Today's been fun so far. Had a meeting with Kevin and Michalson in the morning to talk GDNet tech stuff, then a session on how the guys at Ritual are using D3D10 - omnidirectional shadow maps using cubemaps (or render targets, depending on which view you're using at the time) and vertex shader based skinning (to streamout for multipass) cited as specific examples. I was hoping for a little more, I think, but they said they were focusing on building a solid renderer instead of making lots of glitzy effects, which I guess is fair enough. I also finally met fellow DirectX MVP Andy Dunn ("The ZMan"), which is a meeting long overdue.

After that I headed down to the press lounge to work on my writeups, and got chatting to a nice young lady doing PR from Epic (also British... and when she started talking about how everyone in the industry seemed so young these days, I had to stop her and point out that I was only 19. I think I was lucky that she didn't slap me). She invited me along to a little private press inspection of the current state of affairs with UE3, and... well, I want to get my hands on a copy of that system. I had a word with the guy afterwards to ask about evaluation kits as contest prizes, but no such luck I'm afraid. I'll do a more extensive writeup of what they showed off in a bit, though I'm afraid there are no pictures.

I've got a free half hour, and then I'm heading off to go and listen to Mr Forsyth talk about shadow maps. And then in the evening, the Microsoft party [grin]

Unfortunately, my day has been tempered with a mild depression: I seem to have lost my schwag bag, schwag included. I think I left it on the bus on the way home yesterday but nobody's handed anything in. It also contained my notebook which is extremely irritating as I did have a reasonably large number of notes in there. [sad]