Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,925 posts.

Games & Graphics
Any year
1502

Generating the Alphabet

My current generative artwork-in-progress includes text, but I don’t want to use a font. In browser based art work, using a “web safe” font could produce inconsistent results, while including a font file would mean a large file size. Additionally, I don’t want a visual element of the project to be s

1508

System Shock

We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still…

1512

Ultima (2012)

When we left Richard Garriott, California Pacific had just released his first game, Akalabeth , a substantial windfall for the 19-year-old university student. In between classes and SCA events, he spent his sophomore year at the University of Texas writing a new, much more ambitious game, which CP published just as…

1523

Spline Distance Fields

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…

1529

Godot 3.5

After 9 months of development, Godot 3.5 is out and it comes fully packed with features and quality of life improvements! This includes a new Navigation system, 3D physics interpolation, Label3D and TextMesh, an Android editor port, asynchronous shader compilation, and more!