Project Experience - Virtuos Games

Developing; Texture Upscale Pipeline CODA (UE4) Co-development for Xbox One/Xbox Series, PS4/PS5, Nintendo Switch (2020-2022) Unannounced Xbox/PS4 game (Proprietary Engine) Remaster (Xbox One, PS4) 2018-2019 Evaluating; Popcorn FX middleware 2018 L.A. Noire (Xbox 360 to Nintendo Switch) 2016-2017 Assassin’s Creed The Ezio Collection (PS4, XBox One) 2016-2016 Heavy Rain (PS3 to PS4 port, proprietary engine and tools) 2015-2016 Batman: Return to Arkham (PS4, Xbox One, PC, Unreal Engine 4) 2014-2016 Fable Anniversary (360, Unreal Engine 3) 2012-2013 MonsterJam: Path of Destruction (PS3, 360, Wii, PSP, NDS) 2010-2011 Motorstorm: Arctic Edge (PS2) 2009-2010 PMRII (PS2, NDS) 2008 - 2009 SpeedRacer (NDS) 2007 - 2008 Asphalt 2 (NDS) 2006-2007 StreetRiders (PSP) 2005-2006

Projects

Texture Upscale Pipeline

Duration: ~4 months Size: 2 Engineers Platform; Windows PC

Virtuos Games

Technologies:

• C/C++, C#
• OpenSource upscalers:
  • ESRGAN (https://github.com/xinntao/Real-ESRGAN)
  • Waifu2x (https://github.com/nihui/waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan)
• Many image manipulation CLI tools written in C/C++:
  • tiling enlarge/shrink
  • alpha split/merge
  • smart blend
  • color correction
  • normal decode/renormalize
• Multi-Threaded
• Structured Logging
• Fully configurable upscale pipelines
• Custom JSON deserialization
• Visual Studio 2022

L.A. Noire (Xbox 360 to Nintendo Switch) (2015-2016)

Duration: ~11 months Size: 10-15 Engineers Title: Technical Director; working with 2 Lead Engineers, 6 Senior and 6 Junior Engineers Platform: A PS3/Xbox-360 game porting to Nintendo Switch

Virtuos Games

Technologies:

• Umbra
• FMOD
• Xbox 360 / PS3 SDK
• Nintendo Switch SDK
• ARM NEON for optimizing Math (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Advanced_SIMD_(NEON))
• Visual Studio 2015
• Incredibuild
• FramePro and MemPro

Tasks:

• Wrote runtime component to save profile and memory allocation events with stack-trace and scope, frame number and timing information from multiple threads
• Wrote a tool to convert the profile information to a format that could be read by FramePro
• Wrote a GPU memory allocator based on best-fit algorithm
• Integrated UMBRA into the data building pipeline and runtime
• Part of the realtime MPG streams where converted to use Bink to increase CPU performance
• Refactored a lot of global scope object instances to ‘create on initialization’
• Made the decision and changes to have all streaming data uncompressed to increase CPU performance
• Assisted Senior Engineer to analyze/profile file-IO to write an optimum FileReader
• Assisted Senior Engineer to port old FMOD-Ex to FMOD Studio for Nintendo Switch

Assassin’s Creed The Ezio Collection (PS4, XBox One)

A port to the Playstation 4 and Xbox One

Virtuos Games

• Managing a team of 10+ engineers
• Extending the data building tools to support Xbox One Porting the runtime to Xbox One
• GPU Profiling and optimizations
• Constant Buffer usage optimization

Heavy Rain (PS3 to PS4 port, proprietary engine and tools)

Porting Heavy Rain PS3 to PS4

Virtuos Games

• Replaced custom memory allocator with DLMalloc and refactored the whole code-base to use a standard memory allocation API. This allowed us to swap from a final allocator to a debug allocator very easily during development.
• Wrote the PS4 render engine and made many render passes multi- threaded
• Working with Artists and Graphics Engineer to integrate ‘cubemap based environment lighting’
• Integrated Bink to provide us with movie frames in an asynchronous manner
• Wrote a lock-less JOB system used for multi-threading animation and render-passes
• Did a lot of CPU optimizations to get the game at 30+ FPS

Batman: Return to Arkham (PS4, Xbox One, PC, Unreal Engine 4)

A challenging port by merging engines, UE3 and UE4 and moving to a PBR pipeline

Virtuos Games

• Setup many details on how to merge UE3 core engine into UE4
• Extended Mercurial (Hg) to be able to handle large amount of binary data
• Designed an Artist PBR workflow to automate and ease the validation of PBR assets

Fable Anniversary (XBox 360, Unreal Engine 3)

A port of an XBox game to Xbox 360 using Unreal Engine 3 merged with the old game engine

Virtuos Games

• UE3
• WWise
• Merging UE3 and proprietary game engine
• Designed the interface layer between proprietary engine and UE3
• UE3 package analysis and re-distribution of objects to match story line
• FaceFX
• Wrote a batch convertor for Audio/Voice to Face FX animation for all supported languages
• Localization compression
• Scaleform

Generator Rex: Agent of Providence (PS3, 360, Wii)

Full development of Generator Rex using a custom engine and tools

Virtuos Games

• PhysX
• Visual Scripting
• Cross platform custom engine Custom Editor
• Managing a team of 25 engineers FMOD

MonsterJam: Path of Destruction (PS3, 360, Wii)

Full development writing a custom cross platform engine and tools

Virtuos Games

• Managing a team of 20+ engineers
• Integrated Bullet Physics
• Terrain collision was done in a custom ‘grid’ manner to speed up raycasts
• Full Particle System and Editor
• WII render engine and material system

Motorstorm: Arctic Edge (PS2)

Co-development, responsible for the PS2 version of the game

Virtuos Games

• VU0/VU1 skinning job
• Adjust data-building pipeline to also build PS2 graphic data PS2 render-engine
• Did a lot of implementation and refactoring of the PS2 render engine
• Automated performance testing
• CI/CD using Team City
• Perforce

Pimp My Ride: Street Racing (PS2, NDS)

Full development of a Pimp My Ride game for PS2 as well as Nintendo DS

Virtuos Games

• Re-used and extended the C# based data description and build pipeline.
• Support for the data-pipeline to be incremental, caching converted assets and using a dependency tree
• Big-file re-ordering based on file-order-access logged by the game
• Designed and assisted with the implementation of a UI authoring pipeline using Microsoft Blend

SpeedRacer (NDS)

Full development, game engine, AI, Tools, UI framework and networking

Virtuos Games

• Designed and Implemented the (Render) Engine to run at 60 FPS
• Designed the technical aspects of the 3D track structure and how cars would drive/navigate
• Written a full C# based data description and build pipeline
• Worked with VFX artist to make all of the VFX just scaling effects instead of actual particle simulation
• Big-file and index-file generation

Asphalt 2 for Nintendo DS

Porting of Asphalt 2 (N-Gage) to Nintendo DS (2006-2007)

Virtuos Games

• Ported Render Engine to Nintendo DS
• Optimized (the hell) out of the UI rendering to get 30 FPS Integrated distance based fade-in/fade-out

Street Riders PSP

Porting of Street Riders PS2 to PSP (2005-2006)

Virtuos Games

• CodeWarrior, C/C++
• CI/CD, CruiseControl
• Wrote the complete Render Engine for PSP
• Extended data-building tools to write out PSP graphic and texture formats
• Optimized the skinned mesh parts (bone constraint) using minimum spanning trees
• Optimizations, C/C++