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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 105 posts.
2D Terrain generation using midpoint displacement
Today I will present how to implement in Python a simple yet effective algorithm for proceduraly generating 2D landscapes. It is called Midpoint Displacement (or Diamond-square algorithm,…
Deep Learning Enables You to Hide Screen When Your Boss Is Approaching
Discover how advanced deep learning technologies offer revolutionary screen privacy solutions in the workplace. Learn to safeguard your digital space with ease.
CHIP-8 in Common Lisp: The CPU
A while back I decided to try to write a Game Boy emulator in Common Lisp based on this series of articles . I made some good progress but eventually got bogged down because I was trying to learn a bunch of complex new things at once:
Wolfenstein 3D – Gameboy cartridge with co-processor
Source code and hardware schematics are available on Github: https://github.com/agranlund/wolf
Making an MSX font
I figured, for this and future posts I have planned about MSX, that I wanted an MSX font face. I browsed the web a bit for one and found nothing that I liked...
Happy 23rd Birthday, DOOM
It's that time of year again, where we say Happy Birthday to one of my most favorite games, DOOM! Every year I try to reveal something about the game's development that hasn't been documented to death. Believe me, DOOM has been documented more than most games. But never fear, I have so much stuff th
Magic Leap – Separating Magic and Reality
The Goal – Explain What is Magic Leap Doing Magic Leap has a way of talking about what they hope to do someday and not necessarily what they can do anytime soon. Their patent applications ar…
Lessons Learned from Shenzhen I/O
Shenzhen I/O is a brilliant game. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a game about programming micro-controllers. It distills programming down to the fun parts, removing the inertia, …
Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata
Last time we looked at generating random dungeons for video games using the Drunkard’s Walk algorithm. The Drunkard’s Walk is fun to play with, and often generates cool levels, but it’s also pretty unreliable. That’s not good enough for my purposes: I want to reliably generate big, open, cave-like maps, with lots of…
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…
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…
Compromising a Linux desktop using 6502 opcodes on the NES
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...
Not Your Problem
Struggling to complete your game? Discover practical strategies to overcome distractions, stay focused, and manage your game development project effectively.
Every Version of Voxel Quest
I've been told I'm good at hiding bodies... pic.twitter.com/ZZBHOvzOKt
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.
Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
One night in May of 1996 I was bored and wanted to play Tetris very badly... At the time I was an exchange student. I owned a broken laptop which wasn't of much use but I also had access to my host family's 486 desktop computer that came with MsDOS
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 .
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 […]
Pixels and voxels, the long answer
Retronator Do It Yourself
So You Want to Be a Hero?
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.