Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,925 posts.
Rebecca Heineman – from homelessness to porting Doom (2022)
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like…
Metal Gear Solid V – Graphics Study
The Metal Gear series achieved world-wide recognition when Metal Gear Solid became a best-seller on the original PlayStation almost two …
Furiosa's Cat Feeder (2016)
Furiosa’s Cat Feeder
Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…
I did Advent of Code on a Playstation
How far can I get in Advent of Code if I do all the problems in Dreams?
Fog Volumes arrive in Godot 4.0
On top of the existing fixed-function fog, Godot 4.0 introduces a new type of fog: Volumetric Fog. For the 4.0 release, we decided to take Volumetric Fog one step further with the addition of FogVolumes. These allow users to dynamically place fog and control complex fog effects with shaders.
A Programming War Between 545 Wizards
What happens when you challenge hundreds of elite programmers to put on their robes and wizard hats, enchant their minions to solve a constantly shifting multi-agent traveling salesman problem, use the loot to build mighty armies, and vie for eternal glory and tournament prizes? You get a lot of
What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first…
The Sound Proof Booths of Silence
Welcome back to Between the Lanes, a blog feature where we let members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota, and an event as unique as The International. The International is an unbelievably huge…
Bevy 0.3: game engine built in Rust
A little over a month after releasing Bevy 0.2, and thanks to 59 contributors, 122 pull requests, and our generous sponsors, I'm happy to announce the…
Hacking Flappy Bird with Machine Learning
This is a hack for the popular game, Flappy Bird. Although the game is no longer available on Google Play or the App Store, it did not stop folks from creating very good replicas for the web. People have also created some interesting variants of the game - Flappy Bird Typing Tutor and Flappy Math Saga.
Writing a Game Boy emulator
I've always wanted to write an emulator from scratch, but I've held off for a long time because it's probably the most advanced programming project I've ever wanted to do.
Raspberry Pi Zero Hidden in an Xbox Controller
I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁…
The Hardest chess problem in the world?
Hebden Bridge Chess Club members will be well acquainted with my passion for digging up chess curiosities from across the ‘interweb’. Recent...
Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
The Polygons of Doom: PSX
It was a pleasure to research the material for the "Polygons of Another World" articles [1] . All the machines I studied were different from one another. The diversity I witnessed in the Amiga, Atari ST, PC, SNES, Genesis, GBA, and Jaguar demonstrated the richness of a field then still in its dawn. As I concluded the…
The unlikely story of Teardown Multiplayer
Multiplayer has been the single most requested feature for Teardown ever since before its initial release. Synchronizing physics over the network is already known to be hard, and on top of that we have a completely dynamic, destructible world with full modding support. For a long time, we considered the whole idea…
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.
Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
→日本語で読むWelcome to "Interviews with Demosceners"! This time, we welcome Japanese demoscener 0b5vr, who mainly creates 64K...
A treasury of Zork maps
Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles: "Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection ...
WebGPU is now available on Android
Support WebGPU on Android, use of DXC for shader compilation, timestamp queries in compute and render passes, default entry points to shader modules, support display-p3 as GPUExternalTexture color space, memory heaps info, and more.
The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks
Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…
The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside
The Untold Story Behind a Meteoric Rise