Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,047 posts.
AR with SceneKit and Metal
Recently I found myself needing to process and visualize both point clouds and meshes in an iOS application utilizing ARKit, with the point cloud being gathered using the 2020 iPad “LiDAR” sensor. To enable maximum performance and content creation convenience I thought it would be nice to have both custom shaders and…
VR robots are building railways in Japan
Could VR-powered humanoid robots be the future of heavy construction? Over the years we’ve seen a number of major corporations try their hands at marrying VR technology and robotics, from VR convenience store employees and a remote-controlled bomb squad bot to a rather unsettling headset that uses a robotic arm to…
You can use lightguns on LCDs sometimes
Old-school cathode ray tube TVs have become de rigeur in the retro scene as the true way to experience retro games “the way they were designed”. But there’s ...
How to (and how not to) fix color banding
Discovering color banding solutions & Smooth gradients with a clever Noise one-liner by SLEDGEHAMMER Games
Gentle Introduction to Realtime Fluid Simulation for Programmers and Artists
A simple intuitive breakdown of fluid simulation for programmers and technical artists. Instead of complicated mathematical expressions, I…
Procedural Dungeon Generation: Cellular Automata
Last time we looked at generating random dungeons for video games using the Drunkard’s Walk algorithm. The Drunkard’s Walk is fun to play with, and often generates cool levels, but it’s also pretty unreliable. That’s not good enough for my purposes: I want to reliably generate big, open, cave-like maps, with lots of…
Exploiting the Wii U's USB Descriptor parsing
In this write-up we're going to take a look at exploiting the Wii U's USB Host Stack. Over the past few months I spent a lot of time reverse...
Descent: A classic 3-D first-person shooter (2012)
DESCENT is a classic 3-D first-person shooter for DOS that was released in 1995, developed by Parallax Software and published by Interplay Productions. DESCENT is a contemporary of the other very popular FPS of the time, DOOM by id Software, released just over a year before. However, it is not based on DOOM; the…
How Microsoft attempted to make the Xbox 360 dashboard load faster
The October 2012 Xbox 360 dashboard update moved the dashboard from the nand flash to the hard-drive. Does it make a difference?
An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering
A little while ago I was doing some research into the state-of-the-art for approximating subsurface scattering effects in real-time (mainly for skin rendering), and I had taken a bunch of loose notes to help me keep all of the details straight. I thought it might be useful to turn those notes into a full blog post, in…
Spreadsheet "breaks" Apple Vision Pro eye-tracking
I am trying to capture “through the optics” pictures of the AVP, and it is unveiling both interesting information on how the AVP works and the second test pattern I tried “broke&#…
Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games
A gauntlet thrown
What Programming a Game in 48 Hours Taught Me About Programming Games
I participated in Ludum Dare 27 this weekend, programming a complete game, Spacetime Adventure, in 48 hours. I make games for a living but I’d never done that before. It was fun.
Revisiting the algorithm that changed horse race betting (2023)
Explore Bill Benter’s iconic horse betting strategy, enhanced with modern code and contrasted against three decades of evolving data.
Shadama: A particle simulation programming environment for everyone
We present a prototype of a programming system called Shadama. Shadama is designed for writing programs that create, control and visualize large numbers of objects. The basic execution model follows the tradition of StarLogo and its "turtles and patches" abstraction. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations…
The Secret Feature of EM-DOSBOX on Internet Archive
There’s been a secret feature on the DOS-related emulated programs on the Internet Archive. It’s been there for over a half a year now. I’ll explain what it is and why I didn̵…
Bastard Tetris
“For people who enjoy swearing at their computer, Bastet (short for Bastard Tetris) is an attractive alternative to Microsoft Word.” (From http://hublog.hubmed.org)
Computer-generated dream world: Virtual reality for a 286 processor
Virtual reality for a 286 processor
Surface-Stable Fractal Dither on Playdate
Rune Skovbo Johansen has a really sweet Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering technique, where the dither dots “stick” to 3D surfaces, yet the dot density adapts to the view distance and zoom level.
Inverse Kinematics and Foot Locking
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
Designing and building an FPGA sprite-based graphics accelerator (2014)
A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular…
A Profanity-Laced Video Game Password That Breaks Everything
Most of these passwords were gibberish that required a pen-and-paper to write down and remember. One password, however, is more memorable, and much more sinister.
I don’t need a Steam Machine
For those of you who are living under a rock, Valve announced three new hardware devices joining …