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What is a color space?
In which we answer every question you've ever had about digital color, and some you haven't.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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The issue of anti-cheat on Linux (2024)
Why are developers so hesitant to bring anti-cheat solutions to Linux?
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Bullfrog in the Dungeon
In January of 1995, Electronic Arts bought the prestigious British games studio Bullfrog Productions for an undisclosed sum that was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $45 million. The lives of the 35 or so people who worked at Bullfrog were transformed overnight. Peter Molyneux, the man who had built the studio’s…
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Blurry rendering of games on Mac
ProblemSolutionAffected GamesWhat Apple could do Problem I’ve submitted the issue described in this post to Apple as FB13375033. This issue has been open since September of 2023. If you game …
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SuperSight: A graphical enhancement mod for Brøderbund's "Stunts"
Clickbait disclaimer: Stunts was actually created by Distinctive Software; Brøderbund was only the publisher. But nobody heard about Distinctive , and I wanted to be sure this article does not get confused with the one about Disney's Stunt Island . Sorry about that.
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Creating the Longest Possible Ski Jump in “The Games: Winter Challenge”
An investigation into The Games; Winter Challenge
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3D Line Drawings
This is an experiment examining how to create a 3D line drawing of a scene. In this post, I will describe how this can be done by augmenting the process of generating 3D Gaussian Splats 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering , by Kerbl et al. and leveraging a process to transform photographs into…
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DrawAFish.com Postmortem
A blameful postmortem of how my viral HackerNews project got compromised by legacy passwords, missing auth, and the perils of vibe coding.
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Perfecting anti-aliasing on signed distance functions
Doing anti-aliasing on SDF is not as straightforward as it seems. Most of the time, we see people use a smoothstep with hardcoded constants, sometimes with screen space information, sometimes cryptic or convoluted formulas. Even if SDFs have the perfect mathematical properties needed for a clean anti-aliasing, the…
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Rollercoaster Tycoon (Or, MicroProse's Last Hurrah)
I think it touches on two of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. We all like doing something constructive, where we can see that we are creating something from virtually nothing, and we all have a desire to nurture or look after things. This is what the game is all about. You spend hours painstakingly…
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I designed my own fast game streaming video codec – PyroWave
Streaming gameplay from one machine to another over a network is a reasonably popular use case these days. These use cases demand very, very low latency. Every millisecond counts here. We need to:
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Programming vehicles in games
The fundamental principles needed to get a functional vehicle in your game.
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More than you wanted to know about how Game Boy cartridges work
I set out a while ago to make a Game Boy cartridge from scratch. This is not a novel goal; bootleg Game Boy cartridges have existed almost as long as the Game Boy itself has, and there are many third-party cartridges now available for purchase , or that have copyleft designs .
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The year of peak might and magic
Some passions are lifelong, but many others fade away over the course of a life, to be replaced by others. Not long after Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing, sold his company to 3DO , it started to become obvious to everyone who worked for him that the torch he carried for computer games no longer…
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Most people who buy games on Steam never play them
The amazing thing about Steam and its player base is that they buy games they aren’t going to play. More than likely the person buying your game is not going to play it.
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Algorithms for making interesting organic simulations
Article explaining simulation algorithms that produce complex organic behaviours, starting with the classic physarum algorithm from Jeff Jones.
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Running a million-board chess MMO in a single process
How one million chessboards works
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Two and a Half Years in GameDev
About 3 years ago, I joined a GameDev company, without any prior experience making games or hands-on exposure to this industry. Statistically, this time is not even enough to release a single game. But during that window, I was lucky to meet many talented people deeply involved in modern GameDev, who shared with me…
291
Stop killing games and the industry response
Recently, there's been a European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames" which by now has hit the milestone of 1'000'000 signatures. You're still encouraged to sign it if you care about its goals and are a EU citizen, since not all of those are likely to be valid signatures, but overall this is a…
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Stop Killing Games
tl;dr: If you're an EU citizen, sign the Stop Killing Games initiative here. Or, if you're in the UK, sign this petition. A month ago, I had a second video on self-hosting taken down. YouTube said it was 'harmful or dangerous content'. I appealed that, but my appeal was rejected. Luckily, I have enough reach I was…
293
EverQuest
It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.
294
Baba Is Eval
Baba is You is a sokoban puzzle game where the rules themselves have to be manipulated to win. (For the uninitiated, the store page should explain the idea best.) The level of abstraction required to solve most levels makes it a formidable reasoning benchmark, with many reasoning steps being completely orthogonal to…
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Donkey Kong Country 2 and Open Bus
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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Anticheat Update Tracking
A few years ago when I was into reverse engineering and binary analysis (and game modding), I did a lot of research into anticheats work. I was curious about tracking their updates, since that would allow me to:
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Graph Theory Applications in Video Games
A detailed look at Graph Theory and how it can be applied to video games.
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The Plot of the Phantom, a text adventure that took 40 years to finish
Gnarled JavaScript warlock, musician, cartoonist, dilettante.
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Alpha Centauri
In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else.