About

I’m Elan Ruskin, a game developer at Valve Corporation, purveyor of fine entertainment products such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. This is where I post my thoughts on game programming and how to write code that runs fast and looks good.

Much of my work at Valve focuses on optimizing for the XBox 360 and other dedicated game consoles. In 2008 I delivered a GDC talk titled How To Go From PC To Console Development Without Killing Your Studio which was based on Valve’s experience with transforming the largely PC-centric Source engine to a crossplatform one, and on my own experience with PS2 and Xbox1 platform games at other studios. I created this blog to answer questions about that talk and explore the topic in more detail.

Before Valve, I’ve worked at a variety of studios on titles such as Jak 3 and Thief: Deadly Shadows. I hold a B.S.E in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.E.T. from Carnegie Mellon University.

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2 Comments

  1. Hai Nguyen says:

    Hi Elan,

    I’ve really enjoyed reading your blog, it’s very informative. I especially found the your analysis of square roots and virtual functions useful. I know you’re super busy. But I was wondering if perhaps you could shed some light on how expf is implemented. I’ve searched the web and still haven’t found a reliable break down of how this function along with its partner in crime pow are implemented. Any thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

    - Hai

    September 22, 2010, 12:04 am

  2. tech ramblings » Blog Archive » Socorro’s Community says:

    [...] Software, the makers of Half Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal, among other awesome games. Recently Elan Ruskin, a game developer at Valve, gave a talk at the Game Developers Conference about Valve’s use [...]

    March 21, 2011, 7:41 am

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