Matthew Newport

Dawn of War II (85 Metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warhammer-40000-dawn-of-war-ii) was the sequel to the popular PC game Dawn of War. I was the lead graphics programmer on the project and a core part of the team from the early days of pre-production until the product shipped.

As lead graphics programmer, I made extensive modifications to the Company of Heroes graphics engine in order to meet the visual goals for Dawn of War II and its gritty sci-fi universe. This included implementing a new HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting engine, a new terrain texturing system, a new system for players to apply custom 'paint' to their units in the game, and many optimizations.

The features I implemented required tool, pipeline, and runtime code and close collaboration with artists on the team. The work involved a number of tools and technologies, such as C++, C#, HLSL, MAXScript, Photoshop scripting, Python, Perforce, NVIDIA PerfHud, PIX, and more.

As the Senior Engineering Manager on the Frostbite Vancouver team at EA, I led a team responsible for maintaining the core low level cross platform libraries used by the Frostbite game engine, which power many EA games.

One of my primary responsibilities was to work as the technical product owner for the job manager project, a cross platform library for task and job scheduling that is used by Frostbite and other teams at EA to support the use of task-based concurrency to make efficient use of multiple processors across the many platforms on which EA's games run.

As a technical product owner, I worked with customers on game teams to understand their requirements. As an engineering manager, I led a team of engineers in designing and implementing features to better meet our customers' needs, which was both a leadership and a programming role.

As a Senior Programmer at Smoking Gun Interactive, I worked on a number of mini games and activities that were part of Kinect Adventures, the game bundled with Kinect for Xbox 360 at launch.

This project used Unreal Engine 3, and I was responsible for implementing rendering features, performance optimizations, image processing, and gameplay logic.

As a senior programmer at Relic Entertainment, I assisted with optimization and bug fixing on the PC strategy game, Company of Heroes (93 Metacritic). I also worked on preparations for the D3D10 port of the graphics engine.

As a software engineer on the central technology team at EA Canada, I played a key role in delivering the first version of RenderWare to support the final Xbox 360 hardware. I spent 3 days on site at Microsoft’s Xbox offices ensuring RenderWare worked on the final hardware before it shipped to EA studios. I also designed and implemented the runtime and pipeline back-end for the shader system that was used in two of EA’s Xbox 360 launch titles: FIFA 2006 and NBA Live 2006.

Finally, I optimized RenderWare's animation and math libraries for PS3 and Xbox 360 using VMX intrinsics and SPUs, in addition to writing a substantial document on optimizing for the PS3 and Xbox 360 which was widely distributed within EA.

I worked on this project as a contract software engineer brought in to help with bug fixing and performance optimization during the last few months of development. With my work on Star Wars Battlefront (75 Metacritic), I helped ensure a successful consumer launch on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.