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Show HN: Metaballs
Generating gooey metaballs as a single SVG path — locating the tangent points between two circles, spreading and curving the connector with polar coordinates, and handling overlap, after Hiroyuki Sato's Illustrator script.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
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Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Heads up: This post is going to have some rougher language than what I normally post. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things teenagers type into videogame text parsers, which means we’re going to get into some naughty words and otherwise unusual subject matter for this blog. I don’t know why I’m warning…
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Calculating the Distance Between Points in Wrap Around (Toroidal) Space
Let’s say you are trying to find the distance between two points in 2D, but that these points are in a universe that “wraps around” like old video games – leaving the screen…
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The Mathematics of 2048: Counting States with Combinatorics
How many board configurations are there in the game of 2048? Let's estimate using combinatorics.
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Laser Socks – a sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing
A sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing.
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Game Engine Black Book Postmortem
I am pleased to announce that the Game Engine Black Book about Wolfenstein 3D has shipped. It is 316 pages, full color and made of three parts describing the hardware of 1991, id Software tools, and the game engine internals. You can read a preview on Google Books and buy it here:
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No Man’s Sky One Year Later
It’s been a year since I last played the captivating , frustrating , and ultimately disappointing No Man’s Sky. There have been some large updates since then, and so I thought now would be a good time to come back and see how the game has evolved. These columns are going to run through September, so you’re basically…
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Your load is too heavy: Zork deep reading
This past weekend a screenshot went around Twitter (my part of Twitter at least!) weight = num_items * Max_held_mult; if( weight <= random(100) ) ?label8; print "You're holding too many things already!"; new_line; rfalse; .label8; ...
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FizzleFade
I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…
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IOCCC Flight Simulator
The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.
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Metal Slug 2 – reducing the slowdown (2015)
UPDATE 15/05 - DO NOT BUY FROM PEOPLE PRODUCING MODIFIED CARTS, the readme file specifically bans making money from this patch. Since this work is given away entirely for free, a modified cart is worth the same as an unmodified one. If you buy from someone making carts to sell, then you're support
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If I Made Another Monkey Island (2013)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997)
This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.
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Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D
How was Wolfenstein 3D made and what were the secrets of its speed? How did id Software manage to turn a machine designed to display static images for word processing and spreadsheet applications into the best gaming platform in the world, capable of running games at seventy frames per seconds? If you have ever asked…
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CHIP-8 in Common Lisp
In the previous post we looked at how to emulate a CHIP-8 CPU with Common Lisp. But a CPU alone isn't much fun to play, so in this post we'll add a screen to the emulator with Qt .
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Kerbal Space Oddities
This was my first successful craft, which lifted off, flew a short distance from the pad, then (after several botched attempts and the deaths of several Kerbal pilots) touched down.
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Dice-O-Matic hopper and elevator (2009)
Introducing the Dice-O-Matic mark II, now generating the die rolls on GamesByEmail.com. It is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day.
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GPU Performance for Game Artists
Performance is everybody’s responsibility, no matter what your role. When it comes to the GPU, 3D programmers have a lot of control over performance; we can optimize shaders, trade image quality for performance, use smarter rendering techniques… we have plenty of tricks up our sleeves. But there’s one thing we don’t…
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Indie games don't make money
At the time of writing, a quick check of stats on steamspy for player unknown:battlegrounds reveals this chart:
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Modifying Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 to run on three immersive monitors
How I modified DOSBox and the original Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 from 1989 to run on my immersive multi-display flight simulator set up.