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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 265 posts.
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“Bad Apple” in Minecraft
Demoscene is the art of pushing computers to perform tasks they weren’t designed to handle. One recurring theme in demoscene is the shadow-art animation “Bad Apple!!”. We’ve played it on the Commodore 64, Vectrex (a unique game console utilizing only vector graphics), Impulse Tracker, and even exploited Super Mario…
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Let's talk about animation quality
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
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Conway's Gradient of Life
What happens if we start from this configuration and take a single step of the game? Here is a snapshot of the next generation:
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My first game with Carimbo, my homemade engine
https://youtu.be/nVRzCstyspQ
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ESP32: leaving love notes and entering demoscene territory (2022)
I’ve been tinkering with arduino-like platforms recently (more on the midi synth soon) and got the idea to make a small message board to leave notes to my girlfriend. This is how I ended up with a simulator, an integration with a demoscene tracker, custom tools to make palette cycling effects, having to learn CAD to…
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Most gamers prefer single-player games
It’s no secret that the bulk of AAA games market revenues come from in-game purchases , mostlyfrom live-service games. It’s also impossible to ignore that the live-service market is fiercely competitive.
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Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard.
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Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene
Boris Vallejo is an epic fantasy painter, who has had an immense influence on fantasy book covers, computer game box art, and even the demoscene. Throughout the decades, his works have often been replicated by pixel artists, leading to controversy. I rediscovered Vallejo's great work for myself, looked into the…
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Determinism in League of Legends: Implementation (2017)
Taking the League of Legends game server from a nondeterministic process to its current state required almost a full year of effort from multiple engineers. As a side benefit of this effort, we holistically improved the codebase’s robustne…
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Doom on a modified rotary phone
Doom Phone is a rotary phone that has been repurposed to control the classic first-person shooter game Doom via Bluetooth. We built it in two days during the "Internet Of Shit" hackathon organized by Technarium crew in Vilnius, Lithuania.
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GSoC'24: Differentiable Logic for Interactive Systems and Generative Music
Last summer , I participated in Google Summer of Code for the first time, working with GRAME on improving support for using the Faust audio programming language on the web .
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Twenty Years of FM Synthesis Inside Ableton Live
In 2004 I created Ableton's first software synthesiser - Operator. On the occasion of its twentieth birthday, this page provides background, a few tips and a download link to a pack with presets I and a few Ableton colleagues created for this occasion.
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What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
(This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting...
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Mitosis in the Gray-Scott model: writing shader-based chemical simulations
Use the parallel processing power of your GPU to simulate a simple chemical system that exhibits emergent behaviors
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DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future
Today the Direct3D and HLSL teams are excited to share some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released,
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WonderWorld: Interactive 3D Scene Generation from a Single Image
Project website for WonderWorld
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GPU Debug Scopes
Using RAII to attach diagnostic information to your command buffers
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D&D is Anti-Medieval
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
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The Lego Great Ball Contraption
The Great Ball Contraption is a class of machines built with Lego that transport small balls from place to place in many different ways. The otherwise pointless
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Unity is cancelling the runtime fee for games customers
After deep consultation with our community, customers, and partners, we’ve made the decision to cancel the Runtime Fee, effective immediately.
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A MiniGolf game for Palm OS
This summer, I embarked on a side project to create a brand-new Palm OS game, and after less than two months of intermittent coding, I'm excited to announce that it's ready to be released to the public!
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Carpentopod: A Walking Table Project
Back in 2008, I wrote some software for fun to generate various optimized walking mechanisms. And when I also picked up some electronics and wood working skills in more recent years, I was able to turn one of these mechanisms into an actual wireless walking wooden coffee table: the Carpentopod. This post briefly…
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Graphics Tricks from Boomers
Technical details about a recent 4096bytes Atari-STE intro, by Arnaud Carré
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The expected value of the game is positive regardless of Ballmer’s strategy
A few days ago John Graham-Cumming posted about “Steve Ballmer’s incorrect binary search interview question” which drew a lot of attention on Hacker News. The Ballmer’s favorite brain teaser goes like this:
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The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside
The Untold Story Behind a Meteoric Rise
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Building a WoW (World of Warcraft) Server in Elixir
Thistle Tea is my new World of Warcraft private server project. You can log in, create a character, run around, and cast spells to kill mobs, with everything synchronized between players as expected for an MMO. It was floating around in my head to build this for a while, since I have an incurable nostalgia for early…
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Interviewing Tim Sweeney and Neal Stephenson
Tim and Neal’s thoughts on the definition of the “Metaverse,” its technological and economic growth, Neal’s reaction on the day Facebook changed its name to Meta, the future of Fortnite , their thoughts on Apple’s Vision Pro, blockchains, and the ethics of Generative AI, plus “Snow Crash 2," a
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Godot on iPad, Toolbars, Importers, Embedding, Debugger
This is a long-due update on porting Godot to the iPad. Shortly after my last blog post covering the development work on May 29th, Apple held its WWDC 2024 conference. I went into the conference with gusto, expecting to fully embrace all the iOS 18 APIs. I already knew