Hey, I’m Jeff.  David’s (fraternal) twin brother!  David and I are really excited to finally get Wolfire off the ground and really get serious about game development.

I am a student at UC Berkeley, but Wolfire Games is too cool of an opportunity, so now I am a part time student.  This is why we are all located in the East Bay.  My role here is as a software developer with an emphasis on web stuff, so if you notice anything weird on the site, let me know!

A little bit of background about me:  I wrote AIMM, the original third party AIM client for Mac OS.  I then went on to write some shareware apps for people who sell stuff on Amazon, and have since been doing a lot of contract work for Amazon sellers.  If you bought something used on Amazon and received an annoying email about it asking for feedback…  Yeah, that’s me.  Sorry!

About a year ago, I joined Redux, Inc., as a software developer and wrote the back end for flick.im (you can check out the iPhone version, but the main Meebo style site has been canceled - it was awesome though!) and worked as a developer for the redux.com site itself. However, once David graduated, we officially formed Wolfire Games and I am really excited to finally be working on my real passion: video games!

Favorite Games: Quake 3: Urban Terror, Angband (you don’t need graphics to be an awesome game), Super Smash Bros.

Random Fact: When David and I were ~8, David made me really mad and I deleted his “Games” folder on his computer, not knowing his original HyperCard games were in there too.  This loss of data and trade secrets probably set Wolfire back years.  That is how I earned the title “Evil Twin”.

Hey guys I’m John.

I went to elementary school with David, Jeff and Phillip (K-8) and am glad to have finally met Aubrey.

I’ve been an avid video gamer my whole life. I had my first game development experience as an assistant product manager and voice actor for David in second grade. Thanks to David’s coding skill in Hypercard and my occasional crazy idea, we invented the “grayscale stick-figure choose-your-own-adventure war game” genre which was quickly banned by our school librarians due to its mature content.

My love for gaming caused me to learn some visual basic programming techniques in high school. I even managed to produce some primitive games using OpenGL and C++. At Yale University I spent time wrestling with Java, C and Scheme but decided to major in economics. I hope to bring important management and business skills to Wolfire (read: I’m the least technologically competent person on the team).

Favorite Games: Operation Neptune (how I learned my maths), Jedi Knight, Unreal Tournament

Random Fact: I composed and synthesized the main menu song in Black Shades.

Ok, all side projects and contracts are done! Now everyone is ready to focus on Lugaru 2 completely, and we will start making some real progress. The rest of the team will make blog posts soon to introduce themselves.

I spent the last month or so gathering the Wolfire team together in one physical place, and finishing up some side projects. We will be ready to go full-time on Lugaru 2 on September 1st! I graduated from college, so there will be no more delays due to schoolwork; I am going to work on Lugaru 2 all day every day until it is done.

I wrote a paper about my 3D acoustics research, with a lot of pictures and videos (including giant explosions). You can find it here!

I tried evolving new kinds of movement in 3D humanoid characters. There has been a lot of research on dynamic humanoid walking controllers, but what about crawling? Or breakdancing?

Link to youtube video…

I have been working on ways to improve the intersections between different objects. The examples shown here demonstrate automatic ambient occlusion and weathering effects as well as one kind of geometry deformation.

I extended the physics engine to support ligament and muscle constraints, and then attached them to a skeleton model to demonstrate how the shoulder joint works.

Link to youtube video.

There are two excellent single-player campaigns for Lugaru made by forum users Silb and Jendraz. They are both longer and more in-depth than the original Lugaru campaign, and use a lot of engine features in innovative ways that I hadn’t thought of. Click on these links to try the Empire and Temple campaigns!

The point-stick-triangle physics described in the previous post is very good for quickly defining articulated bodies, but it is not appropriate for simulating large numbers of colliding rigid bodies. I am experimenting with different methods to handle these cases: here is a screenshot of a standard box collision test using ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) integration. We can use our old system for special physics like characters and plants, and ODE for large numbers of simpler objects.

Here is a link to a video of the new physics in action.