The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 254 posts.
Happy New Year everyone! Just three hours into 2025, I received an email from Google Play Support with the following subject line: Action Required: Your app is not compliant with Google Play Policies (Luck be a Landlord) Nothing has changed with Luck be a Landlord in the past few months,
If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions…
Here’s a breakdown of my year in game dev, the challenges I faced, and the key takeaways that’ll shape my 2025 projects.
When I was analysing the structures of CYOA works a few years back, I began to recognise some strong recurring design patterns. I came up with some home-brewed terminology, but didn’t ever la…
The Mac Mini G4 promises to be compatible with almost every Macintosh software released until the early 2000s. This article explains why and puts the machine to the test.
Ever wanted to know how exactly did Quake’s precomputed visibility work? I did, so I wrote vis.py , a reimplementation of their algorithm in Python. This guide has all the information you need to understand vis , the tool used by Quake, Half-Life and Source Engine games.
Like a lot of boys, I grew up loving trains. And like a lot of men, I retain my fascination for them today.
I wrote a (list of) regular expressions that will play a (not very good) chess game by running a 2-ply minimax search.
tl;dr: pl_synth is a tiny music synthesizer for C & JS and an editor (“tracker”) to create instruments and arrangements.
Earlier this year I decided to put my main project Tangerine on hold indefinitely and began prototyping a new renderer in an unfamiliar language using a totally new graphics API with the goal of overcoming all of Tangerine's technical shortcomings. The new renderer is an eccentric CPU ray tracer called Star Machine…
a bunch of weird and random technical stuff
🖍️ Explaining multiple techniques for rendering outlines and highlights for real-time applications. This includes vertex object-space as well as screen-space methods. This can be used to render outlines in Unity or Unreal. Outlines can be used for gameplay reasons or aesthetics.
Perturbation and rescaling for efficient rendering of fractal images.
