“The Martian” + Starship
“The Martian” by Andy Weir, and its film adaptation directed by Ridley Scott, remain some of my all time favorite science fiction works. Way back in the day I wrote a technical commenta…
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
“The Martian” by Andy Weir, and its film adaptation directed by Ridley Scott, remain some of my all time favorite science fiction works. Way back in the day I wrote a technical commenta…
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…
Since “updates” can usually get lost in the noise, the most recent updates are put first.
The success of an open source browser game called Friday Night Funkin tells us where "instant games" might go. Hint: we've been here before.
This week twenty-five years ago, Quake broke new ground in game engine realism. It was one of the first commercial games to have fully texture mapped 3D scenes rendered in real-time, with pre-computed lightmaps adding an extra layer of atmosphere.
I recently spent some time going through the amazing nand2tetris course, and assignment #9 is to implement something with the Jack programming language that runs on the Hack computer. My friend encouraged me to try writing a raytracer, which is an algorithm that generates physically realistic images by simulating…
This entry focuses on Wube Software's long-running Factorio Friday Facts; a seven-year labor of love documenting the creation of the titular video game.
This is the story of me trying to win a game of chess against my brother. A single freaking game. What’s so special about it? Am I good at chess? Not at all. Did I improve at my game in the process? Also no. Is it a story about “the journey rather than the destination”? Not really. Did I at least have fun in the…
POKEGB: A gameboy emulator that only plays Pokémon Blue, in 62 lines of c++. source: https://t.co/AGt7RUTr9H pic.twitter.com/o0BUUmzNOt
After showing an impressive demo last year and unleashing recently with the UE5 preview, Nanite is all the rage these days. I just had to go in and have some fun trying to figure it out and explain…
The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…
Native line rendering in WebGL leaves a lot to be desired. There's inconsistency in the implementation, so you can't trust that the line width you want will be available to you, for example. It's also missing some pretty important features, like line joins and caps. For these reasons, quite a bit of work has been done…
A post about lockstep, rollback, and what it takes to prepare your game for future netcode integration. Continue reading →
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
In communist Czechoslovakia, a network of teenage hackers discovers that text games are a completely uncensored medium.
An old article, now removed due to being an old time capsule.
Well, somebody had to find it.
Noise is an indispensable tool for creative coding. We use it to generate all kinds of organic effects like clouds, landscapes and contours. Or to move and distort objects with a more lifelike behaviour.
Wake up and smell the bullcrap.
Author's Note After Release I'm really blown away by the reception of this article. It has spread far wider than I could have ever imagined. The many comments and discussions it has prompted that essentially confirm what I believe is truth by not just fellow engineers but many
When the best-loved makers of text adventures met the best-loved sci-fi satirist of the decade, the result was an unforgettable classic of interactive fiction.
Crusader Kings III is a pretty impressive game. It’s impressive not only for its official content, but also for its extensive modding…
A young writer crosses paths with the designer of Zork, sparking a surprisingly experimental game where you experience reality from six unique perspectives.
In 2020, I started writing a 3D game engine from scratch in C++. This is a post about how I added skeletal animation to it. Drake is in it, so buckle up.
The sixtyforgan is a Commodore 64 equipped with a spring reverb, featuring the keyboard layout of a chromatic button accordion.