Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,047 posts.

Games & Graphics
Any year
276

Raytracing a Black Hole

It's now clear I'm on a Black Hole binge (I can stop when I want, by the way). They're endlessly fascinating. My recent interest was in particular focused on simulating visualizations of the Schwarzschild geometry. I was preoccupied by the problem of generating a decent accurate representation of how the curvature of…

278

Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry

Heads up: This post is going to have some rougher language than what I normally post. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things teenagers type into videogame text parsers, which means we’re going to get into some naughty words and otherwise unusual subject matter for this blog. I don’t know why I’m warning…

279

Weep for Graphics Programming

The mainstream real-time graphics APIs, OpenGL and Direct3D, make miserable standard bearers for the age of hardware heterogeneity. Their approach to heterogeneous programming leads to stringly typed interfaces, a huge volume of boilerplate, and impoverished GPU-specific programming languages.

280

Lode Runner

It’s always been a bit of a balancing act to decide which games I write about in detail here — a matter of balancing my level of personal interest in each candidate against its historical importance. In the early years of this project especially, when I still saw it as focusing almost exclusively on narrative-oriented…

281

Breaking the fourth wall with Minecraft

Update 23/11/2015 - I’ve got many requests about the WiFi bulbs. You can find them on dx.com. Enjoy! Recently I started playing Minecraft, again. I find vanilla Minecraft somewhat boring, so I always look out for modpacks. After searching for new modpacks, I stumpled upon FTB Horizons: Daybreaker. Looking at the…

291

The Game Engine Black Book: Doom

The Game Engine Black Book: DOOM is now available for purchase. It is being released exactly 25 years after DOOM.zip was first published on the University of Wisconsin FTP server in December 1993. You can get it at the following locations: - Amazon ( USA , France , UK , and many more). - Google Books ( here with no…