Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 272 posts.
A long time ago, when I was a college undergrad, I spent some time working on computer video games. This was in the 8-bit PC era, when the gaming hardware was almost impossibly slow by today’s standards.
I have kept myself busy with the Game Engine Black Books and I have plenty of news. Most importantly, they have been revised. The DOOM book is now in version 1.1 while the WOLF3D book is entering v2.1. And there is more.
Last week, I released A Snake’s Tale on iOS , Android , Windows, Mac, and Linux .
I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATR). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK)…
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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.
Overview A vulnerability and a separate logic error exist in the gstreamer 0.10.x player for NSF music files. Combined, they allow for ve...
This tutorial is free and open source, and all code uses the MIT license - so you are free to do with it as you like. My hope is that you will enjoy the tutorial, and make great games!
Note: The demos below require WebGL2 support . If you are running a browser without WebGL 2 support, user “petercooper” on Hacker News has helpfully recorded a video and GIFs and for me.
In this series of articles, I aim to demonstrate how OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX work by writing a simplified clone from scratch. Surprisingly, many people struggle with the initial hurdle of learning a 3D graphics API. To help with this, I have prepared a short series of lectures, after which my students are…
I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app . For a taste, see also this screencast:
There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.
Picture this: Toward the end of the development cycle, your game crawls, but you don’t see any obvious hotspots in the profiler. The culprit? Random memory access patterns and constant cache misses. In an attempt to improve performance, you try to parallelize parts of the code, but it takes heroic efforts, and, in the…
L19 = 208168199381979984699478633344862770286522453884530548425639456820927419612738015378525648451698519643907259916015628128546089888314427129715319317557736620397247064840935
In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he…
Learn the optimal strategy for playing Hangman.
Taking over Pokemon Yellow from the inside.
A sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing.
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
One of my hobbies is using a pen plotter to make computer-generated drawings. If you really like them, you can buy one!
Can you use math to escape from, what seems like, an impossible prison escape problem based on coins and a chessboard?
Sandspiel is a falling sand game I built in late 2018. I really enjoyed writing this game, and wanted to put into writing some of my goals, design decisions, and learnings from that process. If you’re reading this but haven’t played sandspiel, you should probably go try it !
In 1998 Looking Glass Studios released the stealth game Thief: The Dark Project . This was just as 3D hardware acceleration was taking off, so due to the development cycle it didn't use hardware acceleration; it was a purely software-rendered game.
Neural Radiance Field training can be accelerated through the use of grid-based representations in NeRF's learned mapping from spatial coordinates to colors and volumetric density. However, these grid-based approaches lack an explicit understanding of scale and therefore often introduce aliasing, usually in the form…
graph theory, music theory
are they good or bad?
