Peter J. B. Lewis' Braindump

The … website … is … BACK!

I’m not going to make a big fuss over the fact that it has been, then not been, and has been again. A blog was all very well while I was at University, but after becoming employed by Geomerics it became hard. Even if I’d had the time, most of what I’d want to post about would be covered by the NDA.

However, in early August I began to look for new employment. Geomerics are a fantastic bunch, but my girlfriend and I decided it was time to move on to new things. Not necessarily better things, but just different things. Game things. So here I am now, sitting in the large and friendly office of Lionhead.

I swore this site wouldn’t devolve into a normal ‘blog’ and to keep this strictly development related instead of shouting about my personal news ad nauseum. So, in this post, I’ll be doing a kind of “Geomerics Retrospective”. I’m not freed from the shackles of NDAs of course, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts about working in middleware.

I’ve already done so, “IRL”. Earlier this year I did two lectures at Teesside University about radiosity and working in middleware. The former was a total disaster for me personally (though I’ve been assured it went “OK”): half of the equipment didn’t work, leaving me 15 minutes short and I had to rush. I’m terrified that I didn’t get my point across at all. The latter lecture, however, went very well and I only cringed three or four times when I watched the recording.

I’ve noticed that the attitude at Geomerics is almost identical to a traditional games company. While it was founded by boffins from the University of Cambridge (notably Chris Doran, who remains on as the COO), the development is run by games developers: Jules Davis, former CTO of Kuju; Gary Lewis, former COO of Take-Two; Rob Precious, previously of Criterion; and the development team are from a mix of Lionhead, EA, Sony… Throw in a few research types (PhDs from various Universities), QA and administration staff and you have everyone.

However, one key difference was the entire concept of scheduling and deadlines. This was usually dependent on negotiations with your client, rather than being determined by public holidays and top selling seasons. There were exceptions, of course, but usually we were able to discuss with clients when they needed Feature X or Bug Y fixed, and generally they were flexible about it. It made for a very relaxed style of work, which was a good thing.

Of course, sometimes there were hard deadlines. A good example stems from a company that Geomerics are working with very closely at the moment on an unannounced title. That title was in the conceptual phase when we approached them, and therefore they were in the advantageous position of being able to “grow” their game up with Enlighten. In order for this to be approved, though, a demo would need to be made for the higher-ups. They couldn’t wait for us, so if we hadn’t have hit this deadline, Enlighten would have been dropped. Luckily, we did, and so I hope to see it on the shelves in the next few years.

As Geomerics is involved with so many different companies across the world, it was great to get a sense of the rest of the industry. Even though I’ve never worked at an actual games studio until now, I think I gained a much more macroscopic view of the industry than if I’d have started as a lowly peon in a traditional games job. Had I stayed there, there would also have been opportunities to go work with a lot of those companies to help integrate Enlighten, or give presentations at GDC. I’ve met some awesome people too, such as David Braben, Frontier boss and co-author of Elite; Andy Serkis, who played Golem and King Kong; Jeremy Vickary, previously a lighting artist at Pixar who was very illuminating, and not to mention the great guys from Sony Cambridge and Ninja Theory.

For a junior I had quite a lot of freedom. While there I worked on areas ranging between core tech to graphics to engine stuff to debugging to tools to support… You did what you had to, because nobody else was free. I think, in retrospect, I could have shouldered much more responsibility, but there was quite enough on my plate to be getting on with when more responsibility was offered.

I really look forward to seeing Enlighten in a game in the next few years. I’m a little saddened that I won’t be there to see it reach that stage, but I’ll be proud to say “I helped make that” when something eventually ships.

And if you’re reading this, guys: good luck and God speed!

We have just released two more videos! HD versions will shortly be available here.

I’ve been meaning to post for a while now, but any posts I would have made would probably have been inconsequential drivel (see all other posts). But not this time!

We at Geomerics have been working rather hard*, and we’ve produced a small teaser video of our work in preparation for GDC 2008. We have more than this teaser, but we’re saving that for the event itself. The video is a capture of our lead technical artist, Ivan Pedersen, demonstrating (at x4 speed) the capabilities of our technology. It’ll hopefully put to rest some of the rumours that it’s all just a fake. (Such rumours kill fairies.)

Find the high-definition version here!

Also, here are some details to answer some other questions that I get frequently asked:

• It is dynamic: you can move lights and geometry, change the materials, et cetera, and the radiosity will change accordingly.
• Dynamic shadows do affect the radiosity.
• It can do larger levels/maps/geometry than shown here. We’re saving that for GDC.
• It is more efficient when using a precompute step for static geometry. Dynamic geometry does not need this step.**
• It uses two solutions for static and deformable geometry, just for efficiency’s sake. In theory you could mark everything as a deformable object…
• It runs fast enough for use in computer games, or we’d all be out of a job.
• There is an SPU version for PS3. It is fully threadable for Windows and Xbox 360.

I confess I’m being deliberately vague about performance here, and you have my sincerest apologies. This isn’t because I’m a filthy liar, but with the extensive work going on here in the office at the moment, I’m not going to commit to any numbers. Also, that’s a job for the marketing types, so I’m not going to tread on anyone’s toes. If anyone does have any questions, however, you can email Geomerics directly from the website.

By the way, I love this website!

* Between the parties and the hookers.
** For the radiosity precomputation only, this took around 3-5 minutes.