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The most popular blog posts about games & graphics on Hacker News. 2,047 posts.
Scorched Earth: The Mother of All Games
We are now offering the complete Scorched Earth experience from a single downloadable zip file. The Totally Scorched zip file contains ready-to-run copies of every official version of Scorched Earth: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 (English and Spanish), 1.5 and a .MTN file builder. The zip file also contains instructions and an HTML…
Fun with Snapchat's Gender Swapping Filter
Snapchat's new gender-bending filter is a source of endless fun and laughs at parties. The results are very pleasing to look at. As someone ...
How I wrote Game Programming Patterns
Update 2014/04/28: In case you missed the link, the web site for my book is gameprogrammingpatterns.com .
2006: Dwarf Fortress
The text of Dwarf Fortress and procedural tales so expansive no human could ever explore them all.
I Resurrected “Ugly Sonic” with Stable Diffusion Textual Inversion
The true dystopia of AI is that it can make Ugly Sonic look cool.
What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
(This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting...
The Death Star and the Final Trench Run (2017)
Today, @vickschutz and I learned a detail about “Star Wars” (1977); it’s totally right there but we never grasped it. — Todd Vaziri (...
Battleship
Let’s overengineer a childhood game.
Gamedev Tutorial: Trigonometry Basics – Sine and Cosine
[latexpage] 本文之中文翻譯在此 Overview Trigonometry is a very essential building block to a huge portion of game math. That's why I've chosen this topic for the first tutorial of my new Gamedev Tutorials series. Having a solid understanding of basic of trigonometry can go a long way for game development. It is used…
“Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders
Have you ever noticed that the food graphics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders are flat “billboarded” stock images of food? This artistic decision from director Masahiro Sakurai has per...
Fast 2D Rendering on GPU
Previously on my quest for fast rendering of 2D vector graphics on GPU, I have posted a piet-gpu update and a deeper exploration into a sort-middle architecture. These intermediate results showed promise, but fell short of my vision for truly high performance 2D GPU rendering.
The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria , the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely…
Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
We’ve spoken about arcade Tron a few times here on the blog over the years. Specifically, I shared some development documents a few months back here. For those of you that don’t know, T…
Exponentially Better Rotations
If you’ve done any 3D programming, you’ve likely encountered the zoo of techniques and representations used when working with 3D rotations. Some of them are better than others, depending on the situation.
Getting the World Record in Hatetris (2022)
HATETRIS is the world's hardest version of Tetris; it's Tetris that hates you. In this post, we chronicle our eleven-month journey to get the world record, and some of our wrong turns along the way.
OpenGL in 2014
Valve is investing in OpenGL to hedge themselves against Microsoft. Some well-known developers have written about the deficiencies in the API. A few competing, proprietary APIs have popped up. In an effort to remain competitive, Khronos announces glnext: a ground-up rethinking of the OpenGL and OpenGL ES APIs. This…
Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
Snowboard Kids 2 for the Nintendo 64 has reached 100% matching decompilation. A brief note on what that means, how we got here, and what comes next.
Flying planes in Microsoft Flight Simulator with a JavaScript autopilot (2023)
Writing auto-pilots in JavaScript for MSFS
DOS Game "F-15 Strike Eagle II" reversing project needs DOS test pilots
(This post is part of a series on the subject of my hobby project, which is recreating the C source code for the 1989 game F-15 Strike Eagle II by reverse engineering the original binaries.)
Meta Quest Pro – Bad AR Passthrough
Introduction I have been taking pictures and making short video clips to demonstrate different aspects of the displays and optics of the Meta Quest Pro (MQP) for over a month. It was a bit of an on…
RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?
It turns out, you can attach an external GPU to a Raspberry Pi 5. So my natural first question is, can I game on it? Let’s try it out and compare it with some similar computers. Just a quick FTC required note: When you buy through my links, I may earn a commission. For the showdown of crappy gaming computers, we’ll…
If I Made Another Monkey Island (2013)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
Chord progressions of 25,000 songs
Systems thinker who ended up in data. Mostly working out why organisations can't answer their own questions.