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How long is that Bézier?
Blog of Raph Levien.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 117 posts.
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How DOOM fire was done
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM features a whole chapter about DOOM console ports and the challenges they encountered. The utter failure of the 3DO, the difficulties of the Saturn due to its affine texture mapping, and the amazing "reverse-engineering-from- scratch" by Randy Linden on Super Nintendo all have rich…
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Deciphering the postcard-sized raytracer
"He's done it again!" was my first thought as I looked at the back of a postcard sized Pixar flier [1] which was covered in code. In the lower right corner, the blob of statements and expressions had been signed by none other than Andrew Kensler. For those who are not familiar with him, Andrew is the programmer who…
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Star Control II
In this vaguely disturbing picture of Toys for Bob from 1994, Paul Reiche is at center and Fred Ford to the left. Ken Ford, who joined shortly after Star Control II was completed, is to the right.
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Path Tracing vs. Ray Tracing (2016)
Path tracing is all the rage in the offline rendering space these days. From Cycles to SuperFly (based on the open source Cycles) to Octane, most new rendering engines seem to be using this technology. Sometimes referred to as “unbiased, physically correct rendering” what is path tracing, how is it different to ray…
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Bastard Tetris
“For people who enjoy swearing at their computer, Bastet (short for Bastard Tetris) is an attractive alternative to Microsoft Word.” (From http://hublog.hubmed.org)
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Response to 'Reasons why Lisp games suffer'
I haven’t been on r/lisp for a week or so due to being rather low on free time as we try and get an alpha of our game out of the door. When I did pop back I saw ‘5 Reasons why Lisp Games Suffer and proposed solution’ which I thought would be interesting, but what I found was bizarre and misinforming.
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Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D, 2nd Edition
The Game Engine Black Book Wolfenstein 3D, 2nd Edition has shipped. It is available at the following locations: - Amazon ( US , UK , FR , CA , and many more). - Google PlayStore ( here ). All errata which readers kindly took the time to report have been addressed. Adrian Carmack has retired from anything related to id…
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How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
After I shipped the DOOM Black Book , I took some vacation in Japan where I was able to play Ikaruga on a real arcade at Taito HEY in Akihabara. The experience reignited my interest in SEGA's ultimate video game console, the Dreamcast. There is a lot of documentation available online which made the studying process…
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Reflections on DOOM's Development
The year of 1993 was a magical one, more so than any other. It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for
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Making Games in Lisp with Hypergiant and Chicken Scheme
Hypergiant is a library for CHICKEN Scheme that tries to make it easy to make efficient games. 1 The idea behind it is the belief that games should start with a prototype that should take minimal effort, but these should be extensible to be whatever you want the final product to be. So Hypergiant attempts to find the…
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The Game Engine Black Book: Doom
The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM is now available for purchase. It is being released exactly 25 years after DOOM.zip was first published on the University of Wisconsin FTP server in December 1993. You can get it at the following locations: - Amazon ( USA , France , UK , and many more). - Google Books ( here with no…
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Great Adventure-Game Puzzles
This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone — might…
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Secrets of smooth Béziers
I haven’t posted here much lately, and I admit, it’s because I’ve gotten sidetracked thinking about curves again. I did my PhD thesis on curves, so spent years thinking about them, then put that on hold for a while, aside from some work in crunching font file sizes down.
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Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune
Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he…
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Designing and building an FPGA sprite-based graphics accelerator (2014)
A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…
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The Making Of Dust (2003)
For a long while Dust was the world's most-played Counter-Strike map and it's still the one for which I am best known. Yet few players realise it was the product of thievery and luck...
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The Graphic Art of Incredibles 2
I remember seeing the first Incredibles film in college with a few friends. We went on opening night and the theater was packed. I remember thinking that the way the movie opened with the old film footage of a younger Mr Incredible, Elastigirl and Frozone being interviewed was such a different way t
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Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki [video]
After he retired from making feature length films in 2013, legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki started work on a short film using CGI animation techniques, which
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Atari Asteroids: Creating a Vector Arcade Classic
As Atari’s best-selling arcade game of all time, Asteroids was literally a game changer. Released in December 1979, it was responsible for catapulting Atari into mainstream public consciousne…
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Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series
Explaining how quaternions, a four-dimensional number system, describe 3d rotation.
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Quest for Glory III and IV
The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I . By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.
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Understanding Quaternions
Quaternions are used to represent an orientation in 3D space. This article attempts to demystify the complexities of quaternions.
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Chess Game Using Racket’s Pasteboard
The Racket GUI library provides an "editor toolkit" which can be used to implement programs that use an interactive graphical canvas where objects can be moved around with the mouse. This toolkit has good reference documentation, however this documentatio...
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The Big List of RPG Plots
What follows is a scrap of trivia . . . my collection of RPG plots , in abstract form. I built this by examining the premises of hundreds o...
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Fixing a Bug in an 18 Year Old Shockwave Game
The story of changing a single byte