Ricardo Costa
Verified Expert in Engineering
Game Developer
Rio de Janeiro - State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Toptal member since September 12, 2018
A professional developer for over 13 years, Ricardo focuses on game development, computer graphics, including rendering, computer vision, and VR/AR, artificial intelligence, and client-server systems. He is also an Unreal Engine expert with eight years of experience. Ricardo is passionate about cutting-edge technology, optimizing complex systems, and creating real-time, high-performance software.
Portfolio
Experience
- Game Development - 17 years
- Computer Graphics - 17 years
- C++ - 16 years
- Networking - 10 years
- Unreal Engine - 8 years
- Augmented Reality (AR) - 3 years
- Unreal Engine 5 - 2 years
- Virtual Reality (VR) - 2 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Git, Visual Studio, Unreal Engine, C++, Perforce, Windows
The most amazing...
...system I've developed is an unmanned ground vehicle software controller featuring stereo vision, autonomous spatial navigation, and 3D-scenario reconstruction.
Work Experience
Game Developer
Ampaire Inc.
- Developed a custom X-Plane flight simulator plugin that showed relevant flight data for a new hybrid aircraft manufactured by Ampaire.
- Wrote code in C++ and OpenGL, also interacting with the X-Plane SDK.
- Created a custom HUD with animated icons and implemented formulas to display simulation data.
Lead Developer
KEYS Metaverse
- Developed an Unreal Engine 5 metaverse project with virtual mansions sold as NFTs to thousands of investors.
- Used C++, blueprints, and other advanced techniques to achieve triple-A visual quality and performance.
- Hosted the game on AWS so that it could be accessed from any browser and pixel-streamed it to the clients.
Senior Graphics Engineer
Genius Ventures
- Developed a 3D interactive poster with a human-like character, i.e., MetaHuman, that could talk and interact with the public on a kiosk at the famous Irving Plaza venue in NY, taking advantage of 5G and edge computing.
- Created a real estate property viewer using Unreal Engine 4 with fully baked lighting and realistic rendering. It allows multiple users to join and collaborate on the same session online.
- Created a new technology to stream ultra-high quality 3D objects from Unreal Engine to an AR experience that surpassed Google's XR Streaming technology in rendering quality.
- Developed a 3D avatar in Unreal Engine that could react in real time to the emotions detected from the user's facial expressions.
- Worked on a 3D car showroom project using ultra-realistic rendering in Unreal Engine 5.
Elite Unreal Engine Developer
MDA
- Collaborated with a large team to create a VR application in Unreal Engine for military training.
- Optimized the project to run in Oculus Quest 2 with good performance and visual quality.
- Wrote code in C++ for critical parts and blueprints for the user experience (UX).
Unreal Engine Developer
RYOT
- Created an AR experience for the Angry Birds 2 movie launch using Unreal Engine and a novel pixel-streaming solution to achieve real-time, movie-like 3D quality using a mobile phone.
- Created native applications for Android and iOS that could run the pixel-streamed experience from Unreal Engine on the phone.
- Worked on several R&D projects for 3D AR and realistic rendering with Unreal Engine through pixel-streaming from an AWS GPU instance.
C++ and Unreal Engine Developer
Lucid
- Developed an Unreal Engine plugin to integrate real-time 3D scenes from Unreal into the Ventuz virtual production ecosystem.
- Used the C++ language and low-level APIs from Unreal Engine source code.
- Optimized a plugin to achieve production-ready performance.
Unreal Engine Developer
Reach Sentient Artificial Intelligence
- Developed a 3D prototype for a new agent-based AI algorithm.
- Used Unreal Engine to create a real-time simulation of sentient agents controlled by AI.
- Integrated a C++ AI library created by other developers on the team.
C#/C++ Developer
Heartland Engineering
- Created a back-end system in Python for a warehouse management system.
- Implemented a crane hardware controller in C#. Communicated via TCP networking.
- Integrated all systems with an existing web-based front end created by another developer.
CTO
Magistral Games
- Developed an online 3D mobile game with Unreal Engine, C++, and Lua. Handled the client and back-end server and completed part of the game design.
- Created a development framework in modern C++ featuring optimized data structures, algorithms, and client-server networking with an efficient multi-threaded architecture.
