Ash Hipgrave

Personal Portfolio

Dying Light

Worked on the port of Dying Light to Epic Games Store and helped add support for next-gen consoles (Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5), including adding support for cross-platform multiplayer with Epic Online Services.

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

Designed and developed the backend service powering the "Invite Code" multiplayer system in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. Additionally helped implement a custom Online Subsystem plugin for Unreal Engine to enable cross-platform multiplayer support through the Invite Code backend service in combination with Epic Online Services.

Star Wars: Hunters

Helping with the development of a planned "Battle Royale" game mode that would increase number of players per match to 24 players (increased from 8 compared to the base game modes). My primary focus was on performance profiling and optimization for both the game client and dedicated servers to support the increased player count as well as developing new Battle Royale oriented gameplay features, character abilities and meta-game rewards.

Confidential Title (NDA)

Converted the networking model of a live AAA multiplayer game from its existing 'Dedicated Server' model to instead use P2P/Listen Servers, whilst retaining support for dedicated servers.

Improbable Labs

Working within a small team to rapidly prototype and build large scale live events to showcase Improbable's upcoming "World Builder" and M2 platform. The goal of this project was to rapidly iterate on different ideas and then run them as live events, targeting hundreds of concurrent players per event. Over the course of 5 months we successfully ran 4 live events.

Improbable Defence

Assisted in the development of a small-scale AI simulation using Unreal Engine 4 and SpatialOS for the British Military's Advanced Warfighter Experiment (AWE 2021). My main responsibility was to develop a plugin that would integrate the OpenDIS library into Unreal Engine, followed by extending this plugin to support the MUSIC protocol from Discovery Machine Inc.