Microsoft Game Stack @ GDC 2019

If you haven’t seen Azure PlayFab recently, now’s the time. The PlayFab team has been hard at work adding new tools and services to what’s already one of the most powerful platforms in the game industry for operating live games.

Get a first look into the PlayFab roadmap with services like team-based matchmaking, hosted C# CloudScript, data warehousing, multiplayer server orchestration, and some that are so exciting we can’t even share them yet.

Improving your LiveOps stack has never been so easy.

Project Acoustics does for audio design, what baked physically-based lighting techniques did for graphics, using the power of Azure. Do you want to spend your time designing sounds instead of faking the physics of sound wave propagation? Do you find tuning complex spatial sound environments costly, time consuming, and not feasible to achieve the results you want?

Project Acoustics solves these problems and saves you time. Project Acoustics is a codeless wave physics-based system that – while maintaining designer control and freedom - calculates acoustic parameters for wave propagation effects like portalling, reverb, occlusion and obstruction based on the materials and geometry of your virtual world. Design your acoustics from that detailed starting point without placing reverb volumes or casting rays. Apply the results in microseconds at runtime. Learn how to use this system to improve acoustic quality and save time today!

Variable Rate Shading is a new DirectX12 API giving developers fine-grained control over shading frequency, enabling significant frame time savings on modern GPUs.  This talk presents a deep dive on VRS and the algorithms used to drive shading rate. Included are integration details, tips and optimisations. Learn how to take VRS to the next level, by exploiting the VRS signal with a new deferred lighting technique, Sparse Lighting.

Yes, you can play your Xbox games on mobile!

Project xCloud is enabling Console Native games to stream through our Azure-hosted game servers and streaming clients.  Any Console Native game currently shipping in the Microsoft Store on Xbox will be capable of streaming to a mobile device.  Project xCloud is an open platform with a customizable Client UX where streaming starts with Xbox game developers not having to modify a single line of existing game code.

This talk - brought to you by the Xbox backwards compatibility team – will go deeper into how Cloud Aware games built with the Project xCloud SDK will help games adapt for mobile through the same graphics and input paradigms as Console Native development.  You will also learn about the new microservices layer that allow customization such as glass and touch input when a game controller is not available, all outside of the game.

Xbox has added new options to ensure that accessible technology – software and hardware interfaces that help people adapt to their digital world – can go with them wherever they create, work, and play.

This talk focuses on in-game communication. Chat can dramatically enhance player experience in multiplayer and social encounters. Pick up Microsoft’s tips and suggestions for an accessible in-game chat user experience. Get introduced to new PlayFab communication technology that delivers voice chat with speech-to-text transcription and text to speech to make it easier for gamers with disabilities to play online. Come experience this new tech live in the Microsoft Game Stack booth (GDC Expo Hall).

Innovation with machine learning in gaming creates a demand for real-time inferencing, capable of integrating well with high performance applications. Do you have a machine learning model?  Do you need machine learning for your rendering workloads, tooling, game engine or content pipeline?

This 401-level session will cover DirectML, a fast and powerful DirectX library that meets game developers’ needs by providing hardware-accelerated operators to take your neural networks from research to production. For this demo we will show how to achieve super-resolution with a DirectML engine plug-in and bring our collaborators on stage to walk through examples of using DirectML to power their machine learning workloads.

LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice - whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.

Tales and Tracks - The art of environmental story telling at 120 miles per hour - An insight into designing narrative inside the Forza Motorsport universe.

Live events are the cornerstone of an effective LiveOps strategy. Join this talk to learn the ingredients of a successful event, how to plan an overall live event strategy, and how to build and operate live events in your game.

Moving your game’s logic to the cloud just got much easier with PlayFab’s new Cloud Script C# support and VSCode integration. Breakpoints! Debugging! Improved github integration! If you’ve spent any time working with PlayFab’s current cloud script solution, then this talk will move you to tears.

Unity is a powerful real-time engine, used to create half of the world’s games. Our flexible real-time tools offer incredible possibilities for game developers. In this session you will learn how to unleash the power of Unity on Xbox One, learn about the latest features built over the past year and how to successfully bring your creative vision to Microsoft’s powerful console for millions of players to enjoy.

