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Games & Graphics

The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.

Any year
331

Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?

There’s a lot of fantastic research into 2D graphics rendering these days. Petr Kobalicek and Fabian Yzerman have been working on Blend2D , one of the fastest and most accurate CPU rasterizers on the market, with a novel JIT approach. Patrick Walton of Mozilla has explored not just one, but three separate approaches…

332

Day of the Tentacle

Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…

333

Quake 2 Source Code Review

I spent about a month in my spare time reading the source code of Quake II. It was a wonderful learning experience since one major improvement in idTech3 engine was to unify Quake 1, Quake World and QuakeGL into one beautiful code architecture. The way modularity was achieved even though the C programming language…

336

How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

After I shipped the DOOM Black Book , I took some vacation in Japan where I was able to play Ikaruga on a real arcade at Taito HEY in Akihabara. The experience reignited my interest in SEGA's ultimate video game console, the Dreamcast. There is a lot of documentation available online which made the studying process…

347

SuperRT – Realtime Raytracing on the SNES

Video links for this article: Short trailer Walkthrough and technical details Update 31th May 2021: The source code for SuperRT has now been released. I’m pleased to finally have some results to show for a project I’ve been working on in my spare time for the last year or so. The idea originated when I was trying to…

352

Stupid, Stupid xBox

I was a founder of the original xBox project at Microsoft and gave it its name. Almost 14 years after the painful, pointless, and idiotic internal cage-match to get it started and funded, the hard …

355

Quake 3 Source Code Review: Network Model (2012)

The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World . The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on…

357

Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

[Translations: Japanese] New media technologies often cause an allergic reaction when they first appear. We may find them painful before we find them indispensable. I watched the movie The Hobbit. Twice. First I saw it in its “standard” mode. A … Continue reading →

359

I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig

The Game Boy Advance is an interesting game console. It has a modern-style CPU (32-bit ARM, lots of registers), but uses an old-fashioned tile based renderer like how the NES did it in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, since its one of Nintendo’s last tile-based systems, they took the idea as far as it can go with fancy…