In this 2015 GDC talk, Ubisoft Montreal's Remi Quenin discusses game-changing improvements applied to the programming pipeline of Far Cry 4 that resulted in day-to-day workflow improvements for the entire production.
With five platforms to support and twice as much content as Far Cry 3, the sequel presented a big challenge for pipeline efficiency.
Quenin explains how the team built a network cache for "binarized" assets on commodity PCs, outperforming million-dollar commercial hardware and provides examples of how the team accelerated package distribution to be instantaneous for hundreds of concurrent users.
He also shows the tools the team built to allow patching a running instance of Far Cry 4 with locally modified assets for rapid content iteration.
It was an insightful talk that's still worth watching, so developers shouldn't miss the opportunity to do so now that it's freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!
About the GDC Vault
In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.
Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.
Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.