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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.

Games & Graphics
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1531

Ken's Academy Award: Noise and Turbulence

In 1997 I received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for work I had done on procedural texture. For example, the NYU Torch on the right is made entirely from procedural textures (except for the text along the bottom). The flame, background, and metal and marble handle…

1532

Spikey Spheres

A word of warning ... I'm presenting here something called an analogy. It's not perfect, it has problems, it's not exact, but there are ways in which it can aid your thinking. I'm giving a way of visualising high-dimensional spheres, a way that has its limitations, but which can help avoid making mistakes based on…

1538

Cartoon Laws of Physics

Cartoon Law I Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.

1544

HTML Kong

There are two things I’ve always wanted to try in HTML : generating a photorealistic image using CSS , and creating an interactive game without the need for JavaScript. HTML Kong is the end result of those two ambitions – a reproduction of the Game & Watch video game, Donkey Kong , using just HTML and CSS .

1545

Writing for Half-Life

(File dated November 9, 1998) PREFACE: Another file from the same disk with the Nihilanth sketches, this one, if it is to believed, written the day after we shipped Half-Life. I do believe it because the file’s creation date is indeed November 9, 1998, and I am not l33t enough to know how to fake […]

1553

Sierra Gets Creative

Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience , Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore…