About Richard Van Natta | Tools;2018-November |
I am a graphics programmer at Firaxis Games, working on Civilization 7. My expertises are in physically based rendering, shader optimization, assembly and compilers. I also did work on the Vulkan and the Switch versions of the game. Getting the switch version to run in 30ms and not go OOM was intense. A few cool things I did: the water tessellation and shading, HDR, and a new SSA backend for the VFX compiler.
I also have a few home projects, the most interesting of which is Vanity, an R7RS Scheme compiler and runtime that runs on Linux, Windows, and, more experimentally, Wasm. It's got excellent interfacing with C and it's got support for multithreading via fibers.
Like all graphics programmers, I have several quarter cooked game engines and no games. Though the newest one uses Vanity and the hope is to keep it that way. The goal is one day I'll have a half cooked engine and a quarter cooked game. The last game I actually wrote was in high school: I hope one day I can be as cool as my high school self.
I went to college in mathematics, intending to continue in academia, but had a change of heart near graduation, and instead got a job at Link Simulation as a graphics programmer, where I worked on sensor simulation and phyiscally based rendering for programs such as PMATS.