Nathan Mates

Current

Senior Programmer at Pandemic Studios

Past

Programmer at Adrenalin Entertainment
Summer Intern at Softdisk

Education

California Institute of Technology

Recommended

3 people have recommended Nathan

Connections

273 connections

Industry

Computer Games

Websites

My Website

Nathan Mates’s Summary

To utilize experience gained as a generalist & firefighter programmer to bring titles to a shippable state and provide post-release support. Able to jump into existing systems and codebases, and safely engineer needed changes, including Xbox 360 TCRs & PS3 TRCs. Portability and security of code are emphasized, without sacrificing speed and memory use.

Nathan Mates’s Specialties:

Xbox 360 TCRs & PS3 TRCs. Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, Sony Playstation 2, Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation, Sega Saturn. Microsoft Windows experience includes DirectX (DirectSound 8, Direct3D 5-9), Winsock, MFC & WTL, Win32, Gamespy libraries. Worked with C++ side of Scaleform libraries.

Nathan Mates’s Experience

Senior Programmer

Pandemic Studios

(Privately Held; Computer Games industry)

August 1998 — Present (11 years 4 months)

• The Saboteur: Handled TRC/TCRs for PS3 & Xbox 360 versions, including save/load, signouts, and downloadable content. Worked on worldbuilding tools to optimize speed and disk usage.
• Mercenaries 2: Added many features to world & sound editing tools, including search, memory optimizations, and image processing. Tracked down and fixed crashes in those tools. Handled TRC/TCRs for PS3 & Xbox 360 versions, including save/load, signouts, and more.
• Star Wars: Battlefront II: handled TRC/TCRs for PS2 & Xbox versions. Built and maintained an overnight automatic build system, including high-level functional tests of every level, generating graphs of framerate/memory usage.
• Star Wars: Battlefront, wrote cross-platform menu system, Xbox Live user interface and parts of the Gamespy user interface. Various additional system engineering tasks as well.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: headed PS2 conversion from GameCube. Also worked on the Xbox version, handling Xbox Live session creation/management and user interface.
• Triple Play 2002: Headed PS2 to Xbox conversion. Updated other low-level code.
• Fifa online: Took standalone PC SKU, and adapted it to run in a web browser for EA.com (ActiveX/Netscape plugin). Reduced PC SKU to a 4MB download with a custom installer.
• Battlezone 2: Implemented networking code and other code. Tracked down post-shipping crashes, and coordinated collecting bug reports, code/asset changes, and managed releases of 1.2 and 1.3 patches. Worked on 1.3 on my own time since 2001, adding DirectSound 3D support, rewrote rendering engine in DirectX 9, lots of new features, crash fixes, XP/Vista/Win7 compatibility, patch installer, and much more.
Programmer

Adrenalin Entertainment

(Computer Games industry)

July 1996 — July 1998 (2 years 1 month)

• Brunswick Tournament of Champions Bowling: Implemented 3D art and animation translation and playback programs from AGFLI (3DS:Max Plugin) format to Playstation HMD and D3D formats. Also worked on other art tools, cross-platform AI code.
• Ten Pin Alley: wrote Sega Saturn code inspired by PlayStation version – nearly everything but the shared physics code was rewritten; additional programming for bowling AI and other platform-independent engine code for the PlayStation and Windows SKUs
Summer Intern

Softdisk

(Computer Software industry)

June 1993 — August 1993 (3 months)

Summer Intern at Softdisk publishing. Wrote Apple IIgs utilities for their monthly subscription software.