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
2558

Path Tracing vs. Ray Tracing (2016)

Path tracing is all the rage in the offline rendering space these days. From Cycles to SuperFly (based on the open source Cycles) to Octane, most new rendering engines seem to be using this technology. Sometimes referred to as “unbiased, physically correct rendering” what is path tracing, how is it different to ray…

2563

Reverse Engineering Strike Commander

Back in the early 90s, one company was on the bleeding edge of PC gaming: Origin Systems . Their motto was "We Create Worlds" and boy did they deliver: With the Ultima series, Crusader series and Wing Commander series, they consistently took gamer's breath away. One of them took four years and more than a million man…

2580

The Problem With Hexagons

H exagons are ubiquitous in wargames now (indeed, both Philip Sabin’s War: Studying Conflict Through Simulation Games and Peter Perla’s The Art of Wargaming feature hexagons on their book covers), but this wasn’t always the case. My first wargame – the first board wargame for many of us – was Avalon Hill’s original…