The courses (Graduate Diploma in Games Development, and Diploma in Interactive Gaming) have both been designed with significant industry feedback, as well as in harmony with the IGDA Framework… They’ve gone on record, stating that ‘general purpose programmers’ are not attractive, and they prefer to see students with in-depth knowledge of particular areas (lighting, shading, kinematics, etc.)… I am still partially divided as to what is the best option for students? Specific, traditional SE at undergrad (4 years) and specialise at post grad (2 years+) or short-term specialised courses (2-3 years).
I guess a fair compromise would be for traditional SE degrees to include more real-time programming, or games as assignment (not blackjack or tetris!), and see if the Game Theory could be ‘smuggled’ (for lack of a better word) in that way.
Industry needs tend to be the driving force, however, if the games industry was to go “belly up” (however unlikely that is) 10,000 HLSL programmers may find it hard to gain employment, in traditional software engineering roles.
There is usually a fair bit of discussion on this topic at the GDC. Has anyone found any relevant material?[/quote:bc2c8486e3]nothing springs to mind, but I’m sure a trawl of the presentations for the last 2/3 years may yield something. Having said that, I have the audio and PPT prezzies for GDC 2002 – 2004 and don;t remember coming across anything
The Devlop conference in Brightin in July this year has a session devoted to his topic however