| Name | John Stuart Alastair McFarlane |
| DOB | 2/9/1973 |
| Nationality | British |
| Address | |
| Click here |
| Company |
Computer Artworks Ltd. |
| Position |
Senior Programmer |
| Description |
Games programmer on various
titles: Alone in the Dark V
(Atari), DJ (Sony, PS2), Tidejackers (SCI, PS2), A Sound of Thunder (BAM!,
PS2/XBox/PC) as well as lead programmer of new projects - a game demo
creation team. Platforms: PC (VC++, MSVSS) and PS2 (Metrowerks, ProDG, SubVersion). Work: largely game logic and artificial intellgence as well as audio digital signal processing (DSP) and user interface design. |
| Date |
From 8th May 2002 |
| Company | The Creative Assembly Ltd. |
| Contact | Mike Simpson |
| Address | The Creative Assembly, Weald House, Southwater Business Park, Southwater Nr. Horsham, West Sussex, RH13 7HE |
| Position | Senior Programmer |
| Description | Programmer since prototype stage of Shogun: Total War included work mainly on 3D battles such as soldier and unit-level AI, world modelling, ambient wildlife, 3d audio, 3d-accelerated user-interface and multi-player networking and later assistance with artificial player-level AI, tutorial, weather system and front-end side of multiplayer games. Success of Shogun was followed by the Mongol Invasion addon and then the full-blown sequel: Medieval: Total War which I worked on for the rest of my time at Creative Assembly. |
| Date | December 14th 1997 - 1st May 2002 |
| Company | Intelligent Research Ltd. |
| Contact | David Levy |
| Address | 89 Constantine Road, London, NW3 2LP, Tel:(0171) 485 9146, e-mail: davidl@intrsrch.demon.co.uk |
| Position | Contracted Programmer (Degree Placement) |
| Description | A C module in a Windows-based NLP product called Converse which went on to win the 1997 Loebner Competition |
| Date | Summer 1994 - Winter 1997 |
| Company | AVP Ltd. |
| Address | Unit 3, School Hill Centre, Chepstow |
| Position | Programmer / Helpline support |
| Description | Entailed converting educational packages written in BBC BASIC from the BBC Micro to the RM Nimbus platform. Problems included compensating for the inferior graphics and sound capabilities and minor incompatibilities of the Nimbus BBC BASIC interpreter. |
| Date | Summer 1990 |
| Company | BEEBUG - Acorn BBC Micro Computing Club |
| Contact | Mike Williams (editor) |
| Address | St. Albans |
| Position | Independent Contributor |
| Description | Wrote several games which appeared as listings in BEEBUG Magazine/disc including a platform and ladders game (Drain Storm), and variations on Boulder-Dash (Egg Head) and Marble Madness (Roller Rally). |
| Date | Between 1986 - 87 |
| Institution | School of Cognitive and Computing Science (COGS), University of Sussex at Brighton |
| Qualification | MSc. Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems (EASy): |
| Description | EASy is an artificial life (A-life) orientated approach to cognitive science which chooses adaptive behaviour over intelligence as a tangible goal. The argument goes that cognition arises through embodied agents being presented with survival-based problems and that the disembodied, abstract problems of traditional AI completely miss out true intelligence . Hence, a focus on robotics, game theory, simulation, evolutionary biology and A-life. Course Leader, Dave Cliff, is consultant for CyberLife and has given talks for Psygnosis. |
| Courses | Autumn 96: Formal Computational Skills (80%); Introduction to
Computer Science (70%); Artificial Life (64%);
Adaptive Behaviour in Animals and Robots (61%). Spring 97: Adaptive Systems (76%); Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour (67%); Neural Computation (63%); Development in Human and Artificial Life (61%). Summer 97: Dissertation - Morphogenesis in the Evolution of Control Architectures for Autonomous Agents. Morphogenesis is an advanced issue in artificial evolution. Its ability to develop adaptive behaviour in complex environments will be explored using a simulation. |
| Institution | AI Department, School of Psychology, Middlesex University |
| Qualification | BSc. Artificial Intelligence with Psychology (sandwich Hon), 2:1 - 2 July 1996 |
| Description | A Modular Degree Scheme course including AI, Psychology and Placement modules |
| AI modules | Neural Networks, Artificial Life, Logic and Prologue, Knowledge Engineering, Lisp, POP11; AI Techniques; Recursive Search; Natural Language Processing (NLP) |
| Psychology modules | A selection of AI-related topics including: Language and Thought; Visual Perception and Consciousness of Mind |
| Placement | Intelligent Research Ltd. (See Work Experience) |
| Institution | Pontypool College of Further Education |
| Qualification | Computer Science (A-level) - July, 1992 |
| Institution | Chepstow Comprehensive School |
| Qualification | Maths Mechanics (A-level) - July, 1992 |
| 9 GCSEs including French, CDT Technology. CDT Communication and Physics |
| Operating Systems | MS-Windows v2 to w2k, MS-DOS v3 to 7, UNIX (Sun/HP/Linux), VAX/VMS, MacOS |
| C/C++ |
UNIX/VAX, MFC, LEDA, MS-DOS, DevStudio vs1-6/SourceSafe/Intel C++ vs3-4.5, WinSock and DirectX vs3-8 including DirectDraw,Direct3D,DirectSound 2d/3d and DirectPlay, |
| Assembler | 80x86/7, 6502 |
| Other Languages | Java/HTML, BASIC (Borland Turbo, MS Quick, BBC), Lisp, POP11, Prologue |
| Miscellaneous | Full and current driving licence |
A lot of my spare time is devoted to personal A-Life experiments.
The main aim of these experiments is to (eventually) provide video
games with agents whose behaviour is novel, challenging/engaging and
adapt to the playing style of the human players who interact with them.
I believe that genetic algorithms and other biologically inspired
techniques will play a key role in this technology and wish to be there
when it happens.
Other areas of interest involved with virtual worlds and software entertainment include ray-tracing and multiplayer gaming. Again I have strong views about how these technologies will affect my chosen industry and spent time at work and at home which I hope will shorten - rather than - lengthen their time to impact.
When I can drag myself away from a computer/console, I like to share
a drink with friends, play pool, watch films and TV, read sci-fi/cy-fi
and populist books on any area of science I find interesting (mainly
biology, psychology and physics). Games I enjoy playing are FPSs (can't
wait for HL2/Doom3), action/adventure games (esp. Zelda) and
fantasy racers (F-Zero, Mario Karts etc.).