The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 158 posts.
Creating animations for robotic characters is very challenging due to the constraints imposed by their physical nature. In particular, the combination of fast motions and unavoidable structural deformations leads to mechanical oscillations that negatively affect their performances. Our goal is to automatically…
As seems to be happening annually, due to a short summer lull, we decided to combine the June and July Progress Reports. As you may have noticed, we're a few days into August at this point and things ended up running a bit late. That's actually a consequence of how we do these Progress Reports - we sometimes will go…
This is a simple ray tracer written in uLisp, using the uLisp graphics extensions to plot on a colour TFT display. The scene contains five spheres and a plane and can be run on any of the following boards that include an integral TFT display:
Open-source animation tool will be officially adopted by Ubisoft Animation Studio in Paris to create series inspired by Ubisoft worlds.
As it’s the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, I thought this would be a great opportunity to live code a demonstration of using my new compiler to write a simple lunar lander game… but first, I’m going to port the compiler to generate code for an actual lunar lander. Yes, my target platform is the…
Diablo1 is a classic 1996 hack and slash rogue-like. several fans took it upon themselves to reverse-engineer the source code. I began a week long deep dive into how exactly did lead developer, Dav…
UW researchers created a method for two people help a third person solve a task using only their minds.
Get those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers! I've been reading a lot about Anthem. It's that gigantic, mega-budget looter-shooter fr...
The vertical scrolling effect in the original “The Legend of Zelda” relies on manipulating the NES graphics hardware in a manner that was likely unintended by its designers.
(Non-clickbait title: building a 4-bit adder in Cities:Skylines.)
The Sierra Online of the 1980s and very early 1990s excelled at customer relations perhaps more than anything else. Through the tours of their offices (which they offered to anyone who cared to make the trip to rural Oakhurst, California), the newsletter they published (which always opened with a folksy editorial from…
How we got here After Apple released its (soon-to-be) previous generation Mac Pro, it probably didn't take long for them to realize they had a trash can…
This is where I write about the stuff that I've been working on.
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
Do adventure games have dead ends? The author of The Teeny Tiny Mansion proves the absence of dead ends in that game via formal verification (in particular, with the help of the cbmc model-checking program ). Here I’ll demonstrate how to prove the same thing via Markov theory. The Markov approach requires more…
A complete rundown of the entire process behind designing and building a new map for the world of Cogmind, and explaining how it integrates with gameplay.
I was thinking recently that here in the West we take our video game history largely for granted. Look back at the Golden Age of video games, and it’s apparent that we had it pretty good R…
Game Builder is an experimental game-building sandbox available now for free on Steam for PC and Mac.
23114, 584, 46931, these three numbers were used to create the entire universe for Elite .
Posted by Karol Kurach, Research Lead and Olivier Bachem, Research Scientist, Google Research, Zürich The goal of reinforcement learning (RL) is ...
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
A new algorithm allows video editors to modify talking head videos as if they were editing text – copying, pasting, or adding and deleting words.
If you haven’t read the other posts, go now: Part 1: the state manager Part 2: the graphic initialization Part 3: the engine entity We have a state manager now but a game without graphic re…
The past few months have been quite hectic with a slew of gigantic changes requiring lengthy articles alongside them. These big features all hitting together seems to have brought up a talking point in the community would be irresponsible to ignore. Everyone wants to know when Dolphin 6.0 is coming. After all, Dolphin…
Depth of Field from random sampling
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
