Kris Lang

Kris Lang is the current head of technology at Relic Entertainment. Prior to joining Relic, Kris spent five years at Sony Online Entertainment, where they served as the Client Technical Director for the Game Technology Group. In this role, Kris was responsible for creating the development roadmap for core client technology, evaluating middleware and tools, and working with game teams and tech directors to develop company wide technology. They also worked closely with executives to ensure that technical decisions were supporting business needs.

Prior to their role as Client Technical Director, Kris served as the Rendering & Client Lead for the Game Technology Group at Sony Online Entertainment. In this role, Kris was responsible for designing and developing a new cross platform rendering engine, acting as a consultant for rendering programmers on game teams, and overseeing and collaborating with senior programmers on the design and development of core client systems, art pipeline, and toolchain. Kris was also the primary art contact on the rendering team and worked extensively with the art directors to extend existing art workflows and develop new tools.

Before joining Sony Online Entertainment, Kris spent several years as a Senior Rendering Programmer for the Game Technology Group and various games. During this time, Kris created the majority of the art pipeline, created most of the surface shaders currently used by in-development games at DBG, introduced the idea of a detail normal map allowing multiple secondary normal maps in a single draw call with DX9 hardware, created a novel set of basis functions and efficient tangent space morph target packing used for simple damage modeling, created a vast tinting system for customization, modified the existing physically-based BRDF to support both metallic and dielectric reflection, added a very simple but fast transmittance model, implemented the entire HDR pipeline including tone mapping and bloom, implemented pseudo-volumetric particle shaders emulating participating media, implemented general effects shaders, and implemented a hands-off but steerable automatic LOD generation system.

Kris Lang reports to Justin Dowdeswell, General Manager. Kris Lang works with David Littman - VP, Production, Curtis Terry - Director, Finance, and Heidi Eaves - Chief Operating Officer.