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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
What happens when you make a move in lichess.org?
Dive deep into the open-source architecture of Lichess.org to understand the technical processes behind making a move in a game.
The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
The demo scene has a peculiar view on copyright . It roughly boils down to a system of effort - effort in ideas, effort in craft - where the scene polices itself and punishes sceners that steal outright from other sceners. Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to…
The Poor Man's 3D Camera
Each of us have our own giants to face. This is a story about one of my giants. Something I never imagined could make a grown man cry, until it did. A 3D camera. No one can face your giants for you. This is a story, not a walkthrough. Expect no useful information. For that I recommend 50 Game Camera Mistakes by…
Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society
A playable post on how harmless choices can make a harmful world.
Accidentally making a language, for an engine, for a game
It's a wise saying, because we game developers have so much fun making the underlying foundations, that we never get around to adding the actual gameplay.
Fine-tuning Mistral 7B on Magic the Gathering Draft
Tips, examples, and thoughts from an exploration of the world of fine tuning
Compromising a Linux desktop using 6502 opcodes on the NES
Overview A vulnerability and a separate logic error exist in the gstreamer 0.10.x player for NSF music files. Combined, they allow for ve...
The neural network of the Stockfish chess engine
Last time, we briefly mentioned the high-level differences between Stockfish and Leela Chess. To recap, Stockfish evaluates about 100 million positions per second using rudimentary heuristics, wher…
Deciphering the Business Card Raytracer
I recently came across Paul Heckbert's business card raytracer. For those that have never heard of it: It is a very famous challenge in the Computer Graphics field that started on May 4th, 1984 via a post on comp.graphics by Paul Heckbert ( More about this in his article " A Minimal Ray Tracer " from the book Graphics…
Rotating Images
How to rotate an image, and a need trick to rotate a bitmap an arbitrary amount in a simple paint package.
PlayStation Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.
Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds (2022)
A high-level how-to guide by Lars Doucet and Dan Cook for game designers and game economists working in large multiplayer online games and/or virtual worlds.
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
We’re going to be a bit silly this week (in part because the ending of this compressed semester has left me with little time) and talk about the recently released historical action-RPG comput…
Playing battleships over BGP
BGP is the glue of the internet. For a protocol that was produced on two napkins in 1989 it is both amazing and horrifying that it runs almost all of the ISP to ISP interactions and is now a very fundemental part of the internet.
Improving Heuristics for A* Pathfinding
On my Introduction to A* page I cover the basics of the A* graph search algorithm for finding shortest paths. Here’s an example from the town of Denerim in Dragon Age Origins. Try moving the start and goal to see A* in action:
I built a Game Boy emulator in F#
Hundreds of hours, many late nights, and a working Game Boy emulator in F# with sound, running on desktop and web.
What it takes to make a game by yourself
Macrocosm is a mobile game that takes you from atom to galactic empire across seven interconnected stages where making progress in one stage gives you a boost in the next! This post is a deep dive into the (nearly) four years of free time I spent making it.
Personal thoughts/notes from working on Zootopia 2
The home of Code & Visuals
The joy of building a ray tracer, for fun, in Rust
TLDR? You can find the code and a bunch of examples on GitHub at dps/rust-raytracer. Over the holiday break, I decided to learn Rust. Rust is a modern systems programming language which has a really interesting type system. The type system can catch broad classes of common programming mistakes - e.g. ensuring memory…
Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer
In the Unity for Software Engineers (now updated and available as a book), series, I give an accelerated introduction to game development in Unity.
Notch, WebGL, Dart, and ramping up quickly
Just a little something I thought was worth pointing out. @notch , the creator of Minecraft, has been posting updates on his latest toy proj...
Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques
Towards the end of Wim Wenders’s excellent Perfect Days , the protagonist Hirayama is drinking beer under a bridge after he has seen a Businessman courting his crush. Suddenly the Businessman joins him under the bridge. As it turns out, things aren’t actually that simple but the point is their conversation takes them…
Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom
For decades, we've asked ourselves "Can it run Doom?". Now we can finally make the ultimate punchline: "Can Doom run it?"