The 2007 Online Game Development Conference is now in full swing, as the agenda for the conference happening this May is now up, live on the official OGDC website. After the announcement of Speaker Force 8...err...the first eight confirmed speakers for the Online Game Development Conference, an official press release also previewed a few more speakers of the 80 speakers to attend the event:

• Herb Sutter - Software Architect, Microsoft
• Mike Goslin - Vice President, Virtual Reality Studio, Disney Online
• Diana Li - Vice President, Shanda
• Charles Manning - President/CEO, PLAYXPERT
• Robert Mitchell - Senior Programmer, Sony Online Entertainment
• Tony Park - Vice President, The9
• Michael Goodman - Director, Digital Entertainment, Yankee Group
• Christian Force - Director of Engineering, +7 Systems

Organized by Evergreen Events, the conference will be delivering "world-class content" to "everyone in the business of making online games." The work and preparation behind the conference soon brought forward a list of sessions and panels including, but not limited to:

• Automating Online Game Balance
• Xbox LIVE on Windows and 360: Are Your Games Dead or LIVE?
• The Chinese Game Market: Latest Developments and Trends
• Casual Games Go Global
• Dirty Secrets of Episodic Video Games
• User Research for Online Game Development
• Adapting your Online Games to the Mobile Platform
• Designing worlds - future directions of tools and technology in MMOs

Peter Freese, chairman of the OGDC, is proud to have finalized the conference's agenda, stating, "It's been a long and involved road to reach this point, but I am very proud of what we've accomplished to assemble this truly impressive slate of speakers and sessions." The 2007 OGDC will start on May 10, 2007 at the Fairmont Olympic, Seattle and will go on for two days. Click on the "Read" link below to hop over to the Agenda page.

There's GDC and there's OGDC, and you should not interchange the two. You're more familiar with the first one - it's Game Developers Conference and this year's event has just been recently concluded. The other one, with the "O" factor, is Online Game Development Conference and is being hosted by Evergreen Events.

Anyway, this is not actually the first time we've reported on this but reckoned that it was necessary to reiterate the difference. This year's OGDC will occur on May 10 and 11 in Seattle and will be focusing on how to marry the creative and technical aspects of making an online video game.

We've also reported about this year's speakers but the keynote speech, the talk of the talk if you will, will be conducted by Herb Sutter. He is a currently a software architect for Microsoft but gained prominence because of the books he wrote on high profile programming language C++.

Sutter is more than happy to be invited. "To be involved in a developer-centric event such as OGDC is a pleasure and an honor for me. In my mind, OGDC represents the ideals of what the development community has to offer the game industry." Likewise, OGDC Conference Chair Peter Freese is quite excited,

To have Herb Sutter on board as a keynote is incredible, both to me as a programmer and as someone involved in a conference like OGDC. His past experience and forward-thinking vision is just about unmatched in the programming field.