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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 60 posts.

Games & Graphics
2011
32

Solving Tetris in C

Exactly one of the following statements is true. In Tetris, you can always get at least one line before losing. In Tetris, a sufficiently evil AI can always force you to lose without getting a single line, by providing bad pieces. Which one? Prove it. The setup I crea...

37

The failure of Second Life

In July of 2005, when I created my account, Second Life was the cool new thing. Moving between regions was kinda wonky, loading textures and objects was slow, and it was pretty ugly when compared to other games of the time; but it was generally assumed that these were teething issues, which would be quickly sorted out…

44

Doom engine code review

Before studying the iPhone version, it was important for me to understand how Doom engine WAS performing rendition back in 1993. After all the OpenGL port must reuse the same data from the WAD archive. Here are my notes about Doom 1993 renderer, maybe it will help someone to dive in. January 13th, 2010 : Reddit…

51

The State of HTML5 Audio

When I started to work on my JavaScript Game Engine back in October 2009, the biggest problems I encountered were with the new HTML5 Audio Element. The Canvas Element already worked nicely in all browsers that supported it at the time, albeit some were a little slow.

55

Ultima Underworld bugs

As we (Blue Sky Productions, later Looking Glass Technologies / Studios) were developing Ultima Underworld in 1991–1992, largely in a basement room in an office building in Somerville’s Davis Square, we received bug reports both from our own people and the QA team at Origin Systems, who published the game. “Our own…