Customprojects.NET

I know it has been several days since my last post. I have been rather busy and will tell you all about it here. Lets start with GDC 09 the conference went well. I talked with a lot of really amazing people. I handed out a few resumes and portfolio pages to those that were accepting it. I think the best experience I had talking with companies was valve. The setup they had at GDC was very professional. They simply asked you to fill out a form then scheduled an appointment with a developer for you to sit and talk one on one with them. This was nice because it didn’t feel like you needed a secret password to talk to someone that was not a recruiter. No offence but often it is nice to get an inside look on the company. As I have found out doing research amongst game companies it is not only important that you are right for the company it is important that the company is also right for you. To find this out it helps to talk with someone who experiences it daily and has a role similar to the role you are applying for. The recruiters are great and they do their gate keeping job well. However sometimes it feels that they are too restrictive sometimes. I like to think that with my experience working for a start up game company, my two years masters program, and my offer from Microsoft that other companies would like to talk with me. However it sometimes seemed all too hard to get by the gatekeeper to find out how the company functioned and if it fit my work style.
Moving on, the next big news that happened at GDC was my offer from Microsoft working on the XBOX platform. This is something that excites me, while I would like to keep my options open for other interviews the companies I have talked with at GDC never got back to me or stated I was to “green”. This is okay as I am more than happy to be a part of the XBOX team.
Finally coming back from GDC I have been working with GROME this is our level editing tool that we are using for our capstone project. I have been working on an exporter for this program while another team mate has been working on the importer into our game. I have the exporter successfully outputting object information, height map, shadow map, normals, and various texture mask to get the level to look and feel the same as it does in the editor.
The other thing I have worked on this week was catching up on some commenting and optimizing my animation engine to animate four joints in less than .00001 of a second. I have also tooled around with getting various animated meshes to be hardware instanced and in the end decided that for our project it is not something that needs to be implemented.