Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 96 posts.
Show HN: Metaballs
Generating gooey metaballs as a single SVG path — locating the tangent points between two circles, spreading and curving the connector with polar coordinates, and handling overlap, after Hiroyuki Sato's Illustrator script.
TensorKart: self-driving MarioKart with TensorFlow
Kevin Hughes' blog
FizzleFade
I enjoy reading a lot of source code and after 15 years in the field I feel like I have seen my fair share. Even with a full-time job, I still try to spare evenings here and there to read. I don't see myself ever stopping. It is always an opportunity to learn new things to follow somebody's mind process. Every once in…
4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys
So I have been working on Miegakure for a long time now, and I have created and accumulated many cool 4D things of all sorts. I think it’s about time that I share some of them, so…
Beware of Transparent Pixels
If you use sprites with transparency in your game — and you most likely do for the UI at least — you’ll probably want to pay …
Desktop compositing latency is real
Update: Note that the capture method I use needs to read pixels back from the GPU which can be slow. This means the Windows 10 results are probably worse than they should be. However, without external hardware this seems to be the only way to measure keyboard to screen latency.
How a 64k intro is made
The demoscene is about producing cool real time works (as in “runs on your computer”) called demos . Some demos are really small, say 64 kilobytes or less, and these are called intros . The name comes from “crack intros”. So an intro is just a demo that’s small.
Street Fighter II's AI Engine
By today’s standards, the Artificial Intelligence in Street Fighter 2 World Warrior isn’t very sophisticated. These days, when most people talk about AI they’re talking about mach…
Making a Game in Rust
Last week, I released A Snake’s Tale on iOS , Android , Windows, Mac, and Linux .
Python plays Grand Theft Auto V
Python Programming tutorials from beginner to advanced on a massive variety of topics. All video and text tutorials are free.
Thirteen Years of Bad Game Code
Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests. The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by... Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one tell you? Why were…
Secret colours of the Commodore 64
In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:
Railroad Tycoon
It says much about Sid Meier, a born game designer if ever there was one, that he tended to get some of his best work done when he was allegedly on vacation. A few years after his significant other had lost all track of him on what she thought was a romantic getaway to the Caribbean but he came to see as the ideal…
Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping
This is Part 1 of a series examining techniques used in game graphics and how those techniques fail to deliver a visually appealing end result. See Part 0 for a more thorough explanation of the ide…
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…
The Poor Man's 3D Camera
Each of us have our own giants to face. This is a story about one of my giants. Something I never imagined could make a grown man cry, until it did. A 3D camera. No one can face your giants for you. This is a story, not a walkthrough. Expect no useful information. For that I recommend 50 Game Camera Mistakes by…
The lost art of 3D rendering without shaders
Learn how OpenGL and Metal work by writing your own 3D renderer from scratch
How Unreal Renders a Frame
This is part 1 of the “How Unreal Renders a Frame” series, you can access part 2 and part 3 as well. I was looking around the Unreal source the other day and inspired by some excellent …
Eigentechno – Principal Component Analysis applied to electronic music
Applying Principal Component Analysis to a data-set of short electronic music loops