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Work on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and subsequent DLCs
In 2013 I began working at High Moon Studios, Activision, as an Intern to support the prop team, but was soon promoted to join the optimization team in early 2014. Our work was done using a proprietary engine based off of Radiant, as well as Maya and other in-house tools. This page shows some pictures of levels I worked on from the release build and short descriptions of what I did.
In addition to the levels pictured, I also did significant work on Riot (MP, art, memory, performance, bugs), Lab2 (MP memory in early stage), DLC Torqued (MP bugs, dynamic event memory) and Three Gorges (MP art, memory, performance, bugs)
My duties primarily consisted of:
- Diagnose and fix framerate issues
- Diagnose and reduce RAM memory use
- Pipeline tool development (MEL and Python, with use of P4 integration, Maya libraries, and PySide)
- Portal PVS building and maintenance
- Handle a variety of JIRA bugs
- Reduce models manually in Maya
Additionally, when first working supporting the prop team, I also made some simple props and foliage which is used in the game, modeled many placeholders, and set up texture animation for certain props that needed it. This included flag/wind animation, animated texture atlases, and tuning special glass or transparent shaders.
My work group was assigned 2 single player maps, the earlier (and perhaps more infamous due to the graveyard scene) shipped with the title "Atlas". This level was somewhat easy as the second half of "training" runs you through the first section of the level, but getting the content to work with multiple light sets was a unique challenge.
In this particular scene the foliage was a challenge due to its complexity and it needed to be recreated almost from scratch for PS3 to reduce the overdraw.
Another picture from Atlas, this is the opening of the cabin fight. some performance challenges were introduced by the heavy foliage, many enemies, and long draw distances outside, but ultimately the level shipped running in top shape.
During this phase of the DLC, a coworker and I were tasked with setting up and maintaining the PVS portal system for burgertown.
a coworker and I were tasked with maintaining PVS portal system and fixing art bugs for ps3 and xbox 360 version.
Tasked with memory reduction, frame rate performance, and all visual bugs for this DLC map
This picture was of particular interest because the floor hologram was originally a scaled down model of the vista mountains. This was a very expensive model for performance, so I created a new, cheaper hologram mountain effect to replace the old hologram model.
Tasked with visual bugs performance, and memory optimization. We had a workgroup for this map.
Tasked with visual polish, Memory and performance optimizations, and gameplay/collision fixes
we were also tasked with performance, visual quality, and memory optimization of the finale level of the game, "Terminus". The level was broken into three sections, a fly in to an underwater breach, a missile silo, and finally the apartment of Kevin Spacey's character, Irons, which though short was difficult due to the massive city view he has. This picture is from the missile silo portion.
A heated battle during the fly in portion of the finale. I had to do a lot of work on performance due to long draw distances and big amount of AI. I also spent time on the drone helicopters and buildings as the level looked very bland on ps3 originally, however I think it came out very well.
Another scene from atlas (This picture is actually from the next gen version). current gen technology did not support tessellation, so we had to re-rig a newly modeled tube to match this effect..
When I first started at high moon, I helped the prop team import their props through the engine. I also helped with props that required additional shader features. I created several glass props and helped to set up some of the animated "smart glass" around the level, including the glass for the tablet in the screenshot and some signs and scales that had animated screens. Finally, I also painted vertex wind animation for all of the trees and awnings in this level.