Four years of my career were at Ubisoft, on Assassin’s Creed, on the Anvil Pipeline team — the part of the studio that builds the tools and infrastructure the rest of the development teams use, not the gameplay players see directly. My biggest project there was the RankInfo migration: a legacy system rewritten into a modular, data-driven architecture, with its own descriptor tags and an adapter pattern for backward compatibility. I also built a migration driver that mapped the old code to the new one, plus internal ImGui tooling for the teams using the system daily. The kind of work that never shows up in a trailer, but without which the rest of the game doesn’t get built. ...

Originally published on Medium, January 2022. Republished here with light edits — the original project’s source code no longer exists, only this write-up survived, so the code snippets below are described rather than shown. A ray-tracer is a rendering method that simulates light reflections, refractions and shadows. It follows a light path from a specific source and computes each pixel in the image to simulate the effect of the light. ...