The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 96 posts.
When I saw oscilloscope music demos, they amazed and inspired me. Observing a clever use of interaction between sound and an electron beam is a unique experience. Some awesome oscilloscope music videos: Youscope, Oscillofun and Khrậng. However, I could not find any beautiful oscilloscope emulators. Lines produced by…
“So what does a game designer do? Are you an artist? Do you design characters and write the story? Or no, wait, you’re a programmer?”
Retronator Do It Yourself
While teaching a web development class, I wanted to present some benchmarks that show the performance benefits of asm.js as well as WebAssembly. I was unfortunately not able to find a suitable reference. Therefore, I implemented a simplistic raytracer in JavaScript as well as in C++ with a similar code structure while…
The Metal Gear series achieved world-wide recognition when Metal Gear Solid became a best-seller on the original PlayStation almost two …
My copy of Settlers of Catan came with two normal wooden dice. To load these dice, I placed them in a small plate of water overnight, leaving the 6 side exposed.
…wherein I talk about my latest Z80 emulation adventures.
How many board configurations are there in the game of 2048? Let's try to enumerate them.
We present ObamaNet , the first architecture that generates both audio and synchronized photo-realistic lip-sync videos from any new text. Contrary to other published lip-sync approaches, ours is only composed of fully trainable neural modules and does not rely on any traditional computer graphics methods. More…
Last week I linked to this video by Skill Up , which talks about how the concept of loot boxes developed inside of EA and how we got to where we are today. This time let’s talk about it in detail.
Every Frame a Painting is officially dead. Nothing sinister; we just decided to end it.
Many years ago, sometime in the nineties, my family was having dinner at the neighbours', and their son showed me some cool DOS programs on the computer. One of the programs was a demo that drew animated flames on the screen. I was amazed! Asking what language it was written in, I was told it was Pascal.
Each of us have our own giants to face. This is a story about one of my giants. Something I never imagined could make a grown man cry, until it did. A 3D camera. No one can face your giants for you. This is a story, not a walkthrough. Expect no useful information. For that I recommend 50 Game Camera Mistakes by…
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
This is part 1 of the “How Unreal Renders a Frame” series, you can access part 2 and part 3 as well. I was looking around the Unreal source the other day and inspired by some excellent …
This is Part 1 of a series examining techniques used in game graphics and how those techniques fail to deliver a visually appealing end result. See Part 0 for a more thorough explanation of the ide…
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.
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…
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…
How many board configurations are there in the game of 2048? Let's estimate using combinatorics.
A sweaty game pointing toward the future of computing.
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:
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…
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; ...
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…
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.
