Emperore K. - Unreal Engine Physics Essentials

Katax Emperore was born in January 1974. Since his childhood days, he has loved board games, science magazines, comic books, and graffiti painting. Katax was introduced to the IT world when he got his first game platform, Fire Attack from the Game & Watch series by Nintendo, back in the 80's. While spending hours on it, he became curious about the process of creating games.

As a teenager, Katax owned Amiga 500 by Commodore on which he played hundreds of games. However, one stuck with him: Shadow of the Beast by Psygnosis. He was enamored by the quality of the graphics, music, and FX sounds involved in the game. Katax realized that he would like to learn to create such games, and this was the first step. Today, he can design and develop any game on various web pages and platforms alike.

The Amiga platform created a high-quality gaming experience supported by an advanced hardware architecture that was way ahead of its time. It was a high-profile computer with real stereo sound supported by the advanced Direct Memory Access technology for multiprocessing. On this platform, Katax learned many aspects of programming, multitasking, DMA, interactive applications, IO port mappings, graphic design, and 3D. When Microsoft introduced Windows 98, he got serious about programming, 3D, and graphic design, which led him to base his education, and later his career, in the IT industry.

Around this time, Katax experienced a live performance of a digital visual art improvisation over music known as a VJ performance. He was influenced by Jimi Hendrix, and he adopted his style of improvising each track on a live stage. His style involves visualizing forms, colors, and brightness of images and videos by playing live visual transitions over each pixel on the screen. Katax believes that it's necessary for each game designer/developer to be a part of some art movement or activity because it helps you in your career, both technically and spiritually.

Katax' favorite bands/artists include Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, and Jimi Hendrix.

I am grateful to John Carmack from id Software for his efforts and great work on 3D graphic programming. What he invented and developed back in the 90's was the beginning of the wonderful genre of first-person shooter games, which is my personal favorite. Also, I would like to thank Westwood Studios for introducing the Command and Conquer (C&C) series to the gaming world. This game pioneered many aspects of the modern real-time strategy games, which later powered many subgenres in this area as well. Great job, thank you!

Devin Sherry is originally from Levittown, Long Island in the state of New York, USA. He studied game development and game design at the University of Advancing Technology where he obtained a bachelor's degree of arts in game design in 2012.

During his time in college, Devin worked as a game and level designer with a group of students called Autonomous Games on a real-time, strategy style, third-person shooter game called The Afflicted using Unreal Engine 3/UDK. It was presented at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2013 in the the GDC Play showcase.

Currently, Devin works as an independent game developer located in Tempe, Arizona, where he works on personal and contracted projects. His achievements include the title Radial Impact, which can be found in the Community Contributions section of the Learn tab of Unreal Engine 4's Launcher. You can follow Devin's work on his YouTube channel, Devin Level Design, where he educates viewers on game development within Unreal Engine 3, UDK, and Unreal Engine 4.

About the Reviewer

Abdullah Obaied is a self-taught software engineer with a long history of expertise in game programming. He has professionally worked on games such as Artifice: Faith in Chaos as well as on engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine 4. Furthermore, using the DirectX technology, Abdullah has developed his own engine labeled Nucleus Engine. He was also one of the developers selected to beta-test Unreal Engine 4 back in its early development stage.

Currently, Abdullah works at Mindvalley in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in the mobile app development team as an Android developer. You can follow him on his blog, http://damngoodcode.blogspot.com.

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