Airport Virtual Environment - Previous work at Virtually Better, Inc.

Remarks
This environment was created to simulate an airport terminal as part of a study for the treatment of smoking addiction and for a commercial product to treat aviophobia. For this project I was asked to populate the environment with models such as the blue waiting chairs and airliners visible through the windows, and to light the environment using attenuated point lights and carefully created shadow and glare sprites. As with many of the environments developed at Virtually better, I had to overcome limitations in the rendering engine through careful use of decals and billboard sprites; the shadows beneath the lounge chairs and the glare from the control tower in the distance are a just two examples.

Loft Virtual Environment - Previous work at Virtually Better, Inc.

Remarks
The loft environment was created to simulate a typical party environment as part of a study for the treatment of smoking addiction. For this project I populated the environment with models, conentrating primarily on the objects within the kitchen (there were over 70 unique objects) I lit the environment using attenuated point lights and carefully created shadow and glare sprites where needed. The glare through the large windows and the shadows beneath the potted plants on the patio are examples. I found that for the materials and light levels the project demanded, the defaults available through Virtually Better, Inc.'s proprietary game engine were not enough, so I created several HLSL shaders for many of the object materials and created a soft-focus shader applied over the entire scene.

Reventa - Homebrew 3d game (in development)


View the in-engine animation test

Remarks
Reventa is 3d action-adventure game I am currently developing. Reventa is built around DirectX, including some of the newest additions to the API, such as XInput and XACT audio. In addition to creating, animating, and texturing the character and environment meshes, I've also created several novel HLSL shaders to control the look and feel of the materials of each. Characters are skeletal meshes in .X format, and the ID3DXAnimationController interface is used to smoothly blend between animations (which are applied entirely on the GPU). Though still in early alpha, Reventa already features per-pixel depth of field blurring and a unified lighting model for characters and environments. Tangent-space normal-mapping is implemented on all objects, and the engine features a specialized scripting system to facilitate rapid prototyping without the need for specialized tools.

Blackjack XP


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Remarks
This is a simple 2d blackjack game. What makes it unique is that it was an experiment to see if accessing GDI functions directly through the Windows dll could perform better than the native C# graphics controls. After repeated testing, it seems that the performance gain is negligable, if any. Still, I keep this game around as an interesting oddity; a prime example of how doing things the hard way can still prove fun.

SpellCheck


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Remarks
This is a quick tool that may prove useful. As you type text in the provided box, the application checks its contents against a collection of known words (specified in the words.txt file) and updates the listbox below with words that match. It performs as quickly as it does because the words are sorted on startup into a 26-ary tree structure. This allows the application to find a word from a bank of tens of thousands in logarithmic time.

GraphBuilder


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Remarks
This application is purely a demonstration of simple graph building and traversal. It features breadth and depth traversals and Prim's path determinations (Kruskal's was not implemented though it appears on the list).

2D Pegs


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Remarks
Anyone who has ever eaten at a Cracker Barrel restaurant should instantly recognize the Peg Game. It plays a bit like checkers, where the object is to remove all the pegs from the board. A peg is removed if it is jumped over by another peg, but pegs can only jump over adjacent spaces. This application runs a second thread that plays all the possible moves that could stem from the current state of the board and returns statistical data indicating the number of unique ways you could win and the chances of that happening. My original intent was to also include animated cutscenes a la battle chess, but I ran short on time and never got to it.

NQueens


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Remarks
This is a managed DirectX demonstration of the popular N Queens problem in computer science. The solution is calculated in a worker thread, allowing the application to display the current solution set in 3d without slowdown.

GrassSort


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Remarks
This application is meant as a visual demonstration of the random and quick sorting algorithms. On startup, the user is presented with a field of grass, each blade of grass representing a random data value (it's height correlates with this value). Pressing F6 will perform a random sort on the data, while pressing F7 will perform a quick sort. F1 re-plants the field. As an aside, I realized at the time I wrote the application that it's performance suffered horribly from the brute-force scene graph I'd implemented, and that instancing the grass geometry would have resolved the problem, but I think the sluggishness of the app serves to underscore the speed of quick sort; It makes it seem that much faster by contrast.

JType


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Remarks
I created JType for two reasons: 1) I was growing very concerned by the poor typing habits of my friends, and 2) I wanted to prove that Visual Basic 6.0 was just as viable a language for game development as (almost) anything else. This is a typing game that plays like Dance Dance Revolution meets Typing of the Dead. Target sentences appear on screen, and all sentences for a given stage must be cleared before the time limit. Mistakes will lower your "groove bar", and once this is depleted the game is over. One of my personal favorites.