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
2461

Origin Sells Out

One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at…

2462

Spikey Spheres

A word of warning ... I'm presenting here something called an analogy. It's not perfect, it has problems, it's not exact, but there are ways in which it can aid your thinking. I'm giving a way of visualising high-dimensional spheres, a way that has its limitations, but which can help avoid making mistakes based on…

2464

The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)

What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…

2469

The Making of Stunt Island

It is human nature to pick a hero, place it on a pedestal, and forget everybody else. We have limited memory after all so remembering only a few things may not be a choice but a necessity. If you were to ask players for the name of a game made in the 90s, unmistakably Mario, Sonic, and DOOM would come up over and over…

2477

Grass Rendering Series

This is part 1 of a multi-part series on grass rendering. We’ll start by figuring out how realistic grass should look like, and how herbage can be modeled with the tools we have at our disposal in real-time 3D graphics. Then, we’ll look at how to implement different methods of grass rendering in Godot. However, most…

2487

Back from the Blender Conference

Yesterday, me, Dmitry, Wolthera and Agata visited BlenderCon 2019 . Intel had asked us to come to the conference to help set up the Intel/Acer booth, which was showing off Krita in all its HDR glory . After all, it’s pretty cool when a free software project has a real, tangible, technical, artistic first ! It was…