About the Authors
Paula Berinstein has written numerous how-to books and articles as well as technical documentation for software companies. She produced and hosted The Writing Show podcast from 2005 to 2012. She is currently developing casual games based on elements of her novel Amanda Lester and the Pink Sugar Conspiracy.
Nicusor Nedelcu is a game technology researcher and software architect. He’s currently CEO of 7thFACTOR Software, which creates game development middleware. He previously worked as editor & tools R&D Software Engineer at Crytek GmbH in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Alessandro Ardolino is currently Senior Technical Artist at Ghost Games - EA in Göteborg. He was formerly the Art Technical Director and VFX Artist at Ubisoft Milan studio.
Dr. Rémi Arnaud serves as Principal Member of Technical Staff at AMD, where he leads the effort in web acceleration. His involvement with real-time graphics started in the R&D department of Thales where he designed the Space Magic real-time visual system, and optioned his Ph.D ‘La synthèse d’images en temps réel.’ He then relocated to California to join Silicon Graphics’s IRIS Performer team. He then co-founded Intrinsic Graphics where he designed a middleware for PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and the PC. Later on he served as Graphics Architect of SCEA R&D, working on the PLAYSTATIONÒ3 SDK graphics API. He joined the Khronos Group, contributing to OpenGL ES, and created the COLLADA standard. At Intel he led the Larrabee Game Engine team (a.k.a. Project Offset). More recently he served as Chief Software Architect at ScreamPoint, designing a web technology 5D system to manage entire cities.
Simon Franco is a senior systems programmer at the Creative Assembly. He started programming on the Commodore Amiga by writing a Pong clone in AMOS and has been coding ever since. He joined the games industry in 2000, after completing a degree in computer science. He started at The Creative Assembly in 2004, where he has been to this day. When he’s not keeping his daughter entertained, he’s playing the latest game or writing games in assembly code for the ZX Spectrum.
Adrien Herubel (@AdrienHerubel) is currently a programmer at Ubisoft Motion Pictures, where he is part of the team working on the Raving Rabbids Invasion TV series. His work is mainly focused on real-time and offline rendering. He teaches OpenGL programming at the Paris-Est University.
John McCutchan is a Software Engineer at Google working on the Dart Virtual Machine. While an undergraduate, John created inotify, the Linux kernel filesystem event notification system used in every Linux distribution and Android phone. After receiving a M.Sc. in Computer Science from McMaster University, John joined Sony Computer Entertainment of America, where he optimized the Bullet Physics library for the PlayStation 3. In 2013, John created a highly-performant SIMD programming model for dynamically compiled languages, such as Dart and JavaScript.
Benjamin Nitschke is the CEO of Delta Engine. He previously worked on www.Soulcraftgame.com (a mobile action RPG), www.ArenaWars.net (an RTS game, the first commercial .NET game), www.RocketCommander.com (a .NET 2.0 open source game), and Xna Racing Game Starter Kit (the most successful and known XNA starter kit). Benjamin has been a Microsoft MVP for XNA/DirectX from 2006 till 2010 and has written XNA books (Professional Game Development with XNA, Wiley, 2007). His blog is at http://blog.deltaengine.net.
Fabrice Robinet works for Montage Studio on seamlessly integrating 3D content on the web. He is also the COLLADA Working Group Chair at Khronos and lead for glTF (graphics library Transmission Format). Prior to joining the MontageJS team, Fabrice worked as a Software Engineer at Apple where he co-created the Scene Kit framework.
Christian Ronchi was born in Milan, Italy and graduated from Brera’s school of Arts after which he enrolled at the academy of Belle Arti in the Faculty of Painting. In addition, he has obtained a professional certificate for Computer Graphics through the Enaip institute in Milan. The first years of his career were spent as a freelance artist making commercials for various companies, until 2001 when he joined Ubisoft Studios in Milan, where he has been ever since. At Ubisoft, he has been involved in a number of projects, filling a wide array of functions, working with and creating models, animation, lighting, rendering, composition, and visual effects for both real-time and cinematics, just to mention a few.
Gustavo Samour is Senior Software Engineer at Shiver Entertainment in Miami, Florida. He holds a Computer Science degree, and most recently obtained an Advanced Game Development degree after attending The Guildhall at SMU. He is originally from San Salvador, El Salvador.
Rita Turkowski is employed by AMD as a Senior Embedded Gaming Marketing Manager. Rita came to AMD from Unity Technologies where she was the Sales Team Channel Manager for 20 months. While at Unity, Unity had more developer adoption in the game industry than any other game development technology company, ever. She was a Graphics and Media Software Product Manager at Intel from 2007 until December, 2009 working on graphics and game industry software tools. Before that, Rita was the Executive Director of the Web3D Consortium from 2005 – 2007, working on projects internationally for the adoption of ISO 3D standards, as well as establishing joint working group cooperation with related industry consortia such as Khronos, the OGC, and W3C. Earlier in her career, Rita worked with various start-ups in media development, and throughout most the 1990’s Rita worked for Apple. She also spent several years working at AT&T Bell Laboratories while attending grad school in the NY metropolitan area at Stevens Institute of Technology. She has undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics and computer science, respectively.
Robert Walter is a Software Analyst and Developer at Intentional Software Corporation, Bellevue, WA. Before, he worked as a researcher and lecturer in game and media science for more than four years, where he initiated and headed the International Workshop on Game Development and Model-Driven Software Development in 2011 (Vancouver, BC) and 2012 (Bremen). He co-authored articles about game development for various conferences, including the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (2010, Monterey, CA) and the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (2011, Lisboa). With the open-source project DialogScriptDSL, he provides a free-to-use tool to model interactive dialog for video games using textual modeling languages.