Swarm & Procedural Content

This is a series of talks I gave at a Procedural Content workshop at EA Redwood Shores, mostly covering Swarm, the swiss-army-knife visual effects system I wrote that has featured in all the games I've worked on. In addition to general visual effect usage, it's proven a very useful prototyping tool, which has led to it being abused in various interesting ways well beyond its original design remit. 

In particular it was responsible for 70% of the original GDC 2005 Spore demo. (Thereby unfortunately fooling a lot of people into thinking the game had already been developed.)

• Swarm Overview

• Swarm Procedural Content

• Procedural LOD (older Sims 2 stuff)

As a bonus(?), here's the first talk I ever gave on the effects system that evolved into Swarm:

• The Timbuktu Effects System

Timbuktu was the code name for SimCity 4. Now you know.