Projects acoustics does for audio design what baked physically-based lighting did for graphics, using Azure cloud power. Do you want to spend your time designing sounds instead of faking the physics of sound wave propagation? Do you find tuning complex spatial sound environments costly, time consuming, and unfeasible to achieve the results you want?

Project Acoustics solves these problems and saves you time. Project Acoustics is a codeless wave physics-based system that - while maintaining designer control and freedom - calculates acoustic parameters for wave propagation effects like portalling, reverb, occlusion and obstruction based on the materials and geometry of your virtual world. Design your acoustics from that detailed starting point without placing reverb volumes or casting rays. Apply the results in microseconds at runtime. Learn how to use this system to improve acoustic quality and save time today!

PlayFab supports all major game engines, but Unity is the most popular with more than 80% of the games on PlayFab built in Unity. Attend this talk to learn how easy it is to integrate PlayFab’s powerful suite of backend tools and serviced into your own Unity-powered game.

Achieving a great gaming experience can be difficult without the proper tools. Join us to learn more about the tools available by Intel and our partnership with Microsoft to help you scale your game's performance efficiently on a wide range of hardware and reach a larger audience.

This quick demo can save you thousands of wasted hours! Join us for a live demo showing how IncrediBuild seamlessly translate hundreds of cores in Azure into unparalleled game development speed. We’ll demo x7 performance boost of code builds, physics engines workloads, rendering, data processing and other game dev aspects. If you don’t want to miss your deadline, don’t miss this demo.

With LiveOps, design is no longer a one-time thing, but a continuous process. Learn how common tools like Excel can be paired with PlayFab to plan and manage your game’s economy, balance, scripts, content, social features, and events - and integrate design smoothly into your ongoing workflow.

LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice - whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.

LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice - whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.

User Generated Content (and the associated marketplace) has been one of the most successful new features rolled out in Minecraft in the last two years, fostering an even stronger sense of community and engagement among Minecraft’s tens of millions of players. And now thanks to this new service coming soon to PlayFab, you too can add the same UGC features to your own game! Attend this talk for a deep dive into how it works, and be among the first to try out this new service.

Visual Studio App Center offers a powerful set of services to build, test, and distribute your game across a range of devices. And now, with PlayFab integration, you can make crash detection and customer follow-up part of your overall LiveOps strategy. Come see App Center in action, and how these two powerful tools can work together.

Projects acoustics does for audio design what baked physically-based lighting did for graphics, using Azure cloud power. Do you want to spend your time designing sounds instead of faking the physics of sound wave propagation? Do you find tuning complex spatial sound environments costly, time consuming, and unfeasible to achieve the results you want?

Project Acoustics solves these problems and saves you time. Project Acoustics is a codeless wave physics-based system that - while maintaining designer control and freedom - calculates acoustic parameters for wave propagation effects like portalling, reverb, occlusion and obstruction based on the materials and geometry of your virtual world. Design your acoustics from that detailed starting point without placing reverb volumes or casting rays. Apply the results in microseconds at runtime. Learn how to use this system to improve acoustic quality and save time today!

How did we develop a game prototype about Back to the Future with interesting time travel mechanics? Not only does our game take place in three separate time periods, but our Microsoft Mixer integration was designed as an addition for the ultimate dynamic experience. Learn how our contest entry to the Universal GameDev Challenge was shaped with fans of Marty’s adventures in mind from concept to final prototype.

LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice - whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.

Learn why PlayFab is the best backend platform to unlock the power of LiveOps in your Facebook Instant Game. In this live demo, see how to easily integrate PlayFab into your game, then how to leverage Azure and PlayFab together to build a Messenger Platform Bot to further engage your players and boost retention.

LiveOps is changing the game industry, and for good reasons. Learn about this powerful new approach to game development, and how PlayFab can help your studio improve its LiveOps practice - whether you’re adapting for the first time, or a seasoned practitioner.