Joseph Morton

Procedural settlement generator (owner)

• Built the Unreal Engine 5 version from the team's Houdini prototype.
• Generates villages, towns and cities from designer-authored zone rules: Voronoi layout, A* main roads from entrances, zone placement by centre, road frontage or perimeter, walls, rivers and bridges.
• Outputs gameplay data for each settlement: playable area, player start, nav seed points, AI road graph and zone routes, with building IDs kept stable across regenerations.
• Walls that fit the terrain around designer chosen zones, with modules selected by landscape height.
• Custom editor mode with viewport overlays, a zone panel and one-click regeneration. Designers built 100+ settlements with it in a few months.
• Collaborated with Environment Artists to improve both the interface of the tool and the output.

Building composition system (contributor)

Prefab style groups of meshes and actors placed into the world.

• Fitting compositions into generated cells, and placement correctness.
• Runtime material overrides for gameplay-driven changes.
• Optimised editor by batching updates, added drag and drop, undo and thumbnails to the composition editor.

Map generation pipeline (owner)

• Step-based pipeline, around 30 step types, that runs terrain, settlements, buildings and roads, then saves, map-checks, cooks and submits to Perforce.
• Runs from an editor button with live progress, or headless as a commandlet on TeamCity with a per-map JSON report.
• Nightly runs regenerate every settlement that uses an updated building composition.
• Submit safeguards: a failed step or logged error blocks the submit. Fixed in-editor runs never saving, and a stall caused by editor CPU throttling PCG.

Other tools

• Audio Usage Finder: shows where an FMOD event is used, following indirect references through gameplay tags, and other references.

• Led an in-house mesh reduction tool (C++, OpenGL, Simplygon API) that loaded meshes straight from Glacier 2 scene data.
• Added wireframe views and debug rendering to the Glacier 2 editor, and fixed editor crashes.
• Built gameplay features with designers: dual wielding, weapon firing, interaction, throwing and keypad mechanics.
• Integrated controller haptics via OpenXR; profiled and optimised with RenderDoc.

• Updated the C++ asset conversion plugin and software renderer that generate avatar meshes and textures at runtime.
• Added PBR clothing and body-shape displacement; optimised shaders for lower-end devices.
• Built a quality-settings system scaled to device GPU and RAM limits.

• Cut physics analysis time for 3D printing by 80% with adaptive Finite Element Analysis.
• Built automatic mesh manipulation and optimisation using signed distance fields.

• Cross-platform engine on Vulkan and OpenGL with PBR rendering, post-processing, an SSE-optimised maths library, Lua scripting and a custom physics engine. Over 1,600 GitHub stars.
• Editor built on the engine's own immediate-mode UI.

Orion · made with Lumos

A space trading and exploration game written entirely in Lua on Lumos, set among the real stars of the HYG catalogue. It ships to desktop and iOS from the engine's prebuilt templates. Read the devlog.

I design, build and ship my own apps on the App Store, including LabPal and a suite of macOS menu bar utilities.