- Planned the cloud architecture of the game's back end, including DDoS resiliency and fault tolerance.
Teacher
ORT Institute of Technology
- Taught technical training courses in Computer Science with programming content in C, C++, Python, x86 Assembly, data structures, computer graphics, computer networks, and operating systems.
Specialist Developer
AevoTech
- Developed an unmanned ground vehicle software controller featuring stereoscopic vision, autonomous spatial navigation, and 3D-scenario reconstruction using C++, OpenGL, OpenCV, and ROS.
- Contributed to a robotic arm Kuka controller and GUI written in C# and WinForms. It has many real-time features, such as 3D visualization of the arm position and its sensors.
- Created an ROV laser scanner that used computer vision to detect changes in the surface of objects, such as underwater oil pipes. It was written in C++ and OpenCV.
- Developed an OCR solution that allowed the client to upload any digitized document, including photos of printed papers, and classified it according to its contents. Used C++, OCR libraries, and a machine learning classifier algorithm.
- Built a Python/Django back end used to process large amounts of data, such as importing millions of entries from a file format into a relational database, in a parallel, efficient manner. Used AWS services such as EC2, RDS, and ElastiCache.
Professor
Infnet Institute
- Lectured Introduction to Artificial intelligence to the Computer Engineering undergraduate class.
Intern Developer
Tecgraf
- Served as the lead developer of Particles, a volumetric discrete element visualization application funded by an oil company, Petrobras.
- Developed many real-time visualization techniques with intense GPU shader usage.
- Collaborated with a team of artists and engineers, communicating and integrating their work based on the project requirements.
Experience
Alta B Interactive Poster
https://youtu.be/mBgpjFvumGsNobu Real Estate Virtual Tour
https://youtu.be/AmY1POsNRVMKEYS Metaverse
https://keys.xyz/Cockfight
https://youtu.be/5VvSWJqVj5oI was the lead programmer and architect of both the game client and server. The client was based on Unreal Engine 4. It was optimized for mobile platforms and leverages GPU shaders and a variety of rendering techniques.
The server was written in modern C++ and Lua, a powerful scripting language whose development team I was part of during college. It featured high-performance, multi-threaded networking, and REST APIs to communicate with cloud services.
I was also one of the game designers, defining gameplay rules and monetization strategies.
Brabexia
I mainly worked on the game server written from the ground up in C++ and Lua. As a real-time game, it required low-latency networking and thousands of simultaneous players. Such a performance level was achieved with parallelism, profiling tools, and highly-optimized code. During peak hours, the game hosted about 7,000 players online.
The computer-controlled characters were based on numerous AI techniques such as A* path-finding, state machines, and behavior trees, providing a challenging gameplay experience to the players.
The 2D game client was based on an open-source project that used OpenGL. It was adapted to my game server by rewriting the networking protocol entirely.
Education
Progress towards a Master's Degree in Computer Science with a specialization in Computer Graphics
PUC-Rio - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
PUC-Rio - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Standard Template Library (STL), OpenGL, OpenCV
Tools
Microsoft Visual Studio, Git, C#.NET WinForms, Perforce
Languages
Lua, C, C++17, C++14, C++11, C++, GLSL, Python 3, Python, Python 2, C#, Assembly
Frameworks
Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine 4, ASM, Qt
Paradigms
Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Mobile Game Design, Concurrent Programming, Parallel Programming
Platforms
Windows, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android, Azure, iOS, Mobile, Oculus, MacOS
Other
Game Development, 3D Visualization, Video Games, Games, 3D Games, Computer Graphics, 3D Rendering, Unreal Engine 5, Blueprints Visual Scripting, Low-level Programming, Low-latency Software, Augmented Reality (AR), Game AI, Android Games, 2D Games, Mobile Games, Mobile Game Development, Computer Vision, MMORPGs, Data Structures, Rendering, Rendering Pipelines, Real-time Rendering Engines, Rendering Performance, Game Design, Debugging, Cloud Computing, Cloud Services, TCP/IP, Shaders, Version Control, Code Versioning, Networks, Multiplayer, Profiling, Benchmarking, Concurrent Computing, Extended Reality (XR), Networking, Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Edge Computing, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT)
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