John Blackwood
Co-Owner And Developer Designer at Blacktopp Studios Inc.
Omaha, Nebraska, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Blackwood is a C++ game systems engineer and co-owner of Blacktopp Studios with 14 years of experience building game engines, tools, and subsystems from the ground up. Based in Omaha, he leads development of the Mezzanine engine, contributes patches to core libraries like SDL, Bullet3D and Ogre3D, and has a practical knack for reading and improving third-party source code beyond APIs. He has applied that expertise at scale as a Frostbite UI engineer at EA, porting rendering technology and enhancing creator workflows. An open-source contributor to the widely used Bullet Physics SDK, he’s implemented low-level constraint accessors and routine fixes that improve physics interoperability. Driven by a passion for game communities, he shares his engine work to both help others and attract collaborative problem-solving.
14 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Papillion-Lavista High School
English
Github Skills (10)
simulations10
simulation10
c-language10
physics10
game-development10
cprogramming-language10
kinematics10
simulator10
animate9
animation9
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
bulletphysics/bullet3
May 2015 - May 2015
Bullet Physics SDK: real-time collision detection and multi-physics simulation for VR, games, visual effects, robotics, machine learning etc.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 2 PRs, 1 comment in 22 days
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the Bullet Physics SDK by implementing "get" methods for various parameters and data related to the `btConeTwistConstraint`, and the `btGeneric6DofConstraint`, and the `btHingeConstraint`, and `btPoint2PointConstraint`, and `btSliderConstraint`. These fetch methods provided access to constraint-specific data. The user also made minor corrections, fixing bracket placements and capitalizing errors.
pybulletbullet-physicssimulationsimulatorreal-time
BlackToppStudios/Mezz_Filesystem
Jul 2019 - Mar 2023
A collection of local filesystem access and query utilities.
Contributions:10 PRs, 107 pushes, 12 branches in 3 years 8 months
querylocal-filesystemdirectoriesfilesystemutilities
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