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SDF vs. MSDF vs. Slug: GPU Text Rendering
The real difference between texture-atlas, SDF, MSDF, and Slug glyph rendering on the GPU: how each works, where each breaks, and when to use which.
Topics /
Games & Graphics
The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 48 posts.
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How I play video games with spinal muscular atrophy
My name is Andrei Cebotar. I’m 37, I live in Moldova, and I have Spinal Muscular Atrophy.
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Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam
OpenTTD has been available on the Steam Store for the past five years. During that time, we’ve built up an incredible player base, attracting lots of new players to the game. Starting today however, OpenTTD will no longer be directly available as a standalone game on Steam. It can instead be obtained as part of a…
34
Design and Implementation of Sprites
So that we may educate as well as horrify: the internals of our new Sprites execution platform.
35
Using any C++ library in Godot
How Godot's GDExtension system and the godot-cpp bindings work, and how to use Conan to bring C and C++ libraries into a Godot game, with a flecs example that simulates 100,000 particles.
36
Factorio 2.1 Experimental Release
Hello, we hope your week has been pleasant.
37
Video Encoding and Decoding with Vulkan Compute Shaders in FFmpeg
In this blog we explore how FFmpeg uses Vulkan Compute to seamlessly accelerate encoding and decoding of even professional-grade video on consumer GPUs — unlocking GPU compute parallelism at scale, without specialized hardware. This approach complements Vulkan Video's fixed-function codec support, extending…
38
We've freed Cookie's Bustle from copyright hell
We've stopped a persistent copyright troll who was trying to impede our work. Here's everything we learned—and how we beat them.
39
The Little Bool of Doom (2025)
A short story about debugging and how sometimes what's true is false. Starring everyone's favourite uncle, Undefined Behaviour.
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A physics engine with incremental rollback for multiplayer games
We want Easel to be powerful enough to make the kinds of games you would play for hours.
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The Conservationist Who Turned 40 Terabytes of Public Data into a Video Game
Raffael Hickisch spent years dreaming up conservation tools he couldn't afford to build. Then he built them himself, with an AI agent and a country's worth of public data.
42
Ray tracing massive amounts of animated geometry using tetrahedral cages
Animate compact tetrahedral cages and reuse static mini-BLASes to ray-trace hundreds of millions of triangles in real time, dramatically cutting per-frame update and memory costs for dense foliage, grass, and crowds.
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Orbs
Everything has changed for us with orbs. How do I make you believe me?
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VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
We've passed a big milestone for our digital archive. Let's talk about where our magazine collection is going next...
46
Gaussian Splats part 3: There's always a bigger scene
Continuing our Gaussian splatting development series, Director of Technology Sam Birley breaks down how we bypassed GPU Scene instance caps, implemented PlayCanvas Streamed SOG LODs, and managed GPU memory budgets for production-ready photogrammetry… bringing us to a point where the renderer has fin
47
RimWorld 1.7 moves from Unity to Ludeon's in-house Waylith engine
Ludeon Studios is an independent game developer. We love deep PC games and story generators.
48
First Shader from Zero in Godot 4
Create your first shader in Godot. Implement texture sampling, shift shader UV coordinates, mask regions, and use noise to generate random shapes that make up a portal.