My name is Dominic Szablewski. I build games, experiment with JavaScript and occasionally tinker with low-level C.
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Introducing QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression. All single-threaded, no SIMD. It's also stupidly simple .
tl;dr: high_impact is small game engine for 2D action games. It's written in C, compiles to Windows, Mac and Linux as well as to WASM for the Web. It's “inspired by” my original Impact JavaScript game engine from 2010. The name high_impact is a nod to a time when C was considered a high level language.
Two years ago, I was Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason . I have since found a reason: making a new N64 game!
I participated in this year's js13kGames , a JavaScript game development competition with a file size limit of 13kb, including code, assets and everything else. My entry was Underrun , a twin stick shooter using WebGL.
Inspired by a blog post to run your own cloud gaming service which uses a VPN and Steam's In-Home Streaming, I thought I could do this, too, but in the browser.
Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games. This problem was new; it was introduced with the iOS 4.2.1 update and wasn't present on older iOS versions.
Like last year with Underrun , I participated in this year's js13kGames – a JavaScript game development competition with a file size limit of 13kb, including code, assets and everything else. My entry was Voidcall , a Real-time Strategy game.
Last month I announced a toy project called QOI — the Quite OK Image Format . It losslessly compresses RGB and RGBA images to a similar size of PNG, while offering a 20x-50x speedup in compression and 3x-4x speedup in decompression.
A few years ago I started to work on an MPEG1 Video decoder, completely written in JavaScript. Now, I finally found the time to clean up the library, improve its performance, make it more error resilient and modular and add an MP2 Audio decoder and MPEG-TS demuxer. This makes this library not just an MPEG decoder, but…
My HTML5 Game Engine Impact is now ready. It took some time, but I think it was worth it. I'm proud of what I have achieved and I hope you'll like it too.
The source code for the classic PSX launch title wipEout was leaked in 2022. A few month ago I finally sat down to take a look at it. The result is a (nearly) complete rewrite that compiles to Windows, Linux, macOS and WASM.
In 1995 one of my all time favorite video games was released: the original WipEout for PlayStation. The brand new PlayStation produced 3D graphics previously unseen on living room TVs and WipEout exploited its capabilities like no other game at the time. It was one of the pioneering titles of the fifth generation…
Did you ever wonder why explosions and other effects looked so much cooler on the original PlayStation than they did on the Nintendo 64?
Audio formats typically fall into one of three categories: “lossless” , “complicated” or “bad” . After developing a simple image format last year, I tried to come up with an audio format that fits neither of these categories.
The following is an email I sent to John Carmack of Id Software after I had watched his Quakecon 2012 Keynote Speech
Less talk, more action – Apple just approved two of my JavaScript games for the AppStore: Biolab Disaster and Drop . Both are free; go check them out. You can also play them in your browser here and here .
When I built my Instant Webcam App, I was searching for solutions to stream live video from the iPhone's Camera to browsers. There were none.
I know you're waiting for the release of the Impact Game Engine , and I promise you, it's coming. I just get distracted too easily. So here's my game Biolab Disaster running on the iPhone 3GS with 60 frames per second:
tl;dr: pl_synth is a tiny music synthesizer for C & JS and an editor (“tracker”) to create instruments and arrangements.
When I started to work on my JavaScript Game Engine back in October 2009, the biggest problems I encountered were with the new HTML5 Audio Element. The Canvas Element already worked nicely in all browsers that supported it at the time, albeit some were a little slow.
For the last ten years or so, I used to turn on my PC when I came home from school or work and shut it down again right before I went to bed. So most of the time when my PC is running, I'm awake. I've also been idling in IRC for as long as I had Internet – when my PC is running, so is my IRC client.
Two weeks ago I filed a bug report on Digg.com , explaining several XSS vulnerabilities and bugs I found. Some of these were (and some still are!) very critical. A day later, I got an automated response to my report: