Luc Shelton

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Gears of War: Ultimate Edition
The Coalition Microsoft Studios Splash Damage
The Coalition Microsoft Studios Splash Damage

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition is a recreation and port of the original Gears of War title brought to Windows 10 and Xbox One by Splash Damage and The Coalition.

The title features higher resolution textures, high-dynamic range rendering, more detailed and complex geometry, and recreated cinematics and cutscenes.


Responsibilities

My role on this project largely consisted of developing scalable and automated functional testing systems, which comprised of a web application for data visualisation, engine-related functionality, and tooling that was responsible for remotely controlling and orchestrating the state of a game on remote Xbox One (Durango) targets using the Xbox Tools Framework (XTF).

Localisation Tooling

  • Commandlets and small pieces of software for integrating Chinese locale (traditional).

Automated Functional and Performance Testing

  • Functional testing systems for remotely orchestrating tests, and collecting historical data for further analysis through our web application.
  • Automated systems for testing gameplay features in various parts of in-game levels.
  • Web application for visualising historical captured performance data.
  • Tools for launching and managing performance test runs on remote targets.
  • Engine module for exposing functionality through remote procedure calls (hooks) in the debug build of the game.

Build Systems and Continuous Integration

  • Build systems powered by TeamCity.
  • Automation achieved through auxiliary MSBuild projects.
    • Powered our automated functional testing systems.
    • Enabled our build configurations to work on build agents (workers) and developer machines.
  • Build pipelines for nightly binary and content configurations.
    • Including build configurations for testing new changes in the depot ("validation" or CI build).

Bug Fixing

  • Miscellaneous core-tech related bug fixing tasks towards the end of the development cycle.
  • Fixing tricky network desynchronisation bugs in co-operative campaign game modes.