Tabula Rasa : Illumination - Rusty

Hometown
Carthage, TX

Favorite games
Lemmings, 7 th Guest, Monkey Island 3, Soul Caliber, Mario Kart 64

Favorite books
Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, Kinsey Milhone series by Sue Grafton, 10 Little Indians by Agatha Christie, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, lots more.

Favorite movies
Back to the Future, Pulp Fiction, American Beauty, Clue

Previous projects
Shipped: Shadowbane, ASB, QBC, Vigilance

Others: Magelords, 100 Bullets

Describe your job
Ensuring the game client has the graphics features required by the artists and designers so that it can look as good as possible. And at the same time, optimize and debug the graphics pipeline making it as fast and stable as possible. My job relies on the hard work of many others; I'm just one piece of a large puzzle.

How did you get into the industry?
In college a friend of a friend decided to start a game company and I was brought on board to be the lead programmer. Our little company didn't get anywhere, but my work did get me an offer at a company called Any Channel. So upon graduation, I started my first job in the industry working on a software rendering engine that was a direct competitor with the original Quake engine.

What do you like most about your job?
The challenge. Game programming in general encompasses many fields, and more and more often game software requires solid internal architecture and top engineers working on the code base to succeed. Graphics programming is just one piece to this puzzle, but I've always liked graphics more than any other area. The field is constantly innovating and moving ahead, so there is always more to learn to stay competitive. Plus it is just very cool to be able to see the fruits of your labor in real-time.

Who are some of your role models or heroes and why?
John Carmack for dropping my jaw in high school when I first saw Wolfenstein 3D, and I wondered, "How is he doing that in real-time?" He also should get credited for being a catalyst in the process of getting $100 consumer graphics cards on the market that could blow away the $10,000+ SGI boxes of just a couple years prior to that. Oh, and I thank Mr. Carmack for backing OpenGL.*

And, of course, I have to add Tim Sweeney, for showing the game business that C++ and solid software engineering applies to real-time games as much as to word processors.

*If I may add a personal off-topic note here. If any OpenGL ARB member reads this, I want you to know that myself and every other GL programmer I know were disappointed you guys didn't keep 3DLab's original GL 2.0 spec - we all loved it.

What evolutionary or revolutionary changes would you like to see in games?
From a graphics perspective, I would like to continue to see the evolution towards photorealistic rendering in real-time. Of course, photorealism would be an artistic choice, and some games would probably be better without it (just like some games now would be better in 2D instead of 3D).

What advice would you give to someone with aspirations to do what you do?
Program. Write lots of code and learn from other resources (books, people, internet). Books I'd recommend are of course the Scott Meyer's books (Effective C++, More Effective C++, and I haven't read it but I'd bet his STL book is good too), Design Patterns by Gamma, Helm, and others. For advanced C++ programmers I'd recommend Modern C++ Design by Alexandrescu.

Graphics books are harder since the field is constantly moving, but I have found Real-Time Rendering by Akenine-Moller and Haines to be good. (Shameless plug: the first edition used screenshots from the AnyWorld software engine I worked on years ago.) The Bible of graphics programming (the material is dated, but that doesn't make it incorrect or less valuable) is of course Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley and van Dam.

Posted by ramana at 2005-12-07 23:11:31

i like this