Hi, my name is Charles Humphrey. I am from England and live in Leicester in the East Midlands, athough I'm originally from Birmingham. I am one of the GPU programmers on the team. I work on the graphical effects you will see in the game, from deferred lighting and cloaking effects to particle systems and post processing, pretty much anything that goes through the graphics card.
I first got into GPU (shader) programming back in 2006 when XNA first came out, in 2009 I was made a Microsoft MVP for my contributions to the XNA community and have again this year been re-awarded. I also have a blog on XNA, but all the shader posts can be used in any framework that uses DirectX (HLSL), so if you are interested in getting into graphics programming pop over and check it out.
For the project, I am currently working on hardware instancing, a method by which we should be able to render a lot of simple models all at once (think asteroids and space debris) and I am also looking at the cloaking effect we will be using.
As far as being an Star Trek fan goes, I used to love the original show re-runs (I'm old), then TNG and then onto DS9 and Voyager, but I kind of strayed from it for a long while but am now getting back into watching the shows on Sky and trying to refresh my knowledge for the project.
I would like to also thank the team for the warm welcome and the chance to be involved in the project, I hope my contributions make a difference. And I hope you future players of Star Trek Excalibur will enjoy all the hard work the team has put into this project.
A lot of upgrades have been made to the graphics of the engine. My most recent work has been on crepuscular rays, also known as "God rays".
