New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,925 posts.
Twenty years later I wrote a Tetris again
One night in May of 1996 I was bored and wanted to play Tetris very badly... At the time I was an exchange student. I owned a broken laptop which wasn't of much use but I also had access to my host family's 486 desktop computer that came with MsDOS
HTML Kong
There are two things I’ve always wanted to try in HTML : generating a photorealistic image using CSS , and creating an interactive game without the need for JavaScript. HTML Kong is the end result of those two ambitions – a reproduction of the Game & Watch video game, Donkey Kong , using just HTML and CSS .
X-Plane 11 Coming This Holiday Season
The future of flight simulation is now. X-Plane 11 is the detailed, realistic, and modern simulator you’ve been waiting for. […]
Writing for Half-Life
(File dated November 9, 1998) PREFACE: Another file from the same disk with the Nihilanth sketches, this one, if it is to believed, written the day after we shipped Half-Life. I do believe it because the file’s creation date is indeed November 9, 1998, and I am not l33t enough to know how to fake […]
Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud
Throughout my career as an engineer, I’ve had a hand in numerous product launches that grew to millions of users. User adoption typically happens gradually over several months, with new features and architectural changes scheduled over relatively long periods of time. Never have I taken part in anything close to the…
Pixels and voxels, the long answer
Retronator Do It Yourself
So You Want to Be a Hero?
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.
August 2016 Lisp Game Jam Postmortem
The August 2016 Lisp Game Jam just wrapped up at the end of last week. I had some free time so I decided to take part, but I did something a bit different. Instead of making a new game I ported an existing one ( Silt ) to Common Lisp.
What every coder should know about gamma
Personal blog of John Novak
How Doom 2016 Renders a Frame
DOOM pioneered fundamental changes in game design and mechanics back in 1993, it was a world-wide phenomenon which propelled to fame iconic figures …
Booting the Final GameCube Game
Every single GameCube game can at least boot in Dolphin 5.0. Except one. Star Wars: The Clone Wars and its complex way of using the PowerPC Memory Management Unit rendered it unplayable in Dolphin up to this day. But finally as of Dolphin 5.0-540, this challenge has come and gone: Dolphin can finally boot every single…
Dolphin Progress Report: August 2016
Dolphin started solely as a GameCube emulator, focused only on the one console. But, when the Wii was released and it was discovered to have hardware almost identical to its older sibling, Dolphin naturally evolved into a GameCube and Wii emulator. All of our readers are probably familiar with this....
GPU Ray Tracing the Wrong Way
If you’re familiar with my blog, you know I’ve lately taken a fancy to doing abominable things to my Intel GPU’s OpenGL driver.
A new algorithm for smoother 360 video viewing
Visit the post for more.
Sierra Gets Creative
Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience , Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore…
Rotoscoped Animation of Filmed Parkour
Hallå! Welcome to my first game devlog. I figured I'd start out talking about graphics, as they are a large source of anxiety for first-time developers. And not without reason! Everyone is a judgy bastard when it comes to how your low-budget game is presented. Oh sure, it's become easier for a solo developer to mask…
NESPi – Mini NES Classic Raspberry Pi Games Console
My blog about making and modding, 3D printing, electronics and other experiments.
A minimal raytracer
How my quest to make a business card sized raytracer got a little out of hand.
The Secret Button
There's a secret button hidden in Windows 7. At least, it's a secret to some people. Many modern users won't know about it, whereas some like me have used it every day for over 25 years.
DEF CON 24 Badge Challenge
Council of 9 ventured forth to DEFCON 24 to compete in this year's badge challenge, brought to us each year by 1o57. There was determination among the team to win at DC24 to ensure that last year's...
Pete Davies: The ‘Invadar’ Arcade Collection
One of the very early committed arcade collectors here in the UK was a guy called Pete Davies. Known on the arcade forums as Invadar, he was by all accounts, very well liked. I can’t say that…