Greetings! My name is Andre "Floh" Weissflog. I work at Radon Labs GmbH as Technical Director (which basically means I'm coordinating engine and tools development while trying to do as much actual coding as possible). I'm also guilty of much of the design and code of The Nebula Device, a popular Open Source game engine, and the Nebula2 Toolkit For Maya, a powerful asset pipeline for Maya and Nebula.
I learned programming in the mid-eighties on one of these (in Z-80 machine code) and then quickly proceeded to something more comfortable (in Z-80 assembly, Pascal and Forth). After the Wall came down I switched to Amiga and learned C, 3d programming and the wonders of a true 32-bit multitasking OS with graphical UI (something the PC didn't have at the time).
From '95 to '98 I was one third of the core team behind Urban Assault at Terratools which eventually was published by Microsoft. During UA development I was on location at the MS Game Studios in Seattle for about 6 months (accumulated) where I worked on porting the game to Windows and DirectX (UA was started on AmigaOS and was then ported to DOS, and finally ended up on Win95 and DirectX 5).
After UA was out, the core team left Terratools, founded a new independent game development company which is now Radon Labs GmbH, created its own technology (which became version 1 of the Nebula Device), and started development of a new game, Project Nomads, which was published by CDV in 2003. At the end of the project, and some financial trouble with CDV it was decided that the company needs to change to a multi-project strategy (so instead of doing one big project every 3 years, make 3 smaller projects every year). All in all this strategy proofed successful. Now at ~70 employees, Radon Labs is one of the biggest independent game development studios in Germany.
In my precious spare time I'm doing some experimental hacking on what will eventually become the next Nebula. Gaming-wise I have mostly migrated to the Xbox360, with the occasional RPG- or FPS-session on the PC.
