Marco Corbetta

Vice President Of Technology at Cloud Imperium Games

United Kingdom

About

Over 20 years of experience in leadership roles in a diverse array of projects at the cutting edge of game technology, spanning from initiating and developing CryEngine for FarCry, developing the initial codebase literally from scratch! to CTO and VP roles, hiring, managing, growing and leading from very small to large engineering teams across various disciplines, platforms, countries and studios. This includes the successful delivery of multiple AAA titles, celebrated for their technical innovation and accomplishments, and incorporating a wide and diverse array of skills such as Computer Vision with pioneering early photogrammetry work in games with Photobump and Faceanim during Crysis1. Since 2015 we have been working together with a large team spread over 5 studios on StarEngine, building a Massive Online Universe, where amongst other contributions I have implemented from scratch in 2016 seamless planetary generation, from ground level all the way up to space without any borders or loading screens.

Experience

  • Cloud Imperium Games (11 yrs 6 mos)
    • Vice President Of Technology
      Sep 2020 - Present · 5 yrs 10 mos

    • Senior Technical Director
      Jan 2015 - Sep 2020 · 5 yrs 9 mos

      StarEngine, Star Citizen and Sq42. Developing planetary and procedural technologies for a Massive Online Universe. We are developing StarEngine, where amongst the other things I have implemented from scratch in 2016 planetary generation technology, where you can explore entire planets seamlessly from ground level all the way up to space without any borders or loading screens. Planets include outposts, caves cities etc. (also see my Encyclopedia entry)

  • Crytek (Frankfurt Am Main Area, Germany)
    • Senior Technical Director
      Jan 2008 - Dec 2014 · 7 yrs

      Crysis franchise, F2P Warface, Hunt, Ryse PC and other projects.

    • Principal Technical Director
      Sep 2007 - Jan 2012 · 4 yrs 5 mos

      As the main Technical Director of Crysis 2 and Crysis 3, my major responsibilities include final technical decisions and strategies, bringing together and driving a code base and infrastructure used by large teams across multiple studios and platforms (90+ engineers, 250+ users),growing the engineers team. Researched, mentored, supported and implemented several technology prototypes, including research on procedural generation.

    • Senior R&D
      Sep 2004 - Sep 2007 · 3 yrs 1 mo

      During Crysis1 and Crysis Warhead, I've pioneered the introduction of several computer vision techniques into a game development pipeline, including Photobump, automatic generation of high quality normal maps from 2 photos taken with an off the shelf, hand-held uncalibrated camera, and FaceAnim, automatic extraction of facial animations from a video stream, using an off-the shelf uncalibrated video camera. Additionally for Warhead I've designed and implemented a facial animation solver tool based on Vicon data. Worked on several additional areas including game code and optimizations.

  • CTO at Crytek USA
    May 2013 - Feb 2014 · 10 mos

    Hunt: Horrors of the Gilded Age

  • Software engineer at Milestone s.r.l.
    Nov 2000 - Jan 2001 · 3 mos

    Worked on Superbike world championship racing game (Xbox 1)

  • Software engineer at Prograph Research
    Jan 1999 - Nov 2000 · 1 yr 11 mos

    Worked on a Cartoon-shading style game. Wrote some Glide/3dfx demos released on the web.