizzard’s Internal Build System

Speaker: Blaine Whittle, Senior Software Engineer II, Team 1, Blizzard Entertainment
Date: March 27
Time: 3:30PM – 4:30PM
Location: Room 303, South Hall

Having added 30 minutes build time for a game like StarCraft II is more than enough
to make this a “must see” presentation. I hope to get ideas on how to at least cut down our build time in half.

Network Serialization and Routing in World of Warcraft

Speaker: Joe Rumsey  |  Principal Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment
Date: March 28
Time: 11:30AM – 12:30PM
Location: Room 2004, West Hall

I have asked myself many times about how WoW networking works.I hope I’ll find the answers here. Code generation for serialization is also a personal favourite of mine.

There are many other GDC talks we are looking forward to as well. It seems like this year HTML5 games and apps development is going to be well covered as a topic as it’s becoming more trendy among indie developers. Game streaming is something else we’re also interested in as it’s going to be available as a feature in the upcoming PS4. In other words this means streaming games and playing them across a network of devices – smartphones, tablets, etc.

One more thing. If you’re going to the Game Developers Conference this year, let us know. We’d love to meet developers interested in game user interface programming and we will be glad to chat and share our vision with you. Also you will have the chance to check out live the possibilities of Coherent UI and how it could help improve your game development workflow. You might book a meeting straight from the GDC’s website or visit us directly at our booth #241.

What are the talks you will not miss and why? We will be happy to hear from you which ones would you recommend.