Hi! I am Seppe Volkaerts
Software developer
I am a student at the Thomas More University in Geel, where I am studying a bachelor’s degree in Applied Computer Science. Prior to my current study, I already finished a bachelor’s degree in Electromechanics.
I am a person who likes to learn new things, solve technical problems, develop software, design graphics, etc. I like good and interesting challenges.
Since my first Erasmus to the Netherlands in 2017, during my studies in Electromechanics, I have grown a lot more interested in international environments. This is the reason that I decided to do it again, this time I went to Finland (2019) and for my internship to Brazil (2020). In my spare time, I am also working on some projects in international context.
Atlas Copco, Wilrijk
Atlas Copco, Wilrijk
Elektro Fiver, Schriek
Thomas More - Campus Geel
These are my current studies where I specialized myself in application development.
Thomas More - Campus De Nayer, Sint-Katelijne-Waver
Sint-Lambertusinstituut, Heist-op-den-Berg
Terre is a proxy server for the game Terraria which adds support for multi-world and cross-play between mobile and desktop clients. The official game and servers are limited to a single world per server or client instance at the same time, with this proxy it is possible to have multiple instances and switch between them. The proxy makes it also possible for mobile and desktop clients to play together without the problems of having different versions or limits with maximum players.
The diagram gives a small overview of the server structure with Terre compared to without.
Terre also provides a modding API which allows the functionality of the proxy to be expanded. For example, creating portals to jump between the worlds, filtering chat messages, etc. The software is written in Kotlin targeting the JVM. It is designed with scalability in mind, the software basically removes the limit of maximum players per (proxy) server, so scalability is an important factor.
Terre does not require any modifications to the official server software for it to work. Everything is done by intercepting packets from the client and backing servers (worlds) and sending packets to the client and servers.
The following video demonstrates a setup with Terre which has two servers (worlds) configured, and using a command to jump between them.
Lantern is an open source project which re-implements the server-side software of Minecraft: Java Edition. A custom implementation gives greater control of the functionalities of the server, which is great for server-side modding. The goal of the project is not to completely remake the game, but instead create a new and unique experience.
It is a very interesting project to work on, it has been in development since 2015. This is one of the biggest projects I have worked on, and it is nowhere being finished. There are so many aspects going from reverse engineering the official protocol, generating infinite worlds, creating libraries to be used for the project, a project website, etc.
I work on it mostly by myself, but sometimes other developers contribute to it because of the open source nature. Lantern also implements an API designed by SpongePowered for server-side modding. I am also part of the Sponge development team.
A strategic and action based mobile game in a dark environment.
The Dark Forest is a mobile video game that I developed with 2 fellow students during my studies in Finland. There was another Belgian student and a Finnish student in my group. The goal was to develop a game, we were free to to choose the topic. But we had to think of how the game could be monetized, like through in-game transactions, freemium model, etc.
The idea behind the game is to strategically move through the level, the movement of the player can be done by drawing the path it has to move. The hard part about the game is that there are enemies roaming around the level, and they only need to hit you once to kill you.
The game was developed using Unity. I already used Unity before for some smaller experiments, but I never made a mobile game before. The drawing mechanics were interesting to work on and I also dived into the animation system to animate the characters.
The following video gives a small demonstration of the game, the video was recorded using my laptop which has a touch screen. The red lines are mainly there for debugging, but it gives an idea of how the drawing system works.
Porygen is an infinite world generator based on polygons, more specifically voronoi cells. These voronoi cells combined with noise generators provide interesting ways to generate worlds or maps for games or other purposes. This project is inspired by the blogpost Polygonal Map Generation for Games, this blogpost gives an idea about where I want to go with this project, but there is a fundamental problem that it is for finite worlds.
Porygen is still in development, but a first important step is already completed. The first step was the creation of infinite voronoi cells and processing them. The generator has also a property that for a given seed, the result must always be the same for a specific area. So if you use the same seed to regenerate the area, it must be exactly the same.
The following images are a few renders I generated. The first one is a height map, a noise generator is used to determine whether a cell is above or below water level, then the distance to the ocean and land is calculated (darker is further away from coastline). The green lines are rivers that start from the ocean and go land inwards. The second image is the moisture map, the moisture is calculated by combining a noise generator which provides a base moisture and whether there are surrounding rivers or ocean.
If those images were to be combined, in combination with another temperature map. It is possible to distribute biomes across cells.
I am planning to expand this project in the future, so that these world generators can be designed through a node editor on a website. The project is currently written in Kotlin targeting multi-platform, this means that the project can be used in JVM projects, JS projects and native projects.
I went on an exchange to Brazil for my internship, I arrived there the 25th of February. The internship took place at the PUC Minas University in Belo Horizonte. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, I returned back to Belgium after being there for roughly a month. When I arrived back home, the internship continued remotely.
There was a lot of freedom in deciding which project to do. There was an interesting idea where you could use augmented reality to see information about aircraft that are flying. This became an mobile application which I worked on with a fellow student, the application is named AirVision. The primary target group is the students of the aviation faculty, it provides them a way to learn interactively about aircraft. But in general can it be used by anyone interested in aircraft. The project was expanded to also include a map where you can see surrounding aircraft.
The development of the application was split into two parts. The front-end which is the application on your mobile device, and the back-end which provides the data used by the application through a REST API. I focused on the development of the back-end and my fellow student on the front-end, but I also helped out on the front-end where needed.
The following list gives a brief summary about things I personally learned during the development. We were free to choose which technologies we could use and this provided us good learning opportunity.
More information about these topics, and the project in general can be found in the realization document